>John Ashbery's "Attabled With The Spinning Years"

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“Attabled With The Spinning Years,” The New Yorker Aug. 11/18, 2008

            It seems foolish to explicate an Ashbery poem; they are famously, purposefully amorphous, concerned much less with meaning-making than with, as he once put it, the experience of experience, quixotic in its own right.  Nevertheless, we should be able to look at any poem to see what the heck it’s doing, even if little can be made of it.

            “Attabled With The Spinning Years” begins with nonsense: Attabled.  The closest real word I can find is astable, which means to confirm, which remains unconfirmable as a proper definition for attable here.  As for The Spinning Years, they are questionably old age, as in the years a spinster has entered, but who can say for certain?  To further complicate things, the poem’s opening questions have various as of yet unrelated grammatical subjects, the first of which—“it”—lacks an antecedent: “Does it mean one thing with work, / one with age, and so on? / Or are the two opposing doors / irrevocably closed?”  Readers must perform shifty footwork to keep up; the lines have us guessing and wondering, which is a good thing, albeit unsatisfactory if we look, or assume we should look, for proper answers to these questions.  If we expect to land sure-footedly onto them, we can be disappointed.

            The questions themselves—the first four sentences of the poem and five total in the first stanza—are rhetorical in nature except…they’re not rhetorical questions.  It’s as though they purport an argument that isn’t actually being made, that at the very least isn’t yet known, as though we’ve dropped in on the speaker mid-conversation.  It is their tone, not their implicit and known answers, that creates the rhetorical stance, that creates the notion of something where there is actually nothing, causing this reader, at least, to stop and consider them.  And that’s powerful poetry—anytime a poet can get a reader to stop and pay attention—hard enough to do when he isn’t being abstruse.  What binds the first stanza together are images and notions of time.  We have “Years” in the title, “age” in the second line, and numerous other such language that divulges the poem’s subject, including a bit of clearer imagery as the first stanza culminates with autumn: “Surely that isn’t snow?  The leaves are still on the trees, but they look wild suddenly. / I get up.  I guess I must be going.”  This admission is interesting because it comes in response to what has become a rhetorical scene, that of the snow and the about-to-be-leafless trees.  As a consequence, the rhetorical quality of the stanza is solidified, and it becomes clear the speaker has been speaking to himself.  The questions, if he can answer them, can only be answered intuitively by the body.  They have no verbal response; the response is get up and be going.

            The second stanza begins with an abrupt turn of previous phrases.  Rather than pose a question, Ashbery uses a sentence fragment: “Not by a long shot in America.”  And what can we do with it?  Two things: one, we can branch out from the speaker talking to himself about himself largely in the context of himself to the speaker becoming a piece of something larger than himself, a piece of something he now, like it or not, represents; two, we can infer that the body’s answer to autumn was wrong, that it should not be going anywhere but should learn to adapt more aptly to staying put.  This is the comment of the second stanza.  Like the first, dotted with references to time’s relentless forward mobility, the second contains images of permanence, particularly “modern buildings [that] look inviting / again” after a century has passed.  The final lines make me think of plastic surgery, one of America’s—the world’s—many devices for stopping the clock if not, in theory, turning it back altogether: “God’s…scalpel redeems us / even as the blip in His narrative makes us whole again.”  So, one little deviation in the master plan, and our subversive one becomes whole again.  We’ve foiled the natural course of events for the better, human course.

            As with many Ahsbery poems of disassociative associations, “Attabled” is difficult to hold together line by line, brick by brick.  It wanders subjects, contradicts itself, repudiates comments and gestures.  But, like good free jazz, it still maintains a central line, though perhaps not a focus, around which images and ideas spin.  There is a concept in there someplace.  One other way Ashbery helps us see the concept is with sound.  Like much of his work, “Attabled” is acoustically playful, the play is more than just that.  While some phrases fall flat, others are rather rhythmically graceful, which helps readers focus on those moments that may be key.  After nine lines of more or less arrhythmic language, he writes “…and such.  The almost invisible blight / of the present bursts in on us.  We walk / a little farther into the closeness we owned.”  The ghost of a pentameter is there, and it’s pleasing, given the previous passage’s atonality.  And, those lines are contextually important.  They are the first assertive gestures the poem makes, grounding the poem’s central problem, that of time and of the present’s ever-increasingly observable encroachment on our very finite eternity.

>Louise Glück's "Before The Storm"

>“Before The Storm,” The New Yorker, 8.4.08

“Before The Storm” is a consistent Glück poem: the tone is subdued, almost flat; the diction is sharp but simple; and, the sentiment is forebodingly dangerous. What makes it different than much of her other—really of her earlier—work is that the “I” and “you” often so terribly present is more or less absent here; in fact, the speaker remains anonymous, though clearly she’s intimately knowledgeable of the scene. The “you” remains equally anonymous. As a consequence, “Before the Storm” works on a much less personal level than many of Glück’s other poems. Her distanced observer, however, makes the poem no less intimate.

The story, here, is that a big storm is coming, something on par with a hurricane, and that it will last “perhaps ten hours all together” after which “the world as it was cannot return.” We have myriad signs that the storm is approaching, that it will be devastating—the world will be changed, we can sense the tempest from a distance, which suggests its magnitude—but we do nothing to heed the signs. Or, perhaps we notice the signs, but they reach beyond the fail-safe point: nothing can be done except weather (pardon me) the weather.

The storm in the poem remains vague enough to become a stand-in for many, many other things, and with my environmental leanings, it’s difficult for me not to read the poem in the chic fashion of the Green Movement. The first line stages a typical (dare I say American?) perspective, complete with a near total lack of foresight: “Rain tomorrow, but tonight the sky is clear, the stars shine.” Well, whoop-dee-do! As long as the world is right, as long as the Heavens shine brightly on we believers, then little harm can come to any of us. But, as the poem continues in lines two and three, “Still, the rain’s coming, / maybe enough to drown the seeds.” Lack of foresight or not, we’re in for a long night. As with much of the poem, these line are tonally honest and brutally straightforward, even boring in their way, which heightens the drama of the conflict without becoming melodramatic or waxing poetic. There’s a definite schism between content and tone, and the result, for me, is fear.

Other details heighten my anxiety for the poem’s pastoral landscape and beyond. Not only are the seeds, which suggest spring and new life, about to be ruined, and thus the future crop and all that would follow (food, money, next year’s seeds, etc.,—cascading repercussions), “the ram, the whole future” is missing, “tomorrow there’ll be blood in the grass….dawn won’t come…the world beyond the night remains a mystery.” These are portentous forecasts. There’s potential for rack and ruin, here. But, while the storm may be unavoidable, the poem heavily implies it could be better endured by paying attention and heeding warnings—“[t]his far from the sea and still we know these signs”—than it will be. Eden is about to be sacked? Let’s avert our eyes to the stars’ eternal beauty and pretend nothing’s going to happen. It reminds me of the last moments of the isle of High Brazil from the cult classic Erik the Viking. As the island is sinking, Erik (Tim Robbins) pleads with the island society’s king (Terry Jones of Monty Python fame) that it is, in fact, only seconds from being submerged along with the king and his people. Jones replies with something to the effect of No, it isn’t; no, we’re not.

Another image that stands out is that of the mountain, which “stands like a beacon, to remind the night that the earth exists, / that it mustn’t be forgotten.” To use a mountain in a poem is to use an image laden with context metaphoric and otherwise. A mountain is an impasse. It is, or has been, home to many gods and goddesses. Reaching its top, acquiring its glory, is a crowning human achievement, a sign of our ability to conquer the unconquerable forces of nature. It is a symbol of hope for humankind, which can do anything if it can rise even higher than the mountain. Glück gets good mileage out of the image in each of these ways. Interestingly, the human element does seem removed here. The mountain “reminds the night that the earth exists,” that it, not humankind, must be remembered. The moment is cold and detached, and the image is apropos not just for the nature of nature, which is not necessarily cold but is certainly indifferent to human desire, but for the poem’s equally cool tone. When the mountain element recurs, it’s presented in strong contrast to the human element: “One by one, the lights of the village houses dim / and the mountain shines in the darkness with reflected light.” Something will persist; something will endure. But, it will not be the village, at least as we’ve come to know it.

“Before the Storm” is built with a variety of sentence-types and line lengths, which heighten the writing’s tension. Some of the sentences stretch across two lines and their verbiage to the right-hand margin; others are fragments as short as two words, lines as short as four. The effect is a stilted rhythm. The poem lopes along and then stops, saying pay attention, which seems to be what it’s all about. After all, “The night is an open book” Glück writes in the poem’s penultimate line, “[b]ut the world beyond the night remains a mystery.”

Well, an inevitable mystery, yes, but not necessarily one for which we cannot prepare ourselves. If only this was in our nature…

>Kathryn Starbuck's "Ancient Anecdotage"

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“Ancient Anecdotage,” The New Yorker Aug. 04 2008

I have next to zero knowledge of Kathryn Starbuck save for two facts: she is the widow of the allegedly slightly-overlooked poet George Starbuck, and she didn’t start writing poetry until some time after his death in the nineties.  Since then she’s published one book and is forthcoming with a second.  With the exception of “Ancient Anecdotage,” I have read nothing of her work and so cannot place the poem in context of her other work (which may not particularly matter, though to me it seems that it should).

“Ancient Anecdotage” is a skinny poem of roughly thirty-five lines of roughly two beats per line, though it lacks a particular rhythm or count of any kind.  The line breaks are all pretty ruthlessly enjambed, and the poem runs quickly, but choppily, down the page as a result.  It’s made of two sentences in its entirety.  The short, first sentence begins with a brief prepositional phrase—“As a former / and future / child, …”— and the long, second with a similar-sounding, strange sort of interruptive determiner—“But / Poor Richard, his almanac of / …”  The sentence continues to the poem’s end mostly by stringing itself together with subordinate and clauses, which effectually lead readers step-by-step to its conclusion without giving us the option of wandering off.  We’re just hauled along, clause by clause.  Each thin line rapidly forces us to the next thin line without offering much in the way of a complete idea, which also adds to the poem’s quickness and the reader’s need to continue zipping along with it.  To acquire any real sense of completion and coherence, you have to keep reading, you have to stay focused, and you have to keep it all in your head until the poem’s final word.

This manipulative gesture on Starbuck’s part makes “Ancient” stand out from other fragmented poems.  Often the fragmented poem is at least coherent at the level of the fragment: it may be equally enjambed with “Ancient,” but the fragments themselves are complete thought units—they simply don’t create a sum that is greater than its parts.  Often it’s the opposite: meaning is lost on the grander scale while it’s contained in and maintained by the disjointed microcosms that destroy it.  “Ancient Anecdotage” differs here in that the fragments themselves don’t add up to much.  You have to read the whole poem to get to…the end of it.  The poem is only partially associative in nature, which aids it in this regard, and there are no true leaps in image, diction, or tone—leaps much contemporary poetry, especially of the fragmented kind, relies on.

Nevertheless, the poem makes a distinct comment on our poetry-of-the-day: lyricized intellectual truth in, narrative experiential personalia out.  Starbuck writes that though Poor Richard’s “ancient / anecdotage / was still in / pretty good / shape,” his comments for day-to-day living had dulled into “a steady / palaver of what / where when and / why.”  The once almighty journalistic questions (and their answers) are now examples of “perseveration / and failure.”  It’s as though Richard’s life has become the tedium of (bad) poetry and, thus, bad reading.  And really, who cares about what happened to Poor Richard on such and such a day and how—or why—he applies it to me via his anecdotage-laden almanac?  So what if he has a good story to tell, a fable to share?  What do I care if his penis was nearly nibbled to death by piranhas, as suggested by the poem’s ending?  How does that represent me and my individualized mode of thinking, which is not poor, male, etc., etc.?

Modern American poetry has been inundated with the confessional and quasi-confessional mode for fifty plus years; it’s bursting with ancient—as in outdated—anecdotage, and Starbuck’s piece makes one wonder about current trends.  Still, one advantage of the narrative is that it appeals to the gregariousness of human nature.  When we gather at the water cooler—virtual or otherwise—we don’t speak to each other in non-unified, associative imitations of our neural networks.  We swap stories (albeit sometimes solely at the sentence level) and talk to each other.  More and more, the fragmented poem of the fragmented poet of the fragment universe is talking to herself,  Perhaps the Poor Richards of the world are doing the same thing by telling stories so they can hear themselves speak, so they can boil experience down to a few pithy maxims they feel should be shared with the rest of us.  Poets undoubtedly should resist that urge.

My last word about “Ancient Anecdotage”?  It doesn’t advocate necessarily the new or the old style.  Simply it says the old way has failed, as all old ways are destined to do.