Wakefulness

by John Ashbery

Early in the title work of Wakefulness , Ashbery "Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me." Progressive awakenings occur in all of these poems. As we read, each of our senses is engaged, and we come to detect a search for spiritual revelations--in buildings, churches, homes, trains, and cars. Then suddenly we find ourselves back in the open, pursuing the course to Baltimore and Bucharest, to the zoo and the park, to the past and future. As ever, Ashbery's wakeful digressions are wily, comic, heartbreaking, and vertiginous.

Genres: Poetry

79 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1998

About the author

Formal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).

From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.

Reviews

[Flo · Rating 2 out of 5]

What could I tell you? I couldn’t tell you any other way.
We, meanwhile, have witnessed changes, and now change
floods in from every angle. Stop me if you’ve heard this one,
but if you haven’t, just go about your business. I’ll catch up with you
at the exit. Who are the Blands? The second change was perhaps
nothing more than
the possibility of changes, one by one, side by side, until the whole
canyon was carpeted with them. Nice. Summer, it said,
ever rested my mind. Something occurs everywhere then,
an immediate engagement with the atmosphere
we’d like to have around, but it was big, then, and obvious,
and oh, this is for your pains. No, really. Take it. I insist.
...

from "Added poignancy"

There's a review of this book that made me smile. It genuinely conveyed its message: I have no idea what the @#$%@ this guy is talking about. The objection was frank, straightforward and without the silly need to please another reader, to apologize because you didn't like it. Same thing when you love something the other didn't so you unfairly diminish the book's strengths to please the other party. That deserves a deep sigh.

I mentioned the other reader's review because I had a similar reaction to most of Ashbery's poems. I'm usually looking for meaning behind verses that are probably meant to be a linguistic experiment rather than the expression of a particular feeling, mood, point of view, etc. Perhaps, it may happen that the experiment also evokes a familiar image, something we can relate to if we get passed the rigidness of literality. However, one has to have the time and willingness to find it. Even without the poet's actual intention for us to find this or that meaning, what is not directly expressed and therefore can take many forms under different lights.
The connection with this book wasn't strong enough to induce me to search further. If you ask me now, I don't remember a single line; I stopped caring very soon. Nevertheless, I have another poetry collection to try.

But I was coming to that,
doing the mystifying.*

No doubt.


Feb 17, 19
* from "Alive at every passage"
** Later on my blog.

[Liz Mc2]

I generally like poetry I can make some sense of, but sometimes I enjoy the challenge of something more deliberately opaque and avant-garde that challenges my need to have things make sense. Ashbery definitely provides that. Poems like the flow of consciousness, changing direction from one clause to the next, a mix of high/low culture allusions and language. Here’s the start of one I started reading to my husband as an example of how these poems frustrate sense-making, and then I found myself saying, well actually, I can kind of see some connections here:

The Laughter of Dead Men

Candid jeremiads drizzle from his lips,
the store looks as if it isn’t locked today.
A gauzy syllabus happens, smoke is stencilled
on the moss-green highway.

This is what we invented suburbs for,
so we could look back at the lovable dishonest city,
tears clogging our arteries.

There’s some kind of journey here (a highway, a syllabus), though the route is perhaps unclear or hasn’t been travelled in a long while. Maybe. I love this image of the suburbs!

Frequently frustrating for me to read, but I got what I came for!

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Ashbery is very difficult to write about and I don't think I'm the first to say that. I don't know why he's this way. Bloody PoMos. It's not through stylistic excess or an untangleable chaos of signification. I always seem to enjoy him but it's again difficult to say how exactly this works - talent oozes from him though the form doesn't seem revolutionary on the face of it. Perhaps I need some biographing or perhaps just further exposure anyway he'll be back soon

[Ross Williamson · Rating 3 out of 5]

030520: quarantine buddy read #5 with keagan! neither of us finished or understood it.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

"LAUGHING GRAVY

The crisis has just passed.
Uh oh, here it comes again,
looking for someone to blame itself on, you, I...

All these people coming in...
The last time we necked
I noticed this lobe on your ear.
Please, tell me we may begin.

All the wolves in the wolf factory paused
at noon, for a moment of silence."

I tried to read Wakefulness by John Asbery. Book #96 of 182, 79 pages, finished 7/9/2017.

Rating: ??? / 5

Wakefulness is a book of confusing poems.

Okay, we're going to use this book review for a chance to rant.

The rant is simple: I have no idea what the @#$%@ this guy is talking about. The poem I quoted above, entitled Laughing Gravy, is utter nonsense to me. Every single, EVERY SINGLE poem in this book sounds like the one above. I don't get the title, I don't understand how the stanzas are related, I don't understand why wolves work in a wolf factory.

Worse off, when I looked at the dust cover, it says Asbery won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for another book of poems. WHAT?!

This book must be a giant troll, a cosmic confluence to simple show how simple-minded and utterly non-creative I am.

Or maybe it's some magic style of poetry I haven't ever heard of.

Or maybe it's supposed to be nonsensical, and I just need to roll with it.

I have no idea. I could do some digging, but bleh.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe it's too late.

Maybe they came today.

[Mark Vanner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I walk out over the moors, the hills, the sand valleys.

My head is listless. The wind is scrubbing the stars.

Yet I don't detonate. There is too much land behind me.

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't like this at all.

Here is a poem that is as representatively good or bad as the others:

"Tenebrae"

For a little snow you get your asking price:
the Ace of Wounds, star of tubs, brushfires
from there to here like an afterthought,

and this suddenly not all that you willed it to be.
We marched in different directions.
Once a week there's a very big field day.

Plant two skyscrapers. Then the moat will be less
unexpected. It's coming round to you again;
indeed, it dances. And in this starting to be something

something disappears, but a shine prevails.
And they don't pay attention,
and they don't pay attention, that's all I can say.

See what the prisoners of war are all about.
How close are you? Rocks seep into the night
and the clay gets the attention it deserves.

We build and build our shadow-pulpit,
then seize morning when it comes,
in chirrupy stride: names of the lost ships,

lasting until today, until nostalgia sets in. We're home
in what passes for a city in America (are the streets

laughing at us?). We can't drive yet,
or even walk.
And one is given the run of the land.

That do anything for you?

[Nikita R · Rating 4 out of 5]

picked it up and knew immediately i was out of my league, or so i thought. Stephanie (then Stephen) Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense has a wonderful essay on Ashberry that helped me understand how to approach these poems. a lot of it has to do with keeping away from all the allusions, and instead focusing on what each poem evokes for you. there’s a wonderful play between dreamlike imagining and sober resolution. so much potential and return in these works

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this for a grad school course in poetry. Ashbery is an egotistical ponce.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comic, elegiac, and puzzling, and marvelously startling in its many digressions and juxtapositions.

[Minhaz]

"Later I'm posting this to you.
I just thought of you, you see, as indeed I do
several million times a day, I need your disapproval,
can't live without your churlish ways."

[Tess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very simple worded but beautiful sound

[Jak Merriman · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Mikael · Rating 4 out of 5]

probably will be nowreading this for a while like i do other ashbery books. i love the late ashbery, the little scattered explosions of poetic observations/observations of poetic things (eg, 'someone had an urge, a whim/and lightning began there.') inbetween druggy sentences that are strange coming from (in this one) a sixty-one-year-old man.

update: read it. cover to cover. btw, this is a good place to start on understanding ashbery http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/...

[Rob the Obscure · Rating 4 out of 5]

!*#@$%&!!!!....er....huh?....WOW....um....uh....My god! That's gorgeous!....999999...WHAT? SAy WaT? Oh...ARRGHHH!...DAMN!...Yeah...yeah...!

[Mills College Library]

811.54 A8198w 1998