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Jan. 19th, 2015 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionSo Ashbery claims "Soonest Mended," one of the handful of poems even those of us generally unthrilled by Ashbery are thrilled by, grew out of a fan letter to Bishop in the late '40s and her postcard response. The letter was motivated by "2000 Illustrations," which in Ashbery's summary is describing an atlas.
So he de-Sunday Mornings it. He also, assuming the 2nd person addressed toward the end of SM (oy, same syllables and stresses as Stevens' also) is more or less Bishop's poem's speaker, takes 2000's message pretty straightforwardly. Vendler does this too, seeing it as an expression of religious nostalgia, but of course Ashbery may realize the speaker isn't Bishop and address him/her as an intimate friend anyway, since the poem meant so much to him in isolation. The layered critique of the religious impulse is more Bishop's point, and fact-facing art and an understanding of what we need from it her suggestion of a way forward. The anguish of the speaker isn't something she knows nothing about, but it isn't her own end point: it's a question she has never not had answers to.
Ashbery gets the poem well enough that his own answers aren't entirely incompatible, and on the other hand is enough of his own person that they don't directly reproduce hers (and takes his usual ambivalent swipes at the sublime). But evading the religious dimension may be what leads him to assume that 2000 is advocating attempts to return to an infantile sense of an ordered world, to see things like a child, as though the poem proved this mode is still available to us. Which I guess it does, and it's a common enough procedure of Bishop's to go back to sights and assumptions of childhood, but that's not the extent of what it's up to. His "so we were both right" tries to hoop together this supposedly advocated fact-ignoring child-vision with his sense that how we see and feel, our frame of reference, is in constant flux just as the world is (hence no highs, because no lows or middles - all tumbles and turns).
I don't at all mind his having read her this way. Her gullible, anguished avatars are one of the gifts she gives us (part of what Herbert gave her - and Spenser him, I wonder?), since they allow us to take the poem as a question, and our own (much Bishop-nudged) ensuing conclusions as at least partly our own. Which they inevitably are, but Ashbery's more so. Gilt-fingered Bishop's poem is about the innocence of desire (third-most present precursor here is The Emperor of Ice Cream), Ashbery's about the innocence of change. Freshness as an ultimate value isn't absent from hers, but I think it's mostly assimilated into desire, hence her metaphor of travel vs. Ashbery's of moored, apprehensive domesticity. He thinks of himself at home in space, though protean in time - in a sense the difference between At North Farm and The Prodigal is pretty much the same one as here. There, too, he cuts the head off a Bishop poem in order to get the body to slump in the direction he wants. I could doubtless have come up with a more sympathetic metaphor, but you get the gist. It and SM are both excellent poems, but their simplicities are less important and their complexities more private (though not more hidden) than Bishop's.
I'd say one price she tends to pay is rhetorical - both of his get to flow better because on some level he's saying exactly what he means. He's not concerned with there being more than one way to look at what's being described, despite his caring greatly about the FACT that there are - for him, the second way to look will be another poem, and a third will follow. Any dialogue with other points of view gets literalized - that "you." Whereas Bishop's always working through two or more ways of seeing, like Stevens overtly did, Frost covertly; "through," because one's going to win, or some offspring of those present at the start will. And we'll be on board. His vision is mostly one of evasion. Though I suppose you could say he's an active procrastinator - everything gets into his verse except what he's avoiding, which also gets in as parts of explanations of why he's avoiding it.
So he de-Sunday Mornings it. He also, assuming the 2nd person addressed toward the end of SM (oy, same syllables and stresses as Stevens' also) is more or less Bishop's poem's speaker, takes 2000's message pretty straightforwardly. Vendler does this too, seeing it as an expression of religious nostalgia, but of course Ashbery may realize the speaker isn't Bishop and address him/her as an intimate friend anyway, since the poem meant so much to him in isolation. The layered critique of the religious impulse is more Bishop's point, and fact-facing art and an understanding of what we need from it her suggestion of a way forward. The anguish of the speaker isn't something she knows nothing about, but it isn't her own end point: it's a question she has never not had answers to.
Ashbery gets the poem well enough that his own answers aren't entirely incompatible, and on the other hand is enough of his own person that they don't directly reproduce hers (and takes his usual ambivalent swipes at the sublime). But evading the religious dimension may be what leads him to assume that 2000 is advocating attempts to return to an infantile sense of an ordered world, to see things like a child, as though the poem proved this mode is still available to us. Which I guess it does, and it's a common enough procedure of Bishop's to go back to sights and assumptions of childhood, but that's not the extent of what it's up to. His "so we were both right" tries to hoop together this supposedly advocated fact-ignoring child-vision with his sense that how we see and feel, our frame of reference, is in constant flux just as the world is (hence no highs, because no lows or middles - all tumbles and turns).
I don't at all mind his having read her this way. Her gullible, anguished avatars are one of the gifts she gives us (part of what Herbert gave her - and Spenser him, I wonder?), since they allow us to take the poem as a question, and our own (much Bishop-nudged) ensuing conclusions as at least partly our own. Which they inevitably are, but Ashbery's more so. Gilt-fingered Bishop's poem is about the innocence of desire (third-most present precursor here is The Emperor of Ice Cream), Ashbery's about the innocence of change. Freshness as an ultimate value isn't absent from hers, but I think it's mostly assimilated into desire, hence her metaphor of travel vs. Ashbery's of moored, apprehensive domesticity. He thinks of himself at home in space, though protean in time - in a sense the difference between At North Farm and The Prodigal is pretty much the same one as here. There, too, he cuts the head off a Bishop poem in order to get the body to slump in the direction he wants. I could doubtless have come up with a more sympathetic metaphor, but you get the gist. It and SM are both excellent poems, but their simplicities are less important and their complexities more private (though not more hidden) than Bishop's.
I'd say one price she tends to pay is rhetorical - both of his get to flow better because on some level he's saying exactly what he means. He's not concerned with there being more than one way to look at what's being described, despite his caring greatly about the FACT that there are - for him, the second way to look will be another poem, and a third will follow. Any dialogue with other points of view gets literalized - that "you." Whereas Bishop's always working through two or more ways of seeing, like Stevens overtly did, Frost covertly; "through," because one's going to win, or some offspring of those present at the start will. And we'll be on board. His vision is mostly one of evasion. Though I suppose you could say he's an active procrastinator - everything gets into his verse except what he's avoiding, which also gets in as parts of explanations of why he's avoiding it.
