A Spoonfull of Poetry Month

In the name of National Poetry Month (I wish we didn't need one, but oh well), I'll be spending the bulk of my time here writing about poetry. Since I'm a big fan of close reading, I think I will approach a given poem of my choosing thusly. To do so, I'll pull from new and old at random or at my whim, unless some readers have suggestions.

In this installment, I'll be reading "Uptick," by John Ashbery, which appeared in the March 2009 issue of Poetry Magazine (and so is accessible to all you lovely readers).

"Uptick" begins mise en scène [ed: actually, en medias res, with apologies to confused readers] with its theory of time given over a social setting, a fact indicated at the beginning of the second stanza when the speaker brings the poem (or the discussion at hand) "back for a few hours to / the present subject, a painting." It's a common device in Ashbery (Houseboat Days, I believe, employs the same device), and as a result of his wide influence, it is featured in a good amount of contemporary American poetry — in this case, though, it is only a slight game of bait-and-switch: there are logical reasons, within the context of the poem, to begin with his theory of time.

The painting at hand is described, "half turning around, slightly apprehensive, / but it has to pay attention / to what’s up ahead: a vision." The dynamics of the speaker's mid-scene theory on time is extended and applied to the imaginative space of the painting and its relation to real space, and to the imaginative space of the speaker's mind, and the description is both perhaps the content of the painted scene but also a relation of the viewer more than dovetailing with the art viewed, with yet another piece on the beyond of the art — "a vision," which might be a reference to the inspiration the painting gave to the speaker.

It was then also appropriate to begin where the poem does, since, according to this theory of time, "Waste is virtually eliminated." Once is constantly in the middle of the act of being in time: there is no in-between or outside of the passing moment. This creates a level of irony to the poem. Ashbery is playing a game of mirrors: just as one is never outside of time, it can be said that one is never outside of imaginative space — he is aware of his influence and the internal logic of this poem is a nod to those who find his work inspirational. Hence, "poetry dissolves in / brilliant moisture and reads us / to us. / A faint notion. Too many words, / but precious."

As in so much of his late work especially, Ashbery's poem here is dense and ironic, with several layers of reference. The language, though, is almost entirely rhetorical. It is certainly a crafted piece of rhetoric: the first line of stanza two begins with and ends with "to," creating a rhetorical tension in lines 6-7 whether the preposition would hang on the end of the first line or begin the next — the former formulation leaving the clause on a line of its own, granting it more weight and a verbal stutter-step; the latter gives a clarity of reading and completeness of phrase and rhetoric. Both are only so effective for the device of the first line in that stanza.

The only description given in the poem is of the painting "half turning around, slightly apprehensive," and the ambiguous poetry solvent of "brilliant moisture," perhaps to lend weight to two pieces of the logic puzzle that seem apparently unconnected (except in their arrangement in the poem itself). Given that it is a short poem, a meta-textual poem, in which the poet uses the poem to refer to his own status, one is surprised at the sparse and prosaic choice of diction. It may be an appropriate mode for the social context of the poem's setting, but it remains ineffective for me as a poem. It is too rhetorical, too constructed like a long riddle. Once the puzzle of reference and meaning is solved, the poem gives little else for which a reader might return.