"Voyage in the Blue" Engagement #7
November 07, 2022
Koestenbaum: “Ashbery’s poems forgive the inner stoner. Never saying no, they extend a welcome to a theory of literature founded on altered, enhanced, narcotic ideation” (85).
I’ve had this mental image of John Ashbery in a sweater. More details: he has a quill, scratches out his stanzas on parchment in a craft office upstate. In short: highfalutin. Perhaps I should outfit him in a different costume, a decidedly more beat one. (Annoying) Bias limiting my aesthetic consideration to stuffier realms, I’ve neglected the psychedelic bent of Ashbery. “Voyage” is rather far out when it comes down to it. Incredibly well-rendered, almost garish imagery sits between pockets of cloudiness, of nothing (as has been discussed previously).
Consider: “The pageant, growing ever more curious, reaches / An ultimate turning point. Now everything is going to be / Not dark, but on the contrary, charged with so much light / It looks dark, because things are now packed so closely together” (11-14).
So much light it looks dark. That is indelible. There is incredible beauty and thematic heft to this image?/concept. It is also puzzling. The kind of thing you might claim to have experienced after dropping a tab, or at the least might puzzle over, pontificate on, then forget after burning one with the mates. Much of the poem could be read this way. Blissed out, passive, woozy. And also getting to the heart of matters in a way that’s impossible in day to day life, certainly in a great deal of writing. Take the poem less seriously. Consider the facets you typically overlook. “A single implication could sway the whole universe on its stem” (44). Think deep, magically. New possibilities are revealed. This is a directive. “Voyage in the Blue” is not a poem. It’s a trip.
At the end of a successful one, you feel better tethered to things. The world has new dimensions. The elliptical quality of time and all that…
Ashbery is a prism!