John Ashbery and the Accumulation of Emptinesses

By pure, happy accident, I happened to be reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" on the same night I was trying to read the poems of John Ashbery. Coleridge argues that the imagination can be conceived of on two levels. The first level is related to perception. Human beings have some capacity to organize sense data as they perceive the world. For Coleridge, perception is a form of creativity. Secondary imagination is what poets utilize in reshaping perceptions into re-creations of the world. According to Coleridge, this secondary imagination "struggles to idealize and to unify." Coleridge distinguishes these two notions of the imagination from the term Fancy, which is used to refer to that faculty of the mind that begins with the material of memory, but is "emancipated from the order of time and space."

I think that many poets probably do operate through the secondary imagination. The form, import, and consequence of this integration are wildly divergent, of course, but the tendency is unity. One can turn to a poet like Ashbery, however, and ask whether he is trying to idealize or unify that which has been perceived. Most would agree that the answer is no, but I'm interested in the nature of this refusal. On the one hand, this could be seen as a typically postmodern complication of epistemology, but Ashbery's poetic concerns suggest otherwise.

He is not as interested in problematizing how we come to know objects as he is in exploring how we come to know emptiness. He reminds us in one of his most characteristic poems, "The Absence of a Noble Presence": "You've got to remember we don't see that much." What we see, however, is less than what we don't. We are surrounded by a vacuity. He rarely mentions specifics, as if they are unattainable or not meaningful in the ways we hope they are. The poem starts with:

If it was treason it was so well handled that it
Became unimaginable. No, it was ambrosia
In the alley under the stars and not this undiagnosable
Turning, a shadow in the plant of all things

That makes us aware of certain moments,
That the end is not far off since it will occur
In the present and this is the present.

The first line repeats the pronoun "it" three times without naming its referent, but the word presumably refers to the "absence" of the title. If this ultimate absence is treacherous, it usually seems okay because the perception of nothingness is "unimaginable." In other words, perception tends to focus on things so the horror of emptiness might be averted. The poetic speaker insists instead that the absence is "ambrosia / In the alley under the stars." But it's too late for the reader: the concept of absence cannot be filled by the epinorthosis that tries to provide a sensation and a location. One must try to perceive absence. Ashbery seems to force the reader back to the first level of imagination: perception...with the added difficulty that the journey of his poems starts with an absence. Here are two recent examples:

"Meaningful Love" begins: "What the bad news was / became apparent too late / for us to do anything good about it." "Lost Footage" begins: "You said, 'Life's a hungry desert,' / or something like that. I couldn't hear."

But "The Absence of a Noble Presence" has a lesson for us: "And since this too is of our everydays / It matters only to the one you are next to." This recalls Whitman's poem "On the Terrible Doubt of Appearances," in which the great ontological and epistemological questions are, if not resolved, at least deflated by the touch of a lover's hand. Though Ashbery does not seem like an objectivist or an intersubjectivist (if there is such a term), his poems do suggest that absence or emptiness are merely states from which perceptions emerge. Another of his well-known poems, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons," ends with the assertion that "The poem is you." And while there are no doubt many levels to this evocative phrase, on the most fundamental level, it suggests that something comes into being from the perception of nothingness.