"Voyage in the Blue" Engagement Introduction
September 19, 2022
In a John Ashbery poem, the ‘it’ is the poem itself. Details: I am exhausted. It is raining. Every John Ashbery poem is about John Ashbery sitting down at his desk to write a John Ashbery poem. Apparently it’s easy for him. It’s almost a little silly, how he puts on some music, has a drink maybe, picks up the pen and sometime later, there’s a poem. “Voyage in the Blue” wasn’t and then was, Ashbery left unscathed in the process, save for the depletion of ink. This is a myth. Perhaps there is pain in the poet’s studio; the poet’s home, cathedral, tomb. The poet channels the language, shapes it; amends, supplements, excises. There is discomfort and violence at each of these stations. Discomfort and violence are required. Ashbery’s project is the pain, the process, yet he defies its rules, his products somehow effortless.
‘John Ashbery’s Lazy Susan’: “How hard does an Ashbery poem work? Very hard. Not hard. Call it the Lazy Susan Sublime” (Koestenbaum 84).
I entered this engagement with a self-mandate to ignore context, to meet “Voyage in the Blue” without pretense, accept what it is and is not. I soon abandoned that rigor and have since come to view the poem as beside the point. It is not a calcified text. It seems to reference, in addition to its own writing, all that Ashbery has written and has yet to write. It means everything. It demands your full attention, your senses. It also wonders what you’re doing here. And what it’s doing here. Inner monologue: I’ve drifted into a kind of Ashbery discourse bingo. The realm of the meaningless. Move this along. Contradictions and defiance. These are the pillars I’ve arrived at. Ashbery is a renegade on the council of the establishment. I’ve become way more interested in his process and his status as a kind of mythic figure. These considerations are of supreme interest and they’re bountiful. He invites you to love poetry, to explore its many rooms. And he (here we go again) is the form’s greatest critic. He shines a clinical light on its trappings, failings. I am a figure in the boat. I am of the poem. Suspended again. It’s frustrating, this feeling of being checkmated. It’s ugly? I return again. Bon voyage!