The poem, then, has begun to sense a paradox: a sense of the wintry void conjured by memory and a sense that memories themselves fill the void. The ending complicates the paradox by adding more details that radically revalue the associations made so far, a typical technique for elegies. Akhmatova has begun the poem by half-discounting her past nihilism, her belief that everything ended with death, but the “filling” action of memory in the guise of example details and musings within the poem has raised as many problems as it has protected against. So she introduces another image, another unknown character, except that in this case the character turns out to be a “frosted pane” of a “branch” or “cobweb” and with a voice obviously dreamt or imagined. The questions underscore the interrogative mood of the end, but also of the whole poem, indeed all of Akhmatova’s work where the rapid sequences of associations constantly call into question each prior image and the direction of the whole movement. Are these images from the “malevolent” past as the images earlier were? Are they linked with a real person, the person elegized? Does the “us” in the last fifth line suggest a consolation in community? Should we emphasize “sunstruck” or “tatter”? Does the mirror at the end turn everything around and make the poem an internalized drama? an elegy, then, for a lost self? Surely the figure is meant to be an image of bright consolation, but it is just as surely an image that is questioned, and so at least partially fails as a protection. Perhaps all these questions underscore what Brodsky calls the note of “controlled terror” in her poems; the victories, the protections, are always provisional, always about to dismantle themselves as rapidly as the lines have constructed them. It is this dizzying dance, eluding perhaps great consolation, but also eluding great disappointment, that is Akhmatova’s victory, the grace of her interrogative mood, her style.

It is this dizzying dance, eluding perhaps great consolation, but also eluding great disappointment, that is Akhmatova’s victory, the grace of her interrogative mood, her style.

For John Ashbery, as I have suggested, the problem of style is the problem “Of all that gets lost in the telling,” as he says in “Gorboduc.” When a story is completed it has a “largely ceremonial relation” to the object of narration: with time, the referential basis of the story becomes further diminished. And yet stories are how we must understand the world and when they become ineffectual we seem lost: “the story blows away? And what can you do, howling without a script?” This is the basic doubleness, the basic paradox of Ashbery’s work. “I talk two ways,” he says in “Unreleased Movie,” “first as reluctant explainer, then as someone offstage / In a dream.”

“Double inscription,” as Derrida would call it, this deconstructing and reconstructing within stylistics, explaining the past yet dreaming of the future in language, puts into play a process of continual revaluation of metaphor, phrasing and vision. “Fall Pageant,” for example, ends:

The tone here is a complex one, counterpointing “formlessness” against the “shape” of a “monument” or the poetic forms that “didn’t work out as planned,” the religious sense of anointing against the “robbers” who seem rather tame. Everything is slightly askew in a world where opposites are not quite opposite, and as we can expect the forms of the rondel and villanelle, however the appear, to be radically changed. Indeed, much of Ashbery’s work is filled with references to poetic and narrative forms: fairy tales, cartoon characters and situations, stories of earlier writers. Ashbery’s “report” of these “monuments” reveals just how much the originals must be deconstructed in later ages.

“Amid Mounting Evidence” provides a succinct account of this process whereby the “contexts” for truth become lost in time so that the significance of any true “text” also becomes lost:

Here, the introduction of “games” as opposed to “truth” suggests a redefinition of truth based on the idea of poetic play. The hope of the poem is that the language games allow the poet enough room to negotiate a new truth “amidst mounting evidence” of a declining world headed towards entropy. The hope is that the poet can find what Bakhtin calls a “carnivalistic” style filled with changes of diction and direction, references that run the gamut from high to low culture, and a pluralistic voice: the “persona / Is off running parallel somewhere,” he says in the poem. And there is always the voice of the other that each says the same thing twice, in two different voices, each slightly shifting the terms of the story, further undercutting the myth of the simple, clear statement. The procedure, then, is to find a “disparate account” rather than a unified and referential one, even at the risk of discovering an essential incoherence, a sense that “something / Enormous, like a huge canvas, is happening without one’s having the / Least suspicion.” If everything becomes simply blurred by the carnivalistic style, too “enormous” to understand, the poet runs the more serious risk of lumping everything under one label and reducing it to “the same old stuff of imaginative / Speculation as it was before.”