Little Review: John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander

December 20, 2004

Ecco Press, March 2005
0-06-07629-1
96 pages

It’s a strange fact that Ashbery, in a long life of writing, has only chosen to write fiction once, A Nest of Ninnies (1976), and that is in collaboration with his friend, the great poet James Schuyler. But part of the appeal of Ashbery, especially the later writing, is his swerves into the rich field of resonant, specific associations that only a person enmeshed in the world of a novel would understand, without any of the compromises to plot – often mistaken for “reality” – that the novelist must make to remain popular. Ashbery, for whom reality might be “that shabby costume drama in which all had become embedded like La Brea tar,” gives you his side of the collaboration and you are invited to fill in the rest, which is why Ashbery is a genuinely popular poet – he takes the pleasures of games and makes of them poetic seductions, wooing the reader into puzzling through his apparent feints and non-sequiturs. Where Shall I Wander is a modestly-scaled book – it doesn’t end with a grand long poem that has become an Ashbery trademark since Rivers and Mountains, nor is it especially big like Can You Hear, Bird, nor does it even contain many poems that extend more than three pages (the title poem, at seven, is the longest). But this let’s one stop and appreciate the tightness of sentences, and how they fall snugly – never orderly, but always a step ahead of norms of “prosody,” like waves from some composition of Debussy’s – into stanzas: “Another’s narrative supplants the crawling / stock-market quotes. Like all good things / life tends to go on too long, and when we smile / in mute annoyance, pauses for a moment. / Rains bathe the rainbow, / and the shape of night is an empty cylinder, / focused at us, urging its noncompliance / closer along the way we chose to go.” (30) One is in a world that is part Joseph Cornell and part Henry James (and maybe, with the cylinder, part Close Encounters) – Ashbery creates child-like dioramas chock full of odd juxtaposition that explain the sophisticated, wounded, and much too inexperienced mind to itself. “It all involves fetishes, those poor misunderstood employees of the sexual closet,” he writes in one of the many prose poems, after lulling us with the dream-like montage that is both epic and errant, as in the opening sequences of a noir: “A chance encounter in the street, an ancient phrase offered by a delicate woman, sends him back to burrow in the rubble of his youth. A few viable wisps still protrude.” The adjective “Ashberian” – how can it ever be defined? – also includes the ability to change gears in the middle of a sentence, even a clause – “And for a number of years, our track record / was zero and polite” (56) – keeping the air of grammatical surprise on a par with the unpredictable approaches of narrative. Perhaps his secret is in providing us with the experience of terrible encounter in the comfort of our own poem, one we decide to occupy for years even after discovering the beating heart under the floorboards, or the cabal of octogenarian witches next door drugging the mousse. Readers of Ashbery will be especially pleased to discover how these often very short poems respond across decades to the work of his (in hindsight almost tentative) first book, Some Trees (1956) – instead of “dim Guadalajara” we have “the interesting people of Newfoundland,” for example – and how loyal he has remained to us, the readers, in his early promise to keep us amazed.