PAR TIS A N REV lEW
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That swarm around the sleeper's head
But are fended off with clubs and knives, so that morning
Installs again in cold hope
The air that was yesterday, is what you are,
In so many phases the head slips from the hand.
The problem Ashbery sets himself in his adventurous and restless poetry
is the description of the journey through "so many phases" of this
alternately hopeful and despairing self. But there are many Siren
calls on the voyage of description and definition: the dangerous en–
crustations of history and language, ritual and habit, are omnipresent,
and often omnipotent, in Ashbery's world. In one of the best of the
"defining" poems, "Definition of Blue," a defenseless-sounding voice
begins the poem trapped in the very cliches and platitudes that make
significant definition all but impossible. Not only the world, but we
ourselves are inhabited primarily by platitudes and abstractions of reality.
Moreover, the poetic counterparts to public cliche provide no effective
resistance. As the voice wearily and wittily reminds us, the "new" ima–
ginative reactions to conformities are "all of them ... in constant use."
"The most that can be said for them further" is that by continual ero–
sion of the worn cliches and metaphors, we can arrive, at least momen–
tarily, at a central, essential, defining metaphor (the "Blue" of the
title ) : "a kind of dust or exaggerated pumice/ Which fills space and
transforms it, becoming a medium/ In which it is possible to recognize
oneself." Notice the rather frantically extemporized "originality" of that
initial image. It's as if Ashbery calls attention to his own originality
only as he watches it dissolve. He holds to it only in the interest of the
other images it might support - in this case the fragmented, fugitive
self which might inhabit the defined "blue."
But that self is itself a cheat, yet accepted as such with grace and
inquisitiveness: it is "A portrait, smooth as glass ... built up out of
multiple corrections/ And it has no relation to the space or time in
which it was lived."
It
is a bit of suspended animation, less real but
for the nonce more desirable than those "chasms of night that fight us/
By being hidden and present." But the dissolution of the projected
and fragmentary portrait is inevitable. And so there is a return to a
drearily quotidian and impoverished self, since there is nothing to sup–
port the imagined portrait in space except the imagination of the blue
medium which, because it eludes "final" definition, eventually vanishes,
"while, you, in this nether world that/ could not be better/ Waken
each morning to the exact value of what you did and said,/ which
remains." "Definition of Blue" is a truly fine poem and in its high in-
