"Voyage in the Blue" Engagement #10
November 28, 2022
Lucky me Ben Lerner is an Ashbery guy. He conceived of Leaving the Atocha Station in part as a vessel for interrogation of poetry as a form. Ashbery is an Adam Gordon fixture. He views him as somehow authentic in a field wrought with drivel. Ashbery relieves Gordon’s embarrassment, makes it okay to be a poet, take poetry seriously. In Ashbery, Gordon finds solace, a temporary unburdening of his ugly feelings. The release has something to do with the infinite temporalities of any Ashbery poem, how his poems allow one to “experience the texture of time as it passes” (Lerner 90).
And to be anyone. Ashbery muddies conceptions of self. Gordon is rendered indistinct. I am indistinct. It’s unclear how Ashbery does it: “Ashbery’s flowing sentences always felt as if they were making sense, but when you looked up from the page, it was impossible to say what sense had been made” (Lerner 90). The mechanics are imperceptible. It really is a kind of high-brow magic, what he pulls off.
Visiting “Voyage” this week, all meaning is lost. I key into a frequency, lose it, find it again, lose myself, become you, we, the past, the here and now of another paradigm, relive my own history, imagine history, and on and on. I bump against the textures of all this. I am nourished and confused. Another quote: “The ‘it’ an Ashbery poem seemed ultimately to refer to the mysteries of the poem itself” (90). Ashbery is no closer to uncovering the secret than we are. Or maybe he has, the grail under lock and key. Regardless, the poem embodies that search. It is a life’s work. Impossible. And therefore inexhaustible.
Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. Coffee House Press, 2013.