A review of John Ashbery’s Can You Hear, Bird (FSG, 1995). In fact, I have a long ago review at goodreads. I’ve elaborated on it further here.

One of the things I like about Mike Kelley’s art work is the commonness of his stuffed animals. I mean, yes, the stuffed animals are complicated because it’s a grown man handling them, and his handling makes them into an art. But just think of how everywhere stuffed animals are. Especially the real ones, that have been used, and “loved,” and worn down. Like there’s something so easy about a “cute face” or a cuteness that’s getting rubbed away. Like cute embraces mundane, and what’s that supposed to make you feel? I’d compare Can You Hear, Bird book with that feeling Kelley brings to his art. A feeling that’s about LOTS, like he uses LOTS of stuffed animals, so his art is populated by LOTS. Ashbery’s poems, on the other hand, don’t have stuffed animals. Just LOTS of objects and memories, and potential memories, and street names, and possibilities. Which he often resignedly accepts as a reality, whatever that reality is, ironically noting how much reality can be seen as LOTS, and then this poem can settle on a mere nod acknowledging LOTS. “There’s LOTS to contend with in the world, but I couldn’t fit that much of the LOTS in this poem.” That’s the general resignation of the poet here.

Living is like a long collection of mundane objects and memories. They’re tender distractions, or people willingly entertain themselves with them. Or there’s just this way that attention is paid to LOTS of only mildly interesting moments. They seem so important, or perhaps, moments like this are vaguely aware they’re detaining us from Philosophy or Abstract Ideas. And that can call into question what a meaningful life really is, then. I’d argue this is a running question for Ashbery’s book. But to say there’s a running question in the book mischaracterizes the nature of the poems. A “running question” would admit to a philosophy. And many of the poems are generally distracted by the moment they’re in the midst of. Read “Tuesday Evening” (a full use case for a poem where details overwhelm whatever might be for cohesion).

One of the challenges to life is knowing how to treat the mundane like it’s meaningless. Which is why I would say Ashbery is resigned to letting LOTS just be his life. These poems are very invested in it. Is it possible to out-mundane the mundane? Especially given other poetry from the 1990s (when this book was published), that was obsessed with giving meaning to the mundane. Make it a poetic hope. Make it a big reveal at the end of the poem. What I read in Can You Hear, Bird is an over-inventory of these mundane objects and moments just sitting on shelves waiting to be called up by poems. And in that Ashbery resignedness, there’s an implicit, “So why choose?” at play.

And as the book progresses, I find this inventory of poetic material expanding so it’s not just objects or memories from the poet’s life, it’s all the impressions that exist around him, everything he can imagine in his life or others, and there’s a running complication of that “why choose?” sentiment. Maybe the poet feels like he should choose, because of who he was with, or he was in London, and anyone would tell him he should be choosing from London. And I don’t think it’s a great revelation to relate Ashbery’s poems to Affect Theory, but I will here. But specifically in that way affect influenced whatever might populate poems in Mary Jo Bang’s Louise in Love (Grove, 2001) or Brenda Shaughnessy’s Interior with Sudden Joy (FSG, 1999). Like both those books feel like chronicles of excess, the poet subjected to so much excess (excessive sensuality, excessive social possibilities), and how is there supposed to be a language that simultaneously navigates it and articulates it? And, for emphasis, add one more question mark to that previous statement. That’s how I hear Bang and Shaughnessy working this out. Ashbery, however, is always so observant, or observational, and resigned. Like reading his poems, I feel like he knew he’d be subjected to this excess all along. Maybe he struggled with it in the past. But now that he’s got around to writing a poem about, he can occupy this “why choose?” sentiment.

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