John Ashbery, A Man of Words

I've avoided writing about John Ashbery because, while I love his poetry deeply, he is such a formidable presence that I feel intimidated. But in spite of the difficulty of his poems, I don't associate him with a faux weightiness. When he makes significant pronouncements, they do not provide the reader with a moral: they leave the reader with more questions.

Take, for instance, "A Man of Words," from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. It begins simply enough: "His case inspires interest / But little sympathy; it is smaller / Than at first appeared." I read this as Ashbery's take on writing about oneself. It might be interesting to tell autobiographical stories, and readers might enjoy them, but in the end they are small. They are mere fact, not the fullness of truth.

Then he asks, "Does the first nettle / Make any difference as what grows / Becomes a skit?" The speaker is implying that the difficulty or problem that inspires the writer to write is ultimately less important than the act of creation it inspires--the skit, the made-up part.

The speaker describes the skit as follows:

Three sides enclosed,
The fourth open to a wash of the weather,
Exits and entrances, gestures theatrically meant
To punctuate like doubled-over weeds as
The garden fills up with snow?

Here the created world and the "real" or natural world have overlapped. Ashbery has a deep disinterest in fact. He seems much more focused on creation, how it spills over into life, which then affects creation, so that in the end the line between the two is blurred irreparably. The created world lets in the "weather" from the natural world and the two become one.

But then the speaker begins to address the reader from a remove. He has described this overlapping of creation and natural world, but he startles himself, snaps back to yet another "reality": "Ah, but this would have been another, quite other / Entertainment, not the metallic taste / In my mouth as I look away." That skit, the three created walls that allowed in the natural world, were a creation within a creation, a poem within a poem. Merely by writing about it, he makes it unreal, untruthful--a construct.

He describes "the angles where the grass writing goes on, / Rose-red in unexpected places like the pressure / Of fingers on a book suddenly snapped shut." In other words, the skit that he feels removed from continues in spite of his remove. And even when he snaps the book shut, or attempts to stop it from existing, the fingers holding the book closed take on the color of the images it sought to destroy. The created world continues to penetrate the world of the speaker, which is itself a created world, ad infinitum. Or is it that by writing about himself, the speaker loses reality and becomes a part of the creation?

The implication is that writing about anything directly tends to lessen the thing--the image or idea loses its truth if it is confronted directly. Only by writing about a thing indirectly, telling it slant, so to speak, can the truth be approached.

As the speaker says, "Those tangled versions of the truth are / Combed out, the snarls ripped out / And spread around." That is, the complexity of truth is simplified through the act of writing, and the best writing is that which allows the complexity to be the primary focus.

The speaker is in search of "what is fine, rarely appears and when it does is already / Dying on the breeze that brought it to the threshold / Of speech." The idea, the truth, is killed by the act of speaking and, by extension, the act of writing.

He provides us with another image to confirm this: "All diaries are alike, clear and cold, with / The outlook for continued cold." The speaker finds autobiography, the rattling off of the daily events of one's life, to be cold, lifeless. And he describes it like weather, like the snow that blew into the three walls of the skit, which lost its reality for the speaker.

The poem ends: "Just time to reread this / And the past slips through your fingers, wishing you were there." The speaker once again calls attention to the fact that this poem is not reality--it is a construction. Something false. And while you are reading, reality is slipping past you, leaving you behind.

"A Man of Words" is a gorgeous, poignant work that demonstrates a deep ambivalence about the effect of art and its relationship to what we think of as the real world.

Read the full poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=32703