"Flow chart", an Introduction

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, n.• 4 (1996),pp. 53 -64 FLOWCHART, AN INTRODUCTION DAVID HAMILTON Universidad de lowa Given the «City» theme of this conference, I wish to speak of the city as teacher, and more specifically to offer the example of one urbane poet-teacher, John Ashbery, a poet of the avant garde. I would hope that this talk could serve as a small introduction to his recent long poem, Flow Chart (1991 ). I feel odd taking up Ashbery in present cornpany. The city, any city, teaches much more than the avant garde. Two writers in our audience today, William Kennedy and Philip Levine, have learned much from the city and have taught us quite different things frorn any instruction we find in Ashbery. Levine describes himself as a poet who writes for people who have no poems, especially for working people left out of literary culture. Ashbery, in tum, could be described as a poet who writes forpeople who already have too many, for readers jaded toward poetry. For all their differences, Levine and Ashbery are poets of the sarne generation in the United States, and so are colleagues, evcn friends. That they, not to mention still more disparate people, walk the same city streets is one more way in which the city is often our surprising teacher. In a recent interview, the novelist Marilynne Robinson mentioned that «Arthur Gordon Pym and Moby-Dick have the same -and for that matter, Huckleberry Finnhave that characteristic pattem of so much American literature where people go through a joumey that leads to a kind of realization that is just at the Iimits of their ability to comprehend or articulate, and after that, there's an openness where earlier experience becomes impossible, and you 're abandoned into a new terrain without being able to use your old assumptions about how to find your way.» So A. Gordon Pym, Ishmael, and Huckleberry Finn all light out for the territory, and even though each retums to tell his story-How would we have those first person accounts otherwise?-no one of them retums as our companion. Each has transcended that Pyrn, the earliest in the series, is said to write from Illinois, far off in the northwest territory, which may seem funny now, with my having just flown in from Iowa, still farther west, but in 1839 Iowa was not yet a state, and lllinois was a strange place indeed to Poe, a resident of Baltimore. 54 David Hamilton Of course Dickinson negotiated an inward counterpart of this same joumey simply by climbing her stairs. And Robinson herself, in H ousekeeping ( 1980), has Ruth and Ruth 's mentor and odd guardian aunt, Sylvie, make a parallel passage into the ghostly status of wanderers, this in the dark of the night, across a railroad trestle, overa mountain lake so profound as to be known to have swallowed a train. Though hardly unique to US literalure, one of ourmost deeply held beliefs would seem to be in the authority of the wanderer who has ventured beyond the pale. That pale is usually seen as the frontier, as in the case of Huck Finn who heads off i nto the «territory», which probably meant Oklahoma and the southwest. Melville and Poe are more extreme, seeing beyond any existing frontier to the distant Pacific and to the Antarctic, still more remote. And of course no frontier is more disturbing than the privacy of an original soul, such as Dickinson. Each of these examples, distilled to its essence , suggests open space, lots of it, and so loneliness, literally and figuratively, the absolute opposite of cities. Consequently this belief finds its counterpart, and ironic opposite, in the writer moving into the city rather than out of it, writers who move in never to retum, for they too ha ve found themselves «abandoned into a new terrain without being able to use old assumptions about how to find your way». Gertrude Stein, H.D., Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Emest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Ralph Ellison ... John Ashbery. From small towns and regional capitals they come, to New York, París, and London. They come to change and to be changed. From the point of view of their origins, they too have passed beyond the pale. Each has seen the disturbing shapes and light shows of the urban Antarctic. Nota one would seek retirement in the Sabine Hills. They locate themselves instead to send news of what is really happening, where they find that it happens, in the city, that great catalyst of the avantgarde. Ashbery epitomizes this movement. A doctor's son from Rochester, he went to Harvard, that is, to Cambridge and Boston, then to Paris, and finally located in New York. Aside from being a poet, he has been an art critic, a mediator of avant -garde painters of his own time and place. The city, as metropolis, represents problematized space and so becomes one of the great stimuli of our literature and art. lt is the place of continuous dialectic, of the most significant interaction of Self with Other. lt is the seat of colonial power, the center from which diasporas occur, the refuge of those suffering their own dislocation. The emblematic dwelling places of the city are the penthouses of the rich, the brownstones of the bourgeoisie, the lofts and garrets of bohemia, and the ghetto. The city forces continuous interaction among them all as versions and subversions of each other. The Armory Shows of ali eras ha ve been mounted in cities, the natal place of the underground, of subversion in its most potent forms, and of the avantgarde. So the uptown galleries of Manhattan stand always in relation to those of Soho. By avant -g arde 1 mean simply that which calls itself experimental, and by experimental, that which, in the case of poetry, bids to be considered poetry though not at Flow Clwrt, an Introduction 55 first read as such. Thus it is composed as a challenge to whatever we have become accustomed to reading. Literary history revels in one such challenge after another. In any given time, avant garde works tend to share a style. No one active in US poetry toda y better suggests an ava nt -garde style for our ti me than Ashbery. Stevens foresawelements ofthis style in his «Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.» «lt must be abstrae!», he said, « it must change», and « it mu st give pleasure.» How better to describe the values of the city or, for that matter, of Ashbery? The c it y forces abstraction and chan ge upon u s. lt congregates the materials for many kinds of pleasur e. Ttalo Calvino 's «Six Memos» for the Coming Millenium -essays on Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Vi sibility, Multipli ci ty, and Consistency -e xtend Stevens's demands and underscore visual experience. In the city, we stagger under th e psychic weight of visual imperatives. The city is the place of our most fraught visual re lations. In the city our seeing is burdened, guilty, and often exciting. It is where we look and leam not to look, where we both notice and leam to subvert our gaze. We find th at looking can be inopportune though seeing is both necessary and unavoidable. One can hardly help being a voyeur just as one is always, or nearly always, cspecially in a city, awarc of watching one's self. City dwellers not only fear be in g mugged but often feel g uil ty, afterwards, for having been careless and so having, in some sense, permitted the attack. Depending on your politics, looking in the count ry side may be as guilty as in the city, but we are less inclined to insist that that is so. In the co untry, we feel less intrusive and that it is pennissible to pause for a view. Though bird watching can be interpreted as exercising hegemony over nature, it still enjoys a high order of cultural approval even though it requires staring, one of the foremost impolitenesses of urban livin g. Farming can certainly be seen as deriving from our rapacious gaze upon the land. But we need to eat, so we cultivate a regard for manual labor and encourage the farmer's benevolent stewardship of that land. Habits of seeing in the count ry lead in ti me to literary conventions. In the country, or in our sma ll towns, we are more like ly to greet strangers and to me et their gaze. We can learn not only to notice but to name and study those birds. In time, such study may lead to our seeing the bird differentl y, as a convincing metaphor, perhaps --of love, or hunger, or longing. In the city, in contrast, we hesitate to linger overa view. So we le am to look out ofthe comer of o ur eye. We st ud y peripheral vision and find more fleeting meanings there. In time we experiment with foregoing metaphor, which tends to fi x a meaning, for metonymy, which notices but lets go. Quickness, Visibility, Multiplicity; it must change; it may give pleasure. We could speculate that there is something essentially rural about metaphor. It requires th e equation of things under the umbrella of a larger order that holds, such as that of seasons and their changes. In extended metaphor, part holds with part and tends to stabilize meaning ali the more. Metonymy on the other hand steps more quickl y. It forego es th e whole to revel in the part, or part s. Sett in g aside a broad interest in an 56 David Hamifton army, it sharpens its sword. The sword may signal a larger order, but it will not attempt to comprehend it. Not long ago, poetry was ali but equated with metaphor. It was signaled by a complex of suborders-rhyme, meter, the consistent development of imagery and of theme. Now to have all these orders in place at once is almost a sig nal ofthe antipoetic, a forlom nod toan old order that does not hold us under its spell. Any one ofthem can do now, can be more than enough. Unes, for example, can be defined by nothing more than their arbitrary, ragged right boundaries. One might call this a visual metonym of the older poetic line. Similarly, occasional or obligue rhyme may be a metonym of rhyme as we remember it, and as such of poetry as it once was. For generations, now, metonymies have been creeping in to challenge the domination of metaphor in poetry. No poem could be a better examplc than «The Red Wheelbarrow», a city poem if there ever was one: So much depends u pon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Williams offers a series metonymies, three of them, suggesting but refusing to reveal one convincing metaphor. Not that metaphorical readings haven 't been advanced, making much of the colors of innocence and m ar tyrdom, for example, or of a rainfreshened conjunction of the machine with nature. But none has been satisfy ing . Hardly a city poet, and much given to metaphor himself, Frost saw these lines as a «fragment», which would imply that the metaphor he sought by which toread them had not come into view. Nor would it, and so, for Frost, the poem cannot be whole. The lines hold together though like a traditional poem, ev en a poem of Frost's. Notice the consistent balance of four (and in one case three) syllable lines against two. Notice the play of assonance from low back vowels, «O» and «U», throu gh mid vowels, «a» and «e», to the high front «Í.» Notice the «d», lifted to sorne degree of stress in each stanza, thus providing a chain of consonance through the whole. Notice the muted thou gh suspended rhym e: «depends /upan . .. chickens.» The poem frustrates our desire to seek a metaphorical meaning. But it is multiple in its imagery, visible, and quick; it is light on its feet and changes. My private fantasy F/ow Chart. an Introduction 57 is that Williams composed it one aftemoon after hi s pal, Pound, burst into his room with news of the last exciting thing of which he had leamed-the Great Vowel Shift. «Pound rests on the middle ages», Williams would say Iater. Anyway, absorbed as he was in something more material, anatomy very likely, Williams, to get rid of Pound, said «Oh, you me an like this» and improvised « Th e Red Wheelbarrow» as a metonomy of philological lore. In any case, it can be r ea d as a series of metonymies for the casual juxtapositions of contemporary living, arrangements not limited to but unavoidable in the city. Ashbery, among many others, has noticed. In Flow Chart he alludes to the wheelbarrow-»oh take this wheelbarrow far from my sight and bury it on yonder height» (65-6)-as he does to the broken bits of green bottle in the cider alley (72), anoth er of Williams' metonymies. He refers lo Williams' habit ofbeing «out riding, pointing at something.» « Why is it too late to be simple?», he asks (71 ), aff mnin g that, from his own point of vicw it most certainly is. u Time is too short forme to attempt more than a glancing reading of Ashbery. He is one of those rare cases in which, though associating himself with the avant-garde and advancing a poetics in tenns of the antipoe ti c, has be en taken up in his own lifetime as a benchmark of poetic achievement, res pe cted by his fellows, honored by many more, imitated and copied by ali and sundry, anthol og ized by rivals in our domestic tribalization of pocts and poetries, and the recipient of nearly ali the national prizes for poetry one can name. He has published at least fifteen separate volumes of poetry wi th hi s pace having accelerated to nearly one per year. In sorne views, such productivity is a crime against poetry, which dismay promotes in turna certain mystery about his methods and conjectures that are no doubt apocryphal. My favorite among those, and this perhaps stimulated by a portrait of Ashbe ry by Larry Rivers, in which the poet si ts before a manual typewriter on a co ffee table staring at something unseen but very likely a tv in the middle distance of a living room, would have Ashbery compose in just such a position daily, with a twenty-four hour movie channel on in the background so that whenever he is at a loss for word or image he merely records whatever catches his eye on the screen. 1 have no reason to believe this tale. Yet it pleases with a hint of plausibility, for it seems to explain first the mysterious profusion of his poems and then their constant flow that rarely settles on a subject but seems to catch instead a moment of flight, of transition belween or among subjects, though it would not explain th e range ofhis subjects or his language. Arelated conjecture would be that Ashbery has taken to heart the lessons of mid- to Jat e-century theory, especially about readers participating in if not dominating the construction of a poem, by which he has found the confidence to offer any kind of mix, belting on our dogged determination to find meanings for it whether he cared to see any or not. 58 David Hamilton You will not be surprised, then, to notice as distinguished a criticas John Bayley saying that Ashbery «constantly suggests meaning without ever being so banal as to attempt it.» Or for Helen Vendler to liken his poetry to Zeno's paradox: «No matter how you hasten toward your goal, you will always be unable to reach it.» Or for me to be reminded of a remark of J ohn Cage 's, said about the works of J oyce, Sati, and Duchamp, that they «resisted the march of understanding and so are as fresh now as when they were first made.» Or for a recent student of mine to suggest that Ashbery «would wa tch the universe mutate at random.» Vendler, after all, citesAshbery quoting Hen ry James, as «one of those on whom nothing is lost», and she applies the line to the poet. Nor <loes Ashbery discourage such suggestions when, for example, on the first page of Flow Chart, he places this small passage: lt seems J was readíng somethíng; l 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. Yet not one ever escapes the forest of agony and pleasure that keeps them in a solution that has become permanent through inertia. The force of meaning never extrudes. And the insects, of course, don 't mind. «It must be abstract.» There is a strong sense of abstraction here in that ideas of reading and of a poem are more evident than examples of either. A forest of agony and pleasure is no forest we know though the phrase suggests the nature of forests. Manuscript evidence shows that Ashbery cut two lines between the last two sentences quoted, p er hap s to reinforce the association of «meaning» as it can be imagined to «extrude>>-like toothpaste, or sausage from its casing, or excr ement-with the insects that would c rawl ali over it if it did. It seems characteristic that the image given by «insects» and «extrudes» is explicitly denied by the sentences in which they appear. There is no extrusion rather than sorne, and the insects «don 't mind» being denied their natural due. Again we are in the realm of ideas rather than among examples. These are not the ants of Thoreau. By now, moreover, one becomes aware of having been drawn away from the earlier lines, which must be at least as importan!, for they are not only about reading, but about the nostalgic idea of a «central poem», in which well joined, that is «mitred» words «glint.» Of course that phrase al so means words dignified as bishops and so decked out in fancy headdress. Reading Ashbery is a continuous adventure of negotiating such passag es, in which the verbal landscape is always shiftin g-It must change!-and wondering how often one might return through them to discover pleasures one has missed. Flow Chart is a poem of 214 pages divided into six unnamed sections indicated by Roman numerals and subdivided further by intermittent white space and by white Flow Chart, an Int roduction 59 space enhanced by a typographic squiggl e. These divisions often appear random, perhaps merely a record of places he stopped for sleep, or for coffee br eaks, or when th e movie changed on the tv, and not always coming to a full stop granunatically when he does. One passage toward the end is a tour de force th at is becoming famous; it is a double sestina, ba sed on Swinbume. The fir st of its dozen stanzas precedes one of those squiggle dividers, and an other page anda h alf follows the sestina 's coda befare the section V ends. That is the kind of move that suggests casualness about division, or prívate determinations, ora desire to deflect us from noticing that a sestina has begun. Th e first time I read the poem , 1 did not notice it at ali. I merely saw that sorne words were being repeated. «Sunflower» struck me, and I wrote in my margins, «lots of su nfl owers here.» It is treacherous to quote from Ashbery, for every quotation extracted denies passages befare and after that might be as fruitful. Here though are a few that may give a sense of Ashbery, or at least of what caught my eye while reading him: Words, however are not the culprit. 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). (24) Repetition makes reputation. Besides, it's something you build with. You need no longer inspect the materials when you buy them in bulk. (133- 4) What if f poetry) were only a small, other way of living, like being in the wind? or letting the various settling sounds we hear now rest and record the effort any creature has to put forth to summon its spirits for a moment and then fall si lent, hoping that enough has happened? (145) I t's my Sonata of Experience, and I wrote it for you. Her e's how it goes: the first theme is announced, then fooled around with for a while and goes and sits over there. (172) One detects a note of parody in ali this. I'v e chosen passages that suggest Ashbery 's writerly sense of his work, his toying with that, and his provoking both himse lf and his readers by mulling over revolutionary ideas. Each passage sparkles with subversive thinking. Each, in my view, «glints», as <lo es this longer one, in about the sa me tone, that defines as well as anything I know the spirit of the avant-garde while threatening equa!ly to defla te it: I can tell you a story about something. The expression will be just ri ght, for it will be adjusted 60 David Hamifton to the demands of the fonn, and the form itse lf shall be timeless though hitherto un suspected. lt will take us down to about now, though a few beautiful archaisms will be allowed to flutter in it-<<co mplain t», for one. You will be amazed at how touched you will be because of it, yet not tempted to find fau1t with the author for doing so superlative a job that it lea ves his willing but breathless readers on the sideline s, like people waiting for hours beside a village street to see the cross-country bicycle riders come zipping through in their ye llow or silver liveries, and it' s ali ov er so fast you're not sure you even saw it. ... But you won't mind that either, since his literature will have performed its duty by se tting you gently down in a new place and th en speeding off before yo u ha ve a chance to thank it. W e've got to find a n ew nam e for him. « Writer » scems totally inadequate; yet it is writing, you read it before you knew it. And besi de s, if it weren 't, it wouldn 't have done the unexpected and by doing so proved that it was quite t he thing to do. (185-6) This passage ali but immediately precedes the double sestina, which se em s destined to become emblematic of thi s poem. The sestina begins ten Jin es later with «W e're interested in the language, that you call breath», «breath» being the first of the dozen end words Ashbery takes from Swinburne and employs in precise ly the s am e pattem as he, in h is «Complaint of Lisa», which in tum bears as e pi graph a reminder of Boccaccio, Lisa's co mplaint be in g central to the seventh tale of the tenth day of the Decameron. One never knows when to quit when citing intertextualities, but let it be said that Boccaccio's tale is one of throwing, projecting, or transmitting one's voice through intermediaries and surrogates, which idea bears more than a little relation to taking Swinburne as one's exa mple, chos ing Swinburne 's rare double sestina, and dro ppin g « ianguage» into its first line which will end w ith « breath .» It ha s everything to do with a «timcless» forro «hitherto unsuspected», com ing down from Boccaccio to «about now», with a few «beautiful arc haism s» being «a llowed to flutter in it.» Lisa, an apothecam 's daughter, falls in Jov e wi th her king, whose love is a h ope less !ove, the king being married already and high above her station. So she falls int o lovesickness. Th e king, a sympathe ti c figure, hears of this and se nds his minst rel to inquire. The girl tells the minstrel her story and he, much moved, promises to ca rry it to their king. lnterestingly, a smart technical complication occurs at this moment, for the minstrel, either incapable of or fi nding it unthinkable to compose his own «original» so ng , employs a songwriter to do that for him befare he retums with the sc ripted, practiced version to the king. What are we to suppose here, that D er rida wa s al so a reader o( Flow Chart, an Introduction 61 Boccaccio and Swinburne? Or that Derrida tells an old story in newer, more abstract language? Anyway, th e minstrel sings his, her, their, sad tale to the king who, much moved himself, decides to visit such an obviously virtuous and tend er maid. He does. Being not only noble but of good heart, and pure enough mind, it never enters into the story that the king might do other than serve her well, that is, to arrange her marriage to a suitable courtier. This he will do at the cost of one kiss from the maiden. And that she will grant only if his queen does not objecl. Ali ends happily ali the way around, and the teller concludes with a reminder that kings, though al l powerful, are abJe to behave well now and then. I just said « Ít never enters into the story», but the breath of corruption was there ali along. We read the story well aware of other tums it might have taken. lt hints of an audience prepared to hear a different story, of a less virtuous maid, or of a rapacious king, or of both, and so of this story being layered, as it were, on another unheard but well remembered. And that is ali the more reason for it to draw the attention of readerly and writerly poets like Ashbery. Like Ashbery, the king did the unexpected and «by doing so proved it was quite the thing to do.» Say he was king of a benign avant-garde. For the moment, anyway, Ashbery seems king of our national poetry, and given the small space 1 have to work with here, his double ses tina se ems a good choice to represen! his spraw Jin g and complex work. So I will finish by telling a different story of it. Last year, I wrote Ashbery to say that a class wou ld be reading Flow Chart with me, and 1 asked whether he could spare copies of one or two draft pages. This seemed a happy way of getting a class to begin talking about a poem. 1 didn't know Ashbery, and 1 expected no reply, so 1 was overwhelmed by his generous response. An assistant called me, asked what passages I was interested in, and when, nonplused, l had no concrete suggestions to make, suggested the double sestina and two others. That's when I learned to go back and look for that sestina. Soon l re ceived a passage from the beginning, in which I found the cut between «insects» and «extrudes», a middle passage, and material including the double sestina and running on to the end. There were twenty-nine pages of typescript, densely single spaced, more than sixty pages of the final text, almost one third of the poem. lt is labelled «original manual typescript», as if it were first written in a posture much like the portrait by Rivers. 1 do not know how man y scripts or of what kind preceded it. Nor how many others followed. There are changes and cuts, plenty ofthem when you begin listing, but the overwheJming impression is of Ashbery's letting things stand, of line after line moving entirely from «Original manual typescript» to the printed text although one whole page of co uplets has been lost that would ha ve added about three new pages just beJow the middle of the present page 66. This was probably beca use a typist turned over two leafs together by accident and noticed no disjunction. That failure to notice is easy to understand. The sestina began, apparently, by Ashbery typing the twelve end words down