AA

Alteiri’s discussion of Ashberry’s work as emblematic of a mode that resists “the dream of a coherent and satisfying representation of the self, either as an individual or as someone in full possession of the terms by which he or she identifies with other people” is both helpful and intensely confounding: confounding because it elegantly articulates the difficulty of reading Ashberry as a problem of closure, “where there is no synthesis whose completeness is not a delusion,” where coherence rests not upon the reader realizing a totalizing intentionality, while wrestling with the desire to find one, but realizing that the self of Altieri’s speaker is always a transitional self, emblematizing a kind of permanent in media res, and helpful because it grants us license to view Ashberry with the particular freedom granted once we realize that the self of Ashberry’s poetry is not something to be divined through that same totalizing intentionality. Altieri is careful to entail this freedom though, implying that the terrain granted us once the reader is freed from digging with ax and pick to locate the poem’s Meaning gives us more rather than less responsibility because instead of portraying the self as merely confused, and easily dismissed, it allows Ashsberry to play ultra-realist, describing a way of seeing that intends to portray all possibility, by way of a more thorough form of mimesis, since the speaker as a kind of solipsist par exellence “can play all the functional roles in dialogue” positing a relationship between language, world, and self that sees the relationship as “somehow impossible, formed of so many things / Too many to make sense to anybody” and therefore more realistic in that the stance assumes that the concretizing powers of language and self are false (sorry for the long sentence here, but I’m not sure I can break this up). Ashberry then acts a kind of Dorothy among poets, pulling back the curtain to expose the real, real workings of the mastery of the poetic self as described by Yeats, highlighting the mode of the self as one in which mastery is not possible, where transition and absence are the primary states of being, highlighting both the intellectual rigor and the emotional pain of finding oneself always as being a form of absence, an absence that is always in transition (this sounds jargony but it means only that because we identify ourselves in relation to others that we are never ourselves because logically if one must rely on an outside relation in order to self-define then the meaning of oneself must always rest outside of oneself, in an other: this definition begins with Hegel). The emotional resonance in Ashberry then rests upon this self as lack, that when the self seems most stable is when it’s engaged in the more thorough delusion, which causes pain since the yearning is to be whole.