Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. and the strange case of John Ashbery

When my daughter Radhika burst forth with her "waste of space" comment about Paul Naylor's new Tinfish Press book, I happened to be holding in my hand the Library of America volume of John Asbhery's Collected Poems 1956-1987. "See, here's what happens when you try to save paper!" I remember imagining myself saying. But Radhika is seven years old, after all, and despite her cluedness about many things, the semiotics of book publishing may still be beyond, beside, and/or beneath her. Where Naylor's book puts a premium on the page as a jam session between blankness and print, silence and language, the Library of America Ashbery (like the LoA anybody) puts its premiums on text, and text within a pre-determined space, let's call it 5X8 inches, or about the size of a mid-sized photograph. Where Naylor's book features paper of a certain heft (negotiated between the designer and money bags here), the LoA features paper that feels like the old airmail stationery, light because it had to travel. Well, we all know that Ashbery travels, but this format and material has me, if not seething, then grumpy, if not grumpy, then giggling. When the reader arrives at The Vermont Notebook, written by JA and illustrated by Joe Brainard, the paper betrays us all.




Is this the raciest thing ever to grace an LoA book? One wonders. While on the one hand, I'm thinking that the book format is simply too fancy kine (or hybolical, in Pidgin) to support the work of a poet who writes lines like "'once I let a guy blow me'" (442) or "Hunted unsuccessfully, / To be torn down later / The horse said" (79) or any number of unconcorded quotations one can mine here or in any JA volume. And yet in this campiest of JA texts (see Susan Sontag, I'm not going there!), the reader can see through the naked man with no right eye to what falls below him, namely a clock (it's 3)(not a cock, oh the parentheticals multiply!) and a washer and dryer (no apparent make). The Granary Books edition of The Vermont Notebook, published in 2001 along with Z Press in Vermont (9-ish by 6 1/2 inches, if you're counting, and I am), allows no such peep hole of transparency. Published originally in 1975 by Black Sparrow, there's a certain 1950s quality to the schematic illustrations, which draws out for me the contrast (not the word I need, but that one doesn't exist) between the lounging naked man and the appliances that keep our clothes clean and our day itself in order. So, as the LoA attempts to render JA a canonical figure, the American version of a French Academie-approved poet, they have succeeded in drawing out what makes him most interesting, the wacky wavering of his diction, the jumpy juxtaposition of his thought images. Here's what you see through to:



But I'm being too kind; I'm justifying the LoA atrocity by reading it against itself. Bad critic! The intent of the Library, according to its own website, is this: "The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher, is dedicated to publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America's best and most significant writing." Ah, the authority! the dedication! the bestness! the significance! the selling! (They rather smartly have a shop at their site, as well.) It's this authority that comes through to my students when I, on rare occasion, teach JA's work in my Hawai`i classrooms. Last time I taught a book, April Galleons, to a graduate class, the reaction was mostly one of confusion. One woman from the east coast loved it; another from Hawai`i loved it, but left the class (scheduling problems). Another student, let us call him Kimo A., attacked JA as one of those establishment white poets out to take over the world for his kind; you know, John Milton, Walt Whitman, et al. "But isn't he gay?" someone asked along the way. Now, while identity politics can be annoying, this kind is inevitable here. Why should we be reading this obscure, somewhat identity-less (hence all-encompassing) poetry, when there's so much else more "relevant" to us. Well, that was the rest of the semester . . . A colleague, Gary Pak, now dear to me, said on a panel in the very early 1990s, when I was a babe on the island (babe in the sense of youth, not in my bathing suit), that "we do not want to be John Ashbery!!!" He says I seemed scared of him after that, shuddered in a stairwell when he passed. I was scared because JA was my man.

And this edition does nothing to argue against that notion of JA as the great white whale-man of contemporary poets; instead, it presents him proudly as a poet whose poems never cross the ordinary boundaries of the book. "Litany," which required an odd-shaped conveyer (As We Know is 8 1/2 by 6 /12) due to its two columns of text, is here rendered as a column per page with a wedgie in the middle. It's also given short shrift in the Selecteds of JA because of its odd bulk. While JA's books are fairly standard in design and size, even the doofy ones had their charms. The first JA I read (in a Silliman College--not Ron, but Yale--poetry seminar taught by Alfred Corn in 1977) was Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The book was small and ugly, aside from the photo of the author leaning on a farm fence on the cover. [Ed. note: the poet is not leaning against a fence--that was Three Poems. Instead, he is looking out of a door on the left side of the book, while the title descends on the righ. Still ugly, just different from my memory of it.] Dark book, dark heavy print, nothing to write home about. But I want that book in my hand instead of this book where "Tarpaulin" and "River" and the beginning of "Mixed Feelings" are all glommed together on a single flimsy yet noisy to turn page. (Have you ever heard a lecture class of a couple hundred students turn the pages of their Norton Anthologies at the same time?) Not "A pleasant smell of frying sausages/ Attacks the sense" (455), but a jumble of readable and unreadable texts (as I wrote above, the other page shows through) causes the reader more than the "MIXED FEELINGS" advertised at the top, as if this were a phonebook.

The happy ending of my teaching story was that the student who most hated Ashbery wrote a wonderful poem based on "Finnish Rhapsody" ("write a poem in which the same things happens twice, in different words, in each line"). It was a scary poem about an unhappy family. It took place on the North Shore, in Haleiwa (if my memory serves me). It was a marvelous, complicated Hawai`i poem. Ashbery's poem about the quotidian is full of aforesaid "mixed feelings"; it's a sad clown of a poem until the end. Kimo's poem is likewise sad, "Truncat[ing[ the spadelike shadows." Is it any accident that Ashbery's poem ends not with a dismissal, but an acknowlegment of, identity: "But perhaps only to oneself, haply to one's sole identity." And this may not be a good thing in any case, whether in New York or Haleiwa.

August 1 will mark my 20th anniversary living in Hawai`i. Many things I know here I did not know before I arrived. Many things--like the work of John Ashbery--I thought I knew. Like an Ashbery poem or the sheen from a space blanket turned from sun to cloud and back, nothing stays still. Never known for their stillness, Ashbery's poems stay stuck in my consciousness but alter in the signals they send out. Somewhere JA mentions a woman from Honolulu; remembering where in JA's oeuvre a phrase can be found is like remembering a cinder cone but being unable to find it on a topo map. From Honolulu (or more properly, Ahuimanu, where this woman sits at her computer), Ashbery does indeed seem a creature of the east (coast)--gee whiz do I hate poems or blog posts that end where they began--yet he still travels well. But read his poems in their original formats or post-originals like the Granary Books The Vermont Notebook, not in this literary equivalent of homeland security with all its neat borders and red, white & blue flourishes! Or you can just peep through the pages' transparencies. Feel the frisson lidat.

Paul Naylor's waste of paper in Jammed Transmission

Yesterday evening I took Paul Naylor's gorgeous new Tinfish Press book to my in-laws to show off; as I was telling my mother-in-law that she could keep the book, my daughter Radhika (age 7) burst forth with "it's a waste of paper!" It seems she'd glanced at the book and seen that each page has more white space than print on it. For a girl drilled at school with the mantra of "reduce, reuse, recycle," the quotient of white space to print was simply too large. When I talked to her about how in poetry the white space is as important as are the words, she looked at me with the expression she wears when she whips out her air/scare quotes to indicate sarcasm. She is not alone. A couple of years ago, I asked one of the department secretaries to xerox Harryette Mullen's Trimmings (it went out of print a long time ago). Not only did she xerox the book, but she then cut out the short prose poems and stuck them together closely, as many as she could fit on a page. When I asked what she'd done, she replied that she'd saved paper. (I just hit the "save now" button on blogger, which of course does save paper, even before the saving.) Who can blame her for trying to save paper? Perhaps only an English professor who wants more space and less print. Her practical goals and mine were at (ever more necessary) odds.

Tinfish Press publishes "experimental poetry," a vexed and vexing term, and for what? I once witnessed a colleague explode in a thesis defense over the word; sounds like science, sounds like your poetry fails. I noticed just the other day that Barbara Jane Reyes insists she is not an experimental poet. I happen to like the word, and even some of the failures that come of the process of putting elements together in unexpected ways. Odd word choices make good neighbors sometimes. Naylor's book is not experimental in a strict avant-garde sense; no Language poet is he. What I take to be experimental in his work involves a temporal and a spiritual playfulness best elucidated by Norman Fischer in his preface to the book. Naylor has written a dialogue with a 14th century Japanese text by Keizan Jokin, translated as Record of the Transmission of Light. That these transmissions are "jammed" already invokes the possibility of failure on the 21st century American poet's part. It's an honest admission, but it opens up spiritual meditation to a process of fits and starts rather than those rarer completions. In that sense, spirit and poetry are firmly allied.

"Jammed" is a good word, as is "transmission." Both are polyvalent, and jam only when the live internet stops functioning and my university's Oxford English Dictionary disappears for a time. The internet is but a step or two past the radio, whose frequencies sometimes jam or are jammed by saboteurs (like the monkey mind, though I jump ahead here). Many of the definitions of "jam" have to do with violence--pressing, squeezing, making fast by tightening, blocking, bruising, crushing, and so on. What is broken can often be said to be jammed. How do we get from there to the sense of a "jam session," where the jamming is improvisational, freeing, a conversation between instruments without the confinement of the written text (which may yet be there as a guide)? A musician cannot self-jam; he or she requires another with whom to jam. The jam is dialogue, as Fischer makes clear about this book. "Transmission" is likewise a volatile term; according to my OED, it involves "conveyance from one person or place to another." Outside the secular bounds of the OED, "transmissions" can be spiritual, as a spiritual guide or master can transmit teachings to his student or disciple.

While Naylor performs zazen, he is not what one calls a practicing Buddhist. He does not study zen, but he reads and reads about it. His dialogue with the 14th century text is hence prone to jams and to jamming transmissions. If the poet is a radio, as Spicer famously remarked, then Naylor's radio is short-wave, self-consciously noisy with static. "Impeded / by all that // surrounds // the mind persists," he admits on page 44. "Why this / insistent / resistance?" he asks on 22. But Fischer's preface helps here, too: "DOGEN sees Zen enlightenment not as opposed to words and thought but as a profound possibility within words and thought. . . NAYLOR'S text can be understood as an instance of what DOGEN would call 'the practice of enlightenment'" (11). Practice is an act of improvisation within the strictest of limitations. That Naylor has chosen to perform an act of call and response with Jokin's text, answering to each chapter of his book, offers him at once the discipline and the opening in which to jam, and to admit to his being jammed by that monkey mind.

On the level of poetic technique, Naylor's jamming occurs most frequently in the way he uses enjambment. Not only are his lines tightly enjambed, but they often halt, pause, stop breathing, in the middle of a short line. Let me cite one of my favorite of his poems because just this morning I laughed to see from our lanai an egret chasing a golf cart, before it flew up against the mountains, moving from ridiculous to sublime in one easy motion.

Yunyan

Saw two white egrets
in early morning fog

where their feathers
end the opaque air

begins to seem it
might just be one. (53)

This is set on the right side of the right page, so:




The poem is only deceptively simple; part of this simplicity is the way it is set so cleanly on an otherwise white page, with designer Sumet (Ben) Viwatmanitsakul's circles floating, as they do on other pages, in different patterns. The poet is saying that he saw two white egrets; that they seem only to be one egret where their feathers end; that this occurs in an opacity of air. And that's really only a literal translation. There's so much activity on the level of the phrase and in the lack of punctuation (both literal and metaphorical) in these six lines. There are moments in the book where I think Naylor may use this technique too often, but mostly he uses it to enact his sense of wonder(meant). And his sense of being jammed. Sentences come in parts, jammed together, but the opening riffs into something new and the two parts start jamming. Naylor may have gotten some of this technique from Robert Creeley, who was so enamored of enjambment and of jazz. But his practice of it, the transmission from him to us, is his--in league with the preceding Zen Buddhist text.

To be honest, I like Naylor's poems more in this book than I did in manuscript. Over the past few days, I've been trying to figure out why. Paul says it's the preface, Norman Fischer's deft explanations of the method. But that's not it for me. I think my response comes out of what Radhika termed "a waste of space." These small poems, in a small font, placed to the left side of the left page and to the right side of the right, are given enough room in which to breathe. They're not jammed together, but released to float with Ben's circles (the page numbers are also circled at the top of each right hand page). The page offers us permission to read slowly, to pause, to jam along with the lines. I will save my paper elsewhere.