Flow Cart + indulgence + what happens when I try to read a 200 page poem
This is a reviewish paper I had to write for a Forms class, but I’m posting it because it’s helping me continue to get through Flow Chart, which I’ve been slowly and uncomfortably reading between other books. But I graduate today, and thus is the end of ’senior week’ and the complete set of debauchery and ridiculousness that is inevitably coupled with it. Apologies for the self indulgence of applying the reading to my own work, which I doubt anyone has read. If anyone has any resources to help me get through Flow Chart it would be much appreciated. For the rest of the summer, this blog will be used mostly to review new books and practice being in conversation with poetry.
Flow Chart interested me because it was recommended, I believe, after I wrote a poem called “white elephants,” which deals at length with the fluidity of time. Flow Chart is expansive with many elements that I think “white elephants” begins dealing with; for one, it is probably one of the longest poems I’ve ever written, whereas John Ashbery’s Flow Chart is a book-length poem. The form interests me for its great length and also for its erratic style: the length of lines are usually long, although it tapers and wanes throughout the course of the book. With a book as long as Flow Chart, Ashbery’s poetic voice and section breaks must contribute to the push outward or else he will lose reader interest, and I wanted to see how he sustains his flow and push throughout the course of the book, in hopes to later emulate it in some way. I was also interested in reading John Ashbery because of his reputation with the New York School poets and because he is constantly being mentioned and compared to in reviews of contemporary poetry. There must, then, be something universal or at least something gleanable from reading Ashbery, even though my previous experiences with him did not make him any more accessible. While I was in Spain, I took a class that required me to read his Pulitzer Prize winning Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and it was not very pleasurable. Reading Ashbery’s Flow Chart is my second chance at Ashbery in a more relaxed and less academic setting, to see if I could stomach him when he wasn’t being forced on me.
Flow Chart, although it is one long poem, is broken up by Ashbery in several ways, which creates discernible sections that can be digested piece by piece, and also makes all the text easier on the eyes. It is first divided up into six numbered sections, and within each section are breaks signified by the § symbol and also by stanzas. For the purpose of this essay I am focusing on poetry out of the first numbered section. As a stream-of-conscious poem, Flow Chart focuses on the continuity of time (to be reductive), and I like to look at it as a microcosm for Ashbery’s psyche, or as an open window into his consciousness. Though I am reading it from cover to cover, I can see how Flow Chart can easily be picked up from any point (perhaps a highly academic form of bathroom reading) and is representative of his experiences modified by his academic background. The example I would like to discuss is chosen because I think it’s a good access point into Ashbery’s writing (and again, I need to practice formating on wordpress.com because the poem doesn’t look quite like this):
It’s the lunatic frequency this time. One man, taking his kids to the ball
game, reverted and was found playing cards at a friend’s house. In spring the tips of
the apple branches graze the trailer and it’s time for a new round
robin of progressive delicacies and returned thank-you letters. Out in the open
by the gym it was never a question of keep your pants on we’re all getting someplace, getting
to be someone. Those were perspectives too limned to shoot along and the people thanked
the baseball player who invented them. Inactivity is as a syrup to these people, some of them,
they bank on mistrust and in the end are amazed to find their land has been overgrazed
by herds of yak, each of the quadrupeds spaced almost equidistant from its nearest neighbor…(36)
Throughout the first section of Flow Chart, Ashbery goes pronoun wild. He constantly refers back and forth between you (directly addressing the reader), you (addressing a persona within the book, sometimes a lover, other times it’s hard to figure out who he is addressing), and then he, she and it. Since this excerpt signifies the first part of a section marked off by §, the first line was particularly significant because it locates the reader by indicating to us the “frequency” of the section, as “this time” indicates the “frequency” was different. Thusly, it comes the lens with which I read this section of Flow Chart; it is as though Ashbery is guiding the reader through experiences and examples, which is markedly different from completely immersing us in the experience, or in a list of imagery.
The form of this excerpt of Flow Chart is provocative because of Ashbery’s choice of line breaks. Ashbery’s abundant use of of long lines is good at generating momentum and keeping the reader at a pace that mirrors a sprawling consciousness. In this section, the lines that spill into the next indented section gain significance because they stand alone. The best example of this is “overgrazed,” which was troubling imagery in the context of its line and the entirety of the section. The best connection I could make to the overgrazing yak and the “mistrust” of some people is a reference to capitalism. If capitalism is a system based on mistrust (i.e.: the idea that no services will be rendered if there is nothing to gain from it), then the yak imagery, for me, transforms into a picture of New Jersey suburbs and shopping malls, especially because the yak are “almost equidistant” and the word “quadruped” linguistically connotes squareness (quad), which leads me to think “house.” Ashbery, in this light, creates a rather unique picture of the typical American suburb as a congested herd of houses unconcerned with space and spreading out over time.
Perhaps relating a herd of yak to American capitalism is not such a stretch because Ashbery mentions baseball very early on, a sport that definitively calls America to mind. Lines that I thought were both syntactically and conceptually provocative in this section deal with an imaginative baseball player: “Out in the open by the gym it was never a question of keep your pants on we’re all getting/ someplace, getting/ to be someone.” I like this line because of Ashbery’s use of unusual syntax but also because it is an important theme throughout the book. In Flow Chart, Ashbery continually references the ebb and flow of time (calling to mind the title), keeping the reader aware that experience or knowledge forms and constantly augments personalities (again, Flow Chart itself becomes exemplary of this idea because the reader constantly augments his or her perceptions about Ashbery’s persona by internalizing his perceptions and experiences). The sexual experience is the catalyst for the formation of individual person, and the line’s sexual concept and the maturation-of-the-psyche-through-experience concept are conjoined and artfully played upon by Ashbery through syntax.
The next line qualifies and contributes humorously to the previous line by unveiling the sexual act as a fantasy told by the baseball player. Ashbery has a very convoluted way of saying that the “people,” who are perhaps fans or consumers, are able to tell that the stories are embellished because they “were perspectives too limned to shoot along.” The listeners understand the story’s fictional nature but are still entertained and augmented by the experience of hearing it. Formally, the long lines again act to highlight and make important the words “people thanked,” and because those words stood alone, it was obvious that the “invented” experience was a positive one, otherwise they wouldn’t be thanking the baseball player. This seems like a sort of commentary Ashbery is making about the nature of this group of people, though I am on the fence as to whether it is positive or negative criticism. In one way, I see Ashbery saying that absolute truth is relative and unimportant, rather it is the internalization of experience and events that contributes to the formation of the person (i.e.: thinking about what they heard). In another way, these lines are coupled with the line about mistrustful capitalists, saying perhaps that most Americans care only about being entertained by things like baseball and fanciful fiction, and not about the realm of truth and other such deep, academic topics. To make an educated guess based on what I think Flow Chart’s aims are, I would like to judge that Ashbery believes the fault of the “people” is not that they enjoy the baseball player’s embellishments, but that they are “inactive” after they internalize them.
Although John Ashbery’s prosaic poetry in Flow Chart is sprawling and vast, he never loses sight of the common threads. What I found useful so far is his careful attentiveness to the central goal, even though the poem is of a great length. In a longer poem it is easy to digress and have entire sections of poetry become irrelevant although nice-sounding, and Ashbery’s skill is evident in that connections are easily made between nearly all the images and concepts working in Flow Chart. His language never seems too outwardly complex or syntactically convoluted, but he makes the best of each word, and it often takes several reads to unravel even a shred of meaning despite their surface simplicity. I find the fact that Ashbery manages to maintain the stream-of-consciousness throughout Flow Chart to be his most ambitious accomplishment–we are truly looking into Ashbery’s psyche because Flow Chart is a composite of nearly infinite experience, especially because the reader will never be able to fully imagine what Ashbery intended, and so everything is further augmented by the individual reader. Ashbery balances line length with section breaks to make reading Flow Chart possible; without the visual and numerical breaks reading it would become a much greater task, and I find myself continuously thankful that Ashbery gives us units to digest one at a time. The long lines are also important to the form of Flow Chart–they contribute to the tone and the stream-of-conscious feeling, and their windy, long nature alludes to the title of the book.
