"Voyage in the Blue" Engagement #5
October 24, 2022
A read of Wayne Koestenbaum’s mini essay “John Ashbery’s Lazy Susan” has provided me some ammunition. It’s scattered, rather spur of the moment, but I’ve found some of his Ashbery takes to be energizing and instructive.
Koestenbaum: “Consider each Ashbery poem an instruction manual on how to spend time fruitfully by wasting it, by growing distracted, blurry, foggy, garrulous, horny, contrapuntal. Reading Ashbery, we enter a fugue state; polysemy (Polly Seamy) overtakes us.”
I wouldn’t deny a single one of those adjectives. “Voyage in the Blue” features bouts of incredible lucidity, where the language is airtight and the meaning not only seems clear but also of outsized import, almost mythologic. Ashbery becomes a cypher. I’ve cited such passages in entries past. But then there are sections of “Voyage” that even after an umpteenth reading (at this point), remain plainly indecipherable to me, steeped in haze. E.g., “We see it with our teeth…” (16). They are welcome digressions, the poem wouldn’t be the same without them, but they engage a different facet of my cognition.
I enjoy Ashbery so much because the reading experience is not uniform. In a perverse way, his poems are somewhat internet-like. With this statement I hang a lantern on my addiction, my Tik Tok addled brain. Anytime I open up the teleputer and inject 150 CCS of Wikipedia, Instagram, etc., I justify the dose as spending time “fruitfully by wasting it.” Traversing URLs, I have the potential to grow “distracted, blurry, foggy, garrulous, horny, contrapuntal.” Does “Voyage,” by being everything and nothing, feed the same receptors? A damning thought…
Koestenbaum has a thing for fugues, but I think he’s accurate here. I wander away from myself each time I enter the fracture that is this poem. I cherish my time on Ashbery’s boat. Is that enough?
Excavate the fugue!
Koestenbaum, Wayne. “John Ashbery’s Lazy Susan.” My 1980s & Other Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013.