480
PARTISAN REVIEW
That swarm around the sleeper's head
But are fended offwith 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.
Very much a "performance," these lines buoy us between phrase and image
in a motion resembling the compositional gestures of a Frankenthaler paint–
ing until, arriving at the predicate, syntax tells us we are home. Our tour is a
guided one; we can relax and enjoy the scenery, secure that we'll arrive at
our destination, wherever it might be, however different from our
expectations.
In "City Afternoon" it's that cluster of beautiful images in the closing
lines: those
Gray garlands, that threesome
Waiting for the light to change
Air lifting the hair of one
Upside down in the reflecting pool
Our pleasure here derives from the superb handling of the line and even
more from the pleasant discombobulation of having our vision twice
reversed in the final line, first with "Upside down" and then with "the re–
flecting pool," whereby the images in the photograph keep being re–
arranged, our perspective repeatedly shifted as in our expeience of
life
itself.
Frank O'Hara once described his poems as "I do this, I do that"
poems, Ashbery's poems are "I am this. I am that" poems. Most
poems are a crystalization of experience : we
move
from a reading of the
poem to a rethinking of the poem on
some
deeper
level.
Ashbery's poems
move
on their deepest level, the
level
of the experience out ofwhich they are
made. Thus, we get a lot of high dudgeon from
some
of Ashbery's critics,
since in a sense there's nothing
to
talk about after reading an Ashbery poem
-nothing, that is, to explicate . But thus also one of the great excitements of
Ashbery's work-our sense of participating in a voyage of discovery as we
momentarily inhabit the poet's journeying awareness.
We take a more expansive journey in "Voyage in the Blue," a poem
that refers us back to "Definition of
Blue"
in
The Double Dream o/Spring.
In that earlier poem, the poet constructed a fictive "Blue," an essential
metaphor, "a medium/In which it is possible to recognize oneself." But
the effort
to
achieve self-recognition in the upper regions of the imagina–
tion failed: resulting
