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'It seems I was reading something'
John Ashbery's Flow Chart strikingly resembles a common-place book -- quotations and impressions that have accumulated in a notebook, documenting aspects of daily life as they occur. This is, as Ashbery might well have realised, importantly bound up in the history of reading English texts: as Robert Darnton recently pointed out, common-place books once required
a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, stamped with your personality... By selecting and arranging snippets from a limitless stock of literature, early modern Englishmen gave free play to a semi-conscious process of ordering experience. The elective affinities that bound their selection into patterns reveal an epistemology -- a process of knowing -- at work below the surface.1
This suggests ways in which Flow Chart seems to have been composed, as well as ways in which it may be read, since material assembled chronologically has been broken up into new patterns, and the resulting poem can be read in fits and starts. Another resemblance to the commonplace book is that while Ashbery apparently imports other voices to formulate a kind of egoless text, his work is still stamped with his own personality -- it resembles its sources, yet can scarcely be mistaken for another poet's. Flow Chart 's entrancing meditative flow simultaneously invites, even compels, the reader to interpose his own sense of what the words mean. Ultimately this is not only part of Ashbery's serious purpose, it is evidence of his distinct comic sense.
Flow Chart is, after all, different from most other long poems. If one omits reading part of The Divine Comedy, for instance, a gap in the cosmos of Dante's poem results; if one reads it in the wrong order, or misreads it, the cosmology is ultimately disfigured. The Cantos of Ezra Pound needn't be read sequentially (or even as a long poem), but the Cantos' specific meaning is insisted upon by their author. By contrast, Flow Chart relies on the fact that the structure of a text, as it is read, is not static -- it flows as reading progresses. The flow of a poem is what the poet has already charted in print, yet it is Heraclitean -- in flux, experienced anew, with any and every reading. This is why even if Flow Chart is read segmentally, rather than sequentially, it still flows. Consequently, much more can be made of the title, especially given what a flow chart is: a pictorial representation describing a process or project to create a common language; a diagram which shows relationships in the stages of a process that leads to an end product; a means to view bottle-necks in a process, etc. The idea of representing bottlenecks is an essential feature of a flow chart, which illuminates Ashbery's project, since Flow Chart is replete with obstacles. In fact, if we delve more deeply into what a flow is, we find that the OED gives definitions for the word which include: 'a watery moss, a morass' (compare, on p. 97 of the US edition, the use of the word 'moraine', as a counterpoint to the river which has, on p. 96, 'threaded its way as best it could through sharp obstacles...'); 'quicksand'; and -- especially interesting -- 'of composition of speech; in early use of a speaker or writer: to glide along smoothly, like a river', a usage which dates to 1585. I don't mean to suggest that Ashbery pored over the OED the way Auden did; the deep suggestiveness of the word 'flow', which inheres in the English language, is probably something Ashbery intuited. Even readers who have trouble reading Flow Chart might say that it has a nice flow to it.
As any river demonstrates, a flow does not have a single clear beginning or end. Ashbery capitalises on the term as a springboard for resonance and irony. The poem therefore begins, appropriately, in medias res. The first word is 'Still...' -- though the lines which move the poem flow: the words do not remain still. That beginning word invites a sort of involuntary word-association game -- part of the mental machinery that produces a flow chart of its own as one reads -- in which the phrase 'still waters run deep' is invoked. This is probably a red herring, yet because Flow Chart frequently invokes landscapes in which still and flowing water figure deeply, it becomes, as one reads on, an example of the way meanings overtake one another in the poem.
Moreover, as the enjambment '... not yet/overtaken' suggests, there's a sense in which each line metrically over-takes the one before it: since the first line of the first section is comfortably pentametrical, one half-expects the poem to commence in formal meter, but this proves not to be the case. Reading Flow Chart one can continually search for signs of a form -- with unexpected results, as with the double-sestina discussed below. Is the poem 'a new form of despair?' ('I ask the diagram: is it the foretaste of pain/it might easily be?') We ask the poem for clues about its form -- and speaker -- but the poem replies by interrogating itself.
The 'I' of the poem is still in the 'published city', but we're not sure what the other possibilities had been. The New York City skyline might be said to resemble columns of newsprint, or spines of books. But the image of published columns is not, ultimately, static, as we come to realise by the time we reach p. 95:
... Mornings, I'd be at the library
while it was still dark outside, straining my eyes over useless newsprint, all
in the interests of some dumb theory I was trying to prove,
even after I forgot what it was. There'd be times I thought I'd hit on something -- eureka! And then I'd realize I'd ignored an important bit of chronology, for instance
that A and B weren't even alive during the same century, and I'd be forced to backtrack,
treading water, then as always.
Those 'I's turn to 'realize's -- while I'm getting ahead of myself by quoting from a passage far ahead of the poem's opening, we see that the 'published city' is a dynamic library of chronological thinking which, like the text of a poem, need not be read in order. Reversing course and rereading is often the best way to tread the waters of Ashbery's verse. But Flow Chart also sways and tugs the reader with its currents of allusiveness.
The phrase 'published city' tellingly echoes the 'Unreal City' in the first and third sections of Eliot's The Waste Land. As Eliot's London perversely mirrored Augustine's City of God, Ashbery gives us New York as a City of Words: cities are real, but words are, too -- where does the ideal live if not in the flow of words? And as Ashbery's words flow onward we read, a few lines into Section I, 'Sad grows the river god as he oars past us/downstream without our knowing him...' This again ripples forward from (and partly parodies) Eliot's 'The river sweats/Oil and tar/The barges drift/With the turning tide...' Also present are various ripples from Four Quartets, notably the 'strong brown god' of 'The Dry Salvages'.2 As Eliot can write 'Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song', and yet not end his song, the invocation of the city and its river (with London Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge hovering above the poems) is a commencement with no particular beginning. Flow Chart is, in fact, continually grounded in references to bodies of water -- not only those, like rivers, that flow, but those in which we can get bogged down, like the morass noted in the OED and the moraine -- and to muddy, earthy places. The river god on p. 3 carries his name (which we 'ingest') through time 'to set down/finally, on a strand of rotted hulks'. That is, the river god is stranded in strands, entangled in intermingled meanings:
... And those who sense something
squeamish in his arrival know enough not to look up
from the page they are reading, the plaited lines that extend
like a bronze chain into eternity.
The river god's arrival is his end, but his arrival constitutes the poem's beginning; to know this is to ingest his name -- which is perhaps why we're never given it. Here, too, are splashes of Eliot, 'Burnt Norton' this time:
Words move, music moves
Only in time...
... Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness...
Moreover, the figure of the 'published city' and its river is destined to reappear like a stepping-stone throughout the poem, as well as at its ostensible end, on p. 216:
... What a city this is! In what rich though tepid layers you can
almost detect the outline of your head and then
you know it's time to read on.
'It seems I was reading something...' And so he was. Ashbery muddies the waters with other poetic voices. Cowper's 'The Castaway' comes into play in the first section of Flow Chart. Cowper's 'melancholy theme' is of a man drowning, literally, in verse. That poem tells of waging with death a 'lasting strife/Supported by despair of life'. 'No poet wept him,' Cowper wails; but Ashbery, too, finding no 'voice divine' to allay the misery of one washed headlong into life, ends up writing undulating lines of words. What these lines despair of is, perhaps, their hope of ever expressing, 'except in small signs', that which 'we can never feel, except occasionally' -- that 'life is so busy, but a larger activity shrouds it'. The enshrouding horror of life's essential and ultimate morbidity is almost impossible to articulate, yet it is felt so strongly that it distracts:
'It seems I was reading something';
I have forgotten the sense of it or what the small
role of the central poem made me want to feel. No matter.
The words, distant now, and mitred, glint.
The opening section of Flow Chart, like Cowper's 'The Castaway', recognises that
not one
ever escapes the forest of agony and pleasure that keeps them
in a solution that has become permanent through inertia.
Cowper's narrator recalls that 'When, snatch'd from all effectual aid,/We perish'd each alone...' There is little, though, of pleasure in his lines. For Ashbery, there is the pleasure of dipping into those lines, though his allusiveness is elusive. A passage on pp. 5-- 6 nicely allegorises the poem's utilisation of various poetic voices:
So no matter what the restrictions, admonitions,
premonitions that trellised us early, supporting this
artificial espaliered thing we have become, by the same token no
subsequent learning shall deprive us, it seems, no holy
sophistication loosen the bands
of blessed decorum, our present salvation, our hope for years to come.
Only let that river not beseech its banks too closely,
abrade and swamp its levees, for though the flood is always terrible,
much worse are the painted monsters born later
out of the swift-flowing alluvial mud.
While allusion is a stock tool for a poet -- and a device that can help propel a long poem -- Ashbery's absorption of other poets' voices in Flow Chart does not function conventionally. The poem brims with these voices not to ripple with learned allusions, which are so much alluvium (the detritus, to use Eliot's word, deposited by running water), but instead to loosen decorum, to allow a free flow. Consequently, when wavelets of what seem to be allusions appear, Ashbery isn't so much relying on the authority of other poems as confronting a dreamlike 'chasm of repeated words,/of shifting banks of words rising like steam/out of someplace into something' (p. 9). It's as if he's navigating, or trying to stay afloat in, 'an ocean whose bottom is dotted' with the relics of old poems, 'with the rusted engines and debris/of long-forgotten wrecks' (p. 13). 'And I in greater depths than he' -- in deeper than Cowper's drowning man, who in his extremity did not have to face floods of phoney erudition:
... The ads
didn't tell you this, they were too busy with their own professional sleight-of-hand
to notice those farther out in deep water ('when such a destin'd wretch
as I, wash 'd headlong from on board'), decorating the maelstrom with
someone's (I wish I knew whose) notion of what is right, or cute. (p. 12)
Language as oblivion, a 'dream/with no place to go', is the peril Ashbery encounters, as does Hart Crane in his pastiche of ad copy in 'The River'. 'Words, however, are not the culprit', as Ashbery adds.
... They are at worst a placebo,
leading nowhere (though nowhere, it must be added, can sometimes be a cozy
place, preferable in many cases to somewhere), to banal if agreeable note-spinning.
Covering reams of foolscap with them won't guarantee success,
yet neither will it automatically induce ruination; wheel on the guillotine;
leave, in the middle distance, something like an endless morgue, a lake of reget.
It's better though to listen to the strange chirps of the furniture. (pp. 24-- 5)
And indeed one can spin wheels spinning notes to this poem. Take this passage on p. 34: 'So, "marrying little with less," meliora probant, deteriora/sequuntur, they footdrag in oblivion...' One footnotes in oblivion here, because the italicised Latin is taken from Poe's 'The Philosophy of Furniture', a mock essay similar in tone to much of Flow Chart, while the phrase in quotation marks here is not (as far as I can tell) a quotation from any authoritative source, but a turn of phrase. Similarly, the italicised Latin on p. 77, 'this is probably unromantic and proper procedure, fons et origo, nemine dissentiente', is not a specific quotation. Rather, these are stock phrases, fons et origo meaning 'source and origin' and nemine dissentiente meaning 'without a dissenting voice'.
These phrases could occur, one imagines, in legal language, formal minutes of meetings, in Latin prayer, or in ancient documents; to weave them into the text is not exactly romantic or proper procedure. Neither, for that matter, is sly rewriting of lines from Gray's elegy on p. 30, where 'desert air' is frozen into 'arctic air', 'sweetness' becomes 'fragrance', and lines are re-divided. It's as if Ashbery can't pay undivided attention to texts and tropes.
It is even more revealing to unravel the case of the Latin quotation given in English, and in quotation marks, on p. 160:
'Unwillingly,
O queen, I left your shore.' Yet she was that none of us left empty-handed; I still have
that souvenir, and therefore cannot decry the fate that brought me to this pass, alone...'
The quotation is from the Aeneid (6.456-- 66), and is a translation of the last words Aeneas ever speaks to Dido; however, Virgil's text is allusive in its own turn, having been derived from Catullus' 'version of Callimachus' mock-heroic Coma Berenices, a piece of genial nonsense in which the severed lock of hair swears to the queen (66.39): inuita, o reina, tuo de uertice cessi... unwillingly, o queen, I left your head.'3 As on p. 145 of Flow Chart,
Something else will break fruitfully,
the allotted chain of associations, and it will serve as well -- only don't try to pass it all off as
an impulse, sincerity.
(The word 'sincerity' launches misleading associations, since there is a false Latin etymology for it: sine cera, without wax, commonly believed to have indicated the dishonest Roman practice of using wax to conceal imperfections in marble statuary.)
In another twist on poetic allusiveness, there's the quoted phrase on p. 209: '"... the dear, dead days" as someone called them'. Who called them that? The phrase can be found, eerily enough, in a poem by E. Nesbit called 'Ghosts' (from her Lays and Legends of 1886), and is the title of a book by the grim cartoonist Charles Addams, and of a mystery tale by Edward D. Hoch. It appears in an Ella Wheeler Wilcox poem, 'Little Queen'; in the Robert Service poem, 'Music in the Bush'; and in two different songs by the 1980s British rock group, Chameleons. More famously, it turns up in the lyrics of Molly Bloom's favourite tune, 'Love's Old Sweet Song', which recurs in Ulysses.
'The words have, as they/always do, come full circle, dragging the meaning that was on the reverse side/all along...' (p. 25). As they do in the double-sestina on pp. 186-- 93. Ashbery copied the end words from Swinburne's 'The Complaint of Lisa', thereby ostensibly avoiding (or voiding) an allusive relationship to the earlier poem. But can a poem be invoked without any allusiveness? Can we be exposed to information without being influenced by it? If, as Ashbery's strategy suggests, this is possible, then do Ashbery's readers remain unchanged by reading his work? In some way Swinburne is carried over into the double-sestina, but not in a way that brings a reader (who might never know about the Swinburne) closer to him; perhaps this is the middle ground Ashbery requires: a text that neither provides nor disavows authoritative meaning, but provides proximity instead -- a matrix, or at the very least, neutral territory.
When Ashbery incorporates lines from Beddoes into passages of Flow Chart we have his own (later) testimony in Other Traditions4 for illumination. He writes revealingly of Beddoes that
it is not just that he is a 'poet of fragments'; it is that the fragments don't separate easily from the matrix, and when they do, something is found wanting: they need their rough natural setting to register fully, even as it partially obscures them. There is no way, really, except to sign for the whole bill of goods and hope that prospecting will turn out to be worth the trouble. (p. 32)
Yet Ashbery did mine the ore of Beddoes' uneven verse for Flow Chart. The passages in which lines from 'Dream-Pedlary' are quoted betray some anxiety for having done so: 'But there were dreams to sell, ill didst thou buy' (p. 177) and:
Yet the spirits are still angry that you woke them, if that's what you did.
Dreaming a dream to prize -- way to go, Thomas L....
... Incorporate it -- no second chance will be given...
(pp. 178-- 9)
In Other Traditions Ashbery pointedly reproduces the entire poem, quoting Saintsbury's praise for it on p. 42 ('what words can possibly do justice to its movement and music?') and adducing Eliot, on the subject of fragments:
Eliot's and subsequent fragmentations in poetry have shown us how to deal with fragments: by leaving them as they are, at most intuiting a meaning from their proximity to each other, but in general leaving it at that. The poetry is complete as it stands, and to wish a further completeness for it would be to destroy its tough but fragile essence. (p. 92)
So proximity is a likely key to understanding Ashbery's non-allusive feeding of lines from various texts as tributaries to Flow Chart 's main currents. Yet beyond strictly mechanical proximity, there's a real affinity between Ashbery and Beddoes. The line quoted on p. 179, 'We nightingales/sing boldly from our hearts, so listen to us', is from a speech in Death's Jest-Book, Act III, Scene iii, which is oddly Ashberyan:
What is the night-bird's tune, wherewith she startles
The bee out of his dream, that turns and kisses
The inmost of his flower and sleeps again?
What is the lobster's tune when he is boiling?
I hate your ballads that are made to come
Round like a squirrel's cage, and round again.
We nightingales sing boldly from our hearts:
So listen to us.5
If we listen to Ashbery, we find that he has been listening to us:
... I
just lay down in a boat and slept, Lady-of-Shalott style. Soon I was gliding among you,
taking notes on your conversations and otherwise making a pest of myself...
... I knew my oracles
for what they were...
... It was the repeating of them that interested me
(p. 133)
This repetition -- the 'plaintive sound/of the harp of the waves is always there as a backdrop/to conversation and conversion, even when/most forgotten' (p. 4) -- is what Ashbery has built Flow Chart with, the repetition that made his reputation.
This repetition is not merely rote. He avoids repeating himself by finding a new form for every book; and he avoids another kind of repetition by rewriting or reworking tropes and even actual quotations. Then, too, key words that recur with great frequency are not exactly repetitions. Throughout the poem, the key words 'I' and 'it' reappear so often that they blur together. One can't always be certain to whom, or to what, they refer, though they are constant emanations of Ashbery's singular writing mind. Such mutability is embodied by the mutability of the poetic line, since formal features appear and are then abandoned: pentameter after the first line, the double-sestina on pp. 186-- 93, and so on. On p. 125 there's a clue:
I say 'I'
because I'm the experimental model of which mankind is still dreaming, though to myself
I'm full of unworked-out bugs and stagefright...
The 'I' is partly the artefact of poetic experiment; like a computer program or a process described by a flow chart, the 'I' is full of unworked-out bugs. Yet in less anthropomorphic terms, the articulation, the charting of anxiety (about revelation, about imperfection) involves stagefright. The mechanical process of poetics, however constructed, conveys and relies upon frailties and fear of exposure. Despite any uncertainty about the identity of 'I', the poem sounds intensely personal. But it is modest: the first appearance of the 'I' is deferred to the second line of the poem.
As for 'it', it appears in profusion, but good examples are found in the first part of Section IV (pp. 103-- 107). There are almost seventy instances of 'it', 'its', or 'it's' here alone. The variable 'it' is far-reaching, and is always in close proximity to the 'I'. (Ashbery's admirer, the poet Ann Lauterbach, refers to 'the its of history, and the its of culture' which are 'multiple and various, not linear and single.'6 For her, the night sky, rather than a river, is the 'rubric' for 'constellations' of words and sentences.) This is not so much a feature or function of the poem as of the English language. But 'it' figures in the poem because it's as if Ashbery draws a blank when he thinks about himself, and the language of his verse flows in to fill the resulting empty space. If thinking about a flow chart causes us to question how information can be schematised, an impending question is how we can possibly organise information about ourselves. Flow Chart is articulate about being inarticulate. The process of reading it induces and activates a process in the reader's mind because it circumvents typically evocative lyric strategies and straightforward narrative. Insofar as the poem impersonally impersonates the voices and lingos of big city businessmen, literary critics, politicians, and others whose work it is to make themselves heard, the end result is a bemused emulsion which resembles and stimulates, but does not dictate to, the mind of the reader.
Ashbery's free-flowing associativeness through undulating lines and stanzas and sections and pages is not only the essential project of Flow Chart, it is its very means of sustaining itself as a long poem. A passage on p. 167 sums up Ashbery's strategy of proximate allusiveness, the vying of separate voices within a single flowing work:
And the contentious are sometimes with us as a smooth pavane on glassy but profoundly
turbulent waters. How to keep it going
when all is trembling violently anyway, the air and all things in it? Shouldn't we
abandon them? But no these are
pointlessly fussy caveats sunk, so as to test one, in the great gray
fabric of the unwinding highway: don't let its apparent dignity fool you, and besides
they're free, and can do and say whatever they want to you; that doesn't
mean you have to respond in kind, but it helps.
Ashbery can 'keep it going' through a strange and strangely diffident intertextuality that owes something to, yet flows away from, its deepest sources. Flow Chart's waters are not gently ruffled by the breeze that blesses in the opening of another wide-ranging long poem, Wordsworth's Prelude; instead, they are subject to a process in which
The breeze that always nurtures us (no matter how dry,
how filled with complaints about time and the weather the air)
pointed out a way that diverged from the true way without negating it,
to arrive at the same result by different spells... (p. 5)
Arriving at the same result by different spells. Darnton speculates that the rise of the novel fostered the habit of reading a book cover to cover, while reading in fits and starts had compelled readers 'to read actively, to exercise critical judgment, and to impose their own pattern on their reading matter'.7 Flow Chart is compelling in just this way, and also devolves critical judgement to the reader, rather than to professional critics. This kind of reading relies on the autonomy of the reader as much as on the authority of the poet; perhaps there's even a sense that readers of Flow Chart can know more than the poet himself professes to understand.
The flowing process of Flow Chart is fascinating and complexly suggestive, but does the poem really work as a whole? Call me overbooked, but I think that Flow Chart is most valuable when it grapples with the voices of other poets, as I've tried to show, rather than the other voices that get sucked into the poem. 'There's no point giving them the slip', as the poem says on p. 73; the 'chatter' of other voices never subsides, yet poetry endures, even in distortion. Other poetic voices keep Ashbery's Beddoes-like dreams of the language afloat. On p. 177 (where he quotes Beddoes about dreams to sell), Ashbery writes of the 'sophisticated adult with a number of books/to his credit and many other projects in the works'. The best poets have always been more than careerists. Their best lines are more than manifestations of the culte de moi (an expression that is itself half allusion -- to Barrés -- and half Miss Piggy). Poems are not merely fragmented wrecks that litter the ocean floor, but are, as Ashbery appears to acknowledge, profound as well as found sources, party buried but somehow, whatever the depths, still in view -- more like deeply-embedded stepping stones in a river of verse. That they may lose cohesiveness, authority, even some of their meaning, can muddy the waters, but that is part of the essential nature of things:
... what about mud? If we lost it, we lose everything.
Distinctions would no longer get muddied. There'd be nothing left in life to wriggle out of,
No ooze to drop back into. We need water, heaven knows, but mud -- it's all over the place,
like air, that the thought of its not being there is even scarier. (p. 182)
'Who needs profundity?' he asks archly but deeply on p. 201. He does, and so do we.
Notes
1 Robert Darnton, 'Extraordinary Commonplaces', New York Review of Books, 21 December 2000, pp. 82, 86.
2 Compare also these lines from Beddoes' Death 's Jest-Book, Act II, Scene iii: '... 'twas a human river,/Brimful and beating as if the great god,/Who lay beneath it, would arise.' Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 'Death's Jest-Book', in The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. H.W. Donner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 403.
3 Neil O'Sullivan, 'Allusions of Grandeur? Thoughts on Allusion-Hunting in Latin Poetry', Electric Antiquity, volume 1, number 5, October 1993, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/journals/ElAnt/VIN5/osullivan.html
4 John Ashbery, Other Traditions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
5 Beddoes, p. 432.
6 Ann Lauterbach, The Night Sky (New York: Viking Press, 2005), p. 4.
7 Darnton, p. 86.
This article is taken from PN Review 165, Volume 32 Number 1, September - October 2005.
