Soon There Was Nothing Left

What does the characterization unfinished mean when describing a poem? Some things obviously merit the adjective—a chair with three legs, a portrait with a swath of raw canvas where facial features should be, a song cut short just before its crescendo. Such cessations can be plainly seen or felt. But unless a line stops in mid-thought, a poem doesn’t immediately appear truncated. Consider the famous example of Samuel Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” We know that it’s a fragment only because the author explained upon publication that the interruption of an annoying visitor prevented him from fully recounting his dream vision (rather than having nodded out on opium). In the case of a more modern specimen, in a free-form poem that traffics in ambiguity of purpose and effect, any degree of incompletion will be somewhat camouflaged by that aesthetic disposition. To be sure, fragmentation, lacunae, and open-endedness have been central to Modernist and post-Modern enterprises. A seemingly unfinished work may be so, or appear to be so, intentionally—that being the point of the poem. The mood of the ongoing moment tilts against the totalizing impulse; emblematic punctuation is the ellipsis rather than the period. The once necessary sense of an ending gives way to the notion that thinking has merely come to rest for a brief spell.

Perhaps more than any other poet of the postwar period and beyond, John Ashbery gave voice to rumination’s off-handed, recursive, ever expansive circuits. Beginning in his early volumes Some Trees (1956), The Tennis Court Oath (1962), and The Double Dream of Spring (1970), he tested the conventional limits of how a poem might start. He often began in medias res with what feels like a snatch of overheard conversation, as in “A White Paper,” which casually opens, “And if he thought that / All was foreign—.” Many of his poems also conclude without quite concluding; the many pages of “Europe,” for example, cease with the unpunctuated line “the breath.” Poems from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s and continuing well through the book-length poems of later decades seem to emerge from an animated discourse already in progress. In a 1976 interview with Richard Kostelanetz, Ashbery describes his creative process: “I have a feeling that in my mind is an underground stream, if you will, that I can have access to when I want it. I want the poetry to come out as freshly and unplanned as possible.” In another interview from 1984, he directly addresses the issue of resolution: “I don’t look on poems as closed works. I feel they’re going on all the time in my head, and I occasionally snip off a length.”

The five long poems in Parallel Movement of the Hands (Ecco, 2021), a posthumous volume expertly edited and introduced by the poet Emily Skillings, who was also Ashbery’s long-time assistant, offer an opportunity to assess what, if any, difference exists between a “finished” poem that resists closure and a work that the poet himself deemed incomplete. As Skillings relates, Ashbery continued writing up to a week before he died, at age 90, in 2017. Such industry is further evidenced by the two-dozen plus original collections (not including compilations) he produced over his lifetime, 11 of which he published after turning 70. The underground stream was a torrent. Her account of Ashbery’s revision process and how he selected poems for inclusion in a book (he gave them grades of A, B, or even C, often sharing them with his former student and fellow poet John Yau for his rating) provides a glimpse of the craft behind work that was sometimes criticized as being composed extempore. She demonstrates an equal measure of care transcribing text from manuscript pages: when confronted with the typescript’s obvious error “on the point ot hopening,” she chooses “of opening” rather than “of happening” owing to “the organization of the keyboard and that the entire word is contained within the misspelling.” Because the spider king, who appears earlier in the line, is said to “unhitch himself to plummet directly into our daily affairs,” Skillings surmises he is likely “falling through the dilations in space and reality created by events.” Alert to ways in which the literal and figurative are hardly separable for this poet, she aptly dubs such a problem “a particularly Ashberian conundrum.”

Ashbery frequently wrote long poems—“Litany,” from As We Know (1979), and the titular poem from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) are among the most well known—and book-length works such as Flow Chart (1991) and Girls on the Run (1999). Each essayistic prose poem in Three Poems (1972) immerses readers in the experience of consciousness, with the rigor of their logical analyses neatly balanced by a wry and knowing tone. The expansive nature of the form allowed Ashbery to roam among multiple historical moments, to deploy his abundant cultural vocabulary, and to unhurriedly explore various dictions. His instinct for close and digressive examination of minute changes in our mental climate equipped him for extended outings that sustain attention through the sheer force of their stamina.

Four of the five works Skillings gathers here—"The History of Photography,” “The Art of Finger Dexterity,” “21 Variations on My Room,” and “The Kane Richmond Project”—were written during the 1990s and early 2000s; the fifth, a prose poem titled “Sacred and Profane Dances,” is undated. That Ashbery had these several extended works underway simultaneously testifies not only to his unflagging fealty to the form but also to his extravagantly various powers of invention and intelligence. Composer (and onetime student of Beethoven) Carl Czerny’s book of piano exercises, published in 1839, provides individual poem titles (“Maximum Velocity in Arpeggios,” “Delicacy in Skips and Staccatos”) as well as the overall title for “The Art of Finger Dexterity.” Allusions to images created by Eugène Atget, Adolph de Meyer, Charles Nègre, and others are threaded through “The History of Photography,” and “The Kane Richmond Project” draws on long-forgotten serial cliffhangers from the late 1930s and early 1940s starring the dashing actor Kane Richmond. Even as the references that undergird these projects range from the reassuringly familiar to the dauntingly obscure, as is typical with Ashbery, they characterize a rarefied mental atmosphere, one in which the poet’s droll self-awareness deflates what otherwise might be pretension.

“The History of Photography” isn’t quite a history—or at least not obviously so. Instead, over the course of the poem’s six numbered sections, readers seem to travel among vaguely recognizable, half-remembered images, entering their narrative possibilities briefly and then moving on to the next. Of course, seem is the operative word. Where we are in place and time and just what is happening is purposefully indeterminate. Is a single image being described, a composite of many, or perhaps something like the essence of any photograph? Likely all of these. But chiefly, Ashbery enacts a photograph’s ability to simultaneously spark intimate personal associations even as it offers a portal to another world, unfamiliar yet alluring. Innumerable photos throughout history depict an old man leaving someplace; does it matter if readers know which one may be the poet’s departure point?

Now the old man takes his leave.
Courtesy wrenched from confusion douses
the reproach of his having here. We all imbibe
the new freshness like a straw, a stem
takes us from there to there, like heaven.

Factual clarity emerges at intervals. Without naming Louis Daguerre, Ashbery ventriloquizes him as he takes Boulevard du Temple, a momentous photo circa 1838:

The first person to be photographed was a man
having his boots cleaned. There were others
in the same street, but they moved and became
invisible. How calm I am!

Other photographers are mentioned directly (“Mapplethorpe the dissenting penis”; “Muybridge’s hopping / woman—”), and sprinkled about are observations that remind readers of Ashbery’s longstanding role as art critic:

The first photographers
who got it right knew what they were doing.
Then a second generation came along, happy to play
in the ruts already carved, to flood them and conceal them under
            flowers.

Though the history in “The History of Photography” peeks its head out just enough to keep readers alert for clues to specific images, the poem doesn’t rely on successful identifications. The fact of the world being recorded via an admixture of light and chemicals for nearly two centuries subsumes any single photo—the snapshot lost in a drawer, the iconic image on a T-shirt—within an amorphous, intensely personal archive. This is the history Ashbery illuminates.

All the poems in this volume extend a career-long mediation on making or experiencing art or even—as in the case of “The Art of Finger Dexterity”—practicing to make art. Ashbery once told an interviewer that Czerny’s book of exercises “was written to torture piano students. … It’s mostly silly little tunes ornamented in a very complicated way to stretch the fingers to the limits of their endurance.” (Skillings, who witnessed the poem’s composition in 2007, notes that Ashbery recalled to her playing Czerny’s Etudes as a child.) The 26 poems gathered under this title are short—some are only several lines and fittingly gymnastic in their verbal shifts. One reads “O happy something” in its entirety. This brevity is matched by most of their line lengths. Taking a structural cue from the composer, Ashbery compacts complication to “dismangling” effect: these poems hug the corners as they pivot from, say, brooding mood to comedic fillip as, for instance, in “Changing Fingers on the Same Key”:

Orderly soul,
looking for a way in telling
us about dismangling—in a book?—
the way in is reversed now.
You bungle candor in issuing
an edition with notes—
what manner can they confine,
what new subjects elide
whose wan exegesis never tattled?
 
Fine with me, guv’nor.
I love it.

Ashbery didn’t so much ornament “silly tunes” as sound out tonal variations with an ear attentive to colloquial speech. It is hard not to believe that the expressions “you do you” and “haters gonna hate” have infiltrated “Delicacy in Skips and Staccatos” to reside cheek by jowl with Jasper Johns’s dictum about artmaking: “Do something to it. Do something else to it.” A snippet of delighted French rounds off the impersonations:

People,
            half-hurled,
you gonna know.
You gonna do.
 
You do something else.
 
Mais non, je t’adore.

When the breezy loquacity tightens and turns epigrammatic (“Trespass in shade,” “Soon there was nothing left,” “The wind blows where it wants,” or “O my truth”), such terse declarative statements are all the more bracing because of the change-up. The 45-year gap between the two works notwithstanding, the cryptic angularity of “The Art of Finger Dexterity” shares kinship with The Tennis Court Oath, a book often regarded as one of Ashbery’s most challenging. Though even fans concede this opacity (in a favorable New York Times profile from 1976, Kostelanetz describes the poetry as “extremely difficult, if not often impenetrable”), Ashbery nevertheless earned a lifetime of accolades and acceptance. The acclaim didn’t influence his intentions; he always wrote in accordance with the aesthetic expressed in his 1995 Robert Frost Medal address. “With a poem,” Ashbery said, “there is nothing to explain … because the act of writing the poem was an explanation of something that had occurred to the poet.”

Perhaps intended to be part of longer works, the volume’s relatively shorter pieces—"Sacred and Profane Dances” and “21 Variations on My Room”—are more suggestive of possibilities than realized visions. “Sacred and Profane Dances” does, though, broaden awareness of Ashbery’s cultural scope as he unexpectedly assumes the role of biblical exegete exploring the Parable of the Ten Virgins from the Gospel of Matthew.

The numbered stanzas in “21 Variations on My Room” leave off at 18, giving the clearest indication of being unfinished. But Skillings suggests it may be a portion of the collection’s most sustained and unitary piece, “The Kane Richmond Project,” a work that returns the poet to what his readers will recognize as more-familiar ground—the domain of old and esoteric movies. “Film,” Ashbery asserted in a 2007 interview, “has been a major influence on me. I think it’s probably been more influential than visual art.” The first poem in this book-length effort, “Spy Smasher,” shares its title with the 1942 serial in which Richmond plays a cape-wearing avenger who battles Nazis. The opening line installs readers in what might be a seat in a “decrepit cinema” (a description from “The Phantom Agents,” included in Ashbery’s 1992 collection Hotel Lautrémont), plunging them into a world of proliferating plot complications: “A hundred major developments— / that’s what I think about, ...” Action unspools as a “Man wanders along a ledge,” “old lovers fall apart,” “tall ships… / pass obviously on their way to something,” and it’s all “more than Mary could stand.” Descriptions of the characters’ hectic doings are collaged with snatches of Tom Swift and Hardy Boys books—the stuff of childhood filtered through an idiosyncratic sensibility that delights in disjuncture and improbability:

Kane was a righteous dude, heat-packing.
Cared not for right or wrong,
rode east, rode west. “Home’s best,” he smiled.
But indeed, where was home? Some place
under the sky’s petals, attuned to harmony?
He preferred the poetry of Charlotte Mew to that of Nathalia Crane,
sang in the shower while the radio poured discord
about not believing in the Bible, or in hell, more precisely.

Of course—in this poem titled “The President’s Dream”—Ashbery would meld a kid’s assessment of Kane’s manliness with a recondite reference to a pair of female poets. Hierarchies of all sorts, whether cultural or linguistic, dissolve in a narrative flow that combines and recombines source materials with assured equanimity; this is a voice that slides with ease among sentimental, analytical, and ironic registers, rarely snagging on an unforeseen bend. The very fluency of the “underground stream” persuades readers of the rightness of what otherwise might strike them as awkward or indecipherable.

In his foreword, the poet and novelist Ben Lerner thoughtfully addresses the question of the “unfinished” and recounts an anecdote about an Ashbery appearance at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in 1971. About to read his epic prose poem “The System,” the poet realized he didn’t have the ending of the poem. He reassured the audience: “If you sort of feel like leaving at any point, it won’t really matter. You will have had the experience. … I am disturbed that it’s incomplete, but maybe that’s good.” This wasn’t glibness but rather a fitting expression of his approach to composition and to interpretation; both processes are marked by provisionality, and the poet’s control over either is fluid and changeable. As Skillings discloses, “a poem that was an A on Tuesday could be downgraded to a B or even C by Friday.” During the week, did that poem appear more or less finished to its author? By what measurement do readers make that judgment? This isn’t to cast all evaluations as hopelessly subjective and therefore moot. It’s simply to recognize that barring the fact of that missing last page, or the author’s declaration about the state of the work, determinations about what’s done and done are variable—depending, maybe, on the day of the week.

One treat in Parallel Movement of the Hands is the selection of typed manuscript pages that include Ashbery’s handwritten revisions. In the second of two poems titled “Parallel Movement of the Hands,” a small yet significant change in the lines “pulling your house / and delusions with it into the stream” is discernible. On the typescript, the word delusions is written next to the crossed-out word decisions. The substitution is provocative. Every word in a poem requires decision, but whether that decision is correct may be a delusion the author indulges if for no other reason than to move on to the next word, the next line. Ashbery recognized the porous border between decision and delusion, between finality and its seeming appearance. This collection of unfinished works allows readers to tread that border as well.