"Voyage in the Blue" Engagement #1
September 19, 2022
I’ve been schlepping around Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror for most of my college career. With the dawn of each semester comes the trying process of paring down the New York bound stack of books to a manageable weight. Self-Portrait always prevails. If it were any thicker, perhaps that’d change and I’d have a different affective artifact entirely. Ashbery is a great comfort to me. The volume doesn’t insist upon itself. I’ll go months without giving it a thought. But when I for some reason need poetry, to the extent that anyone can need such a thing, Self-Portrait is there, even if only for a line or two. This in itself is a comfort. You can digest an Ashbery stanza without feeling bad about neglecting the larger body it resides in. His poems are ethereal, their linguistics complex, but they are not erudite. Ashbery is gentle and unassuming. You are invited to enjoy, to interpret if you so please, but he is not demanding. The few obligatory profiles/interviews/etc. of his I’ve read are permeated by a self-consciousness, as the title of his masterwork might suggest. His process involved the engagement of his unconscious and the natural world. But see he wasn’t keen on process questions, demurred when prompted to pontificate on the act of creation. He was an occasional recluse, mostly unperturbed (though not arrogantly so) by how his work was received. I dig all of this about him. But I’m somewhat unsure then, about how to best approach my prolonged engagement with “Voyage in the Blue,” the poem I’ve selected out of Self-Portrait for its title (immediately striking, I mean come on) and its manageable length. You don’t spar with an Ashbery poem. A critic himself, he eschewed explanation, dissection. I align him with Sontag in my mental schema of writers/thinkers. So for now, I’ve elected to adhere to her tenets. Appreciate “Voyage in the Blue” for what it is and the components that make it so, not for what it might be trying to say. So then for first contact (in the context of this project, I’ve read this poem before): I am soothed, as I tend to be by Ashbery. The lines cascade and I’m privy to fractals of imagery. I finish and feel recalibrated. No resounding meaning beyond that. And that is good. I am once again most taken with lines 51-55:
Perhaps all that is wanted is time.
People cover us, they are older
And have lived before. They want no part of us,
Only to be dying, and over with it.
Out of step with all that is passing along with them
…I’m not sure why. Yet.