[Continued from: “American Sonnets (Part XV: Some Sonnets)”]
Ashbery’s second book The Tennis Court Oath, published in 1962, contained “Two Sonnets” too—directly after “America” and a few poems removed from “‘They Dream Only of America.'” (Blur your eyes, and there are American Sonnets in the Table of Contents.)
TWO SONNETS
- DIDO
The body’s products become
Fatal to it. Our spit
Would kill us, but we
Die of our heat.
Though I say the things I wish to say
They are needless, their own flame conceives it.
So I am cheated of perfection.
The iodine bottle sat in the hall
And out over the park where crawled roadsters
The apricot and purple clouds were
And our blood flowed down the grating
Of the cream-colored embassy.
Inside it they had a record of “The St. Louis Blues.”
2. THE IDIOT
O how this sullen, careless world
Ignorant of me is! Those rocks, those homes
Know not the touch of my flesh, nor is there one tree
Whose shade has known me for a friend.
I’ve wandered the wide world over.
No man I’ve known, no friendly beast
Has come and put its nose into my hands.
No maid has welcomed my face with a kiss.
Yet once, as I took passage
From Gibraltar to Cape Horn
I met some friendly mariners on the boat
And as we struggled to keep the ship from sinking
The very waves seemed friendly, and the sound
The spray made as it hit the front of the boat.
(Note “Dido’s” thirteen lines: “So I am cheated of perfection.”)
And then, there’s “At North Farm” which opens A Wave, published in 1984. Though this sonnet doesn’t announce itself in its title, by this point in Ashbery’s trajectory, perhaps, his readers have come to look for the ghosts of tradition:
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?
Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?
In a review at the time, Helen Vender wrote that this was a “poem at once so ordinary and so literary that we read it with a pure transparency of understanding . . . No pleasure is sweeter in the ear than something new done to the old. Ashbery’s deep literary dependencies escape cliché by the pure Americanness of his diction.” Her review, as his book, opens with the subversive sonnet and remains preoccupied with Americanness, focused on “his campaign (of course, not only his) to write down the matter of lyric in the idiom of America,” noting that he “has taken his Americanness in part from Gertrude Stein, who turns up in various agreeable echoes.”
A few years back, Ben Lerner said, “Some of my favorite words written about John Ashbery were written by John Ashbery about Gertrude Stein,” quoting at length from a young Ashbery’s 1957 Poetry review of Stanzas in Meditation.
I certainly hear Stein in Ashbery, not foremost the Stein of her satirical sonnet embedded in “Patriarchal Poetry”—but that Stein too.
Ashbery’s interest in the (American) sonnet continued into this century; his “Lost Sonnet” was published in The New Yorker in 2009: “You tracks are alive with new interest. // The trail always sees what’s up ahead, / which is resistance.”
[Continued in: “American Sonnets (Part XVII: An American Sonnet By Any Other Name)”]