A Wave
BY John Ashbery
(Viking, 1984)

Ashbery describes his technique most fully in “Description of a Masque,” one of the centerpieces of A Wave: “Then we all realized what should have been obvious from the start: that the setting would go on evolving eternally, rolling its waves across our vision like an ocean each one new yet recognizably a part of the same series, which was creation itself. Scenes from movies, plays, operas, television; decisive or little-known episodes from history; prenatal and other early memories from our own solitary, separate pasts; events yet to come to life or art; calamaties or moments of relaxation; universal or personal tragedies; or little vignettes from daily life that you just had to stop and laugh at, they were so funny, like the dog chasing its tail on the living room rug.” This passage is an important one for illustrating Ashbery’s desire to convert, as Parmenides did, the tragic into the comic by subsuming the “decisive,” the “universal or personal tragedies” in an evolving catalogue of perspectives that wittily undercut each other. And there is also, by the very diverse nature of the list, an implicit desire to include everything in a Whitmanesque gesture that seems denied by the understated tone the passage projects on the surface. Yet the seriousness and the desire to be inclusive remain muted. The problem is that the speaker often exists like “an empty pair of parentheses” — the narrator may become isolated, cut off even from his own history:

The range of emotion is astounding here: and it is given stylistically by the way in which the downward, sideways motion that defines each movement (nearly every verbal gesture) is disrupted by such contradictory connotations suggested by “carnival” and “clenched fist,” self and other, passive drifting and the holding of the throttle. The simple, formal principle of containment that attempts to center the poem in a certain direction of consciousness is exploded so that the passage seems to include more than it wanted or intended.

What stands out in this process is a radical decentering of the self, a gesture that many Ashbery poems make in addressing a “you” who is simultaneously the focus of the poem and the consciousness specifically excluded from its resolution. “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” for instance, begins by cajoling the reader:

The first stanza is intent upon a process of identification that climaxes in the last line of that stanza; the second stanza then begins a process of denial and questioning in which the “you” is nearly forgotten amidst the machinations of the “I,” the identification of inner and outer. By the time the third stanza emerges, the self and other are lost in “the stream and chatter of typewriters.” The last stanza is itself a sort of “tease” —

The repetition with a “different attitude,” the frustration of being set down beside the other by a poem that is and is not that very other, produces an uncanny effect: self, other and poem all merge at the same time they disperse. “What attitude isn’t then really yours?” Ashbery had previously asked.

The decentering of the self, the discovery of the self in an essential otherness that is inherent in language (“The poem is you”), accounts for the discursive, often chatty quality of Ashbery’s style. In As We Know this otherness was most manifest in “Litany,” a parallel text in two columns spoken by “A” and “B.” The two columns each have their own voices but are interdependent: narrator A mentions topic X before or after B does, or perhaps never mentions it at all. The white spaces between and within the two columns act like threatening silences, as if the speakers had to talk in order to exist. To remain quiet is to be content only with the self, to remain static with no sense of expanding horizons. The vision undercuts a more progressive, more narrative movement; in critiquing the simple linearity of time, the columns subvert history, narrative, the evolution of the self.