Listen to "My Philosophy of Life" on www.poets.org, And Tell Me If I'm Wrong (I'm Being Sincere)

I am not sure that I could have understood Ashbery without the Altieri article. I did not need Altieri to help me see the “logopoeia” in the poems. Pound defines “logopoeia” as “’the dance of the intellect among words.’” “It employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play.” The “dance of the intellect” is apparent in “Decoy.” The first line of the poem is an example of what some people consider postmodernism—lifting something from the past and using it with irony. We do not expect a poem to begin with the first words in the Declaration of Independence, nor do we expect the following lines—“That ostracism, both political and moral, has / Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things—“ to share the Declaration’s tone of optimism and certainty. Of course, the lines do not actually share that tone; they are meant to be ironic.
I could not, however, recognize the commentary about modernism and the scenic style in “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” and “Metamorphosis” without Altieri’s help. I do not think that Altieri is reading his argument into the poems. Most, if not all, of the poems have lines and passages that might have come from an academic lecture. For instance, consider these lines from “No Way of Knowing:” “But difficult to read correctly since there is / No common vantage point, no point of view / Like the “I” in a novel.” This could be an excerpt from Perloff’s analysis of Rimbaud’s prose poem.
Altieri knows that some people probably “consider Ashbery [as] representative of only a decadent philosophical surrealism and of the kind of poetry that becomes important because it gives academics something to write about” (139). He responds to such criticism by arguing that Ashbery’s poems have as much affect, or emotion, as the poems of Stafford et al., but without the faux sincerity. I am not convinced. I do not see the “lyric emotion” that Altieri finds in “No Way of Knowing.” The first two words of the poem, according to Altieri, are “a muted yet anguished cry of belatedness” (140). Like the other “lyric cries” that Altieri mentions throughout his reading of Ashbery’s poems, this one is too muted. I do not feel any anguish. “Muted” is the right word for these poems. Their sounds and rhythms are rather unremarkable. Every now and then, I hear something interesting. “On angry screen-door moment rushing back,” for example, has an urgency. No “the” appears between “On” and “angry.” Also, the “door” in “screen-door” makes the third foot of this ten-syllable line a spondee—just the kind of loud interruption you would expect in a line about an angry exit. But, for the most part, I had to read these poems with my mouth shut. The occasional noises distracted me, and I needed to focus all of my attention on the intellectual “rhythms” and “polyphony.” Ashbery can start a good dance of the intellect. He may, as Altieri argues, “recove[r] Stevens’s and Pound’s sense that poetry must be excessive, must achieve sublimity by its scope of attentions” (151), but, unlike Stevens and Pound, he does this by divorcing sound from sense. The “late Victorian” (read “old fashioned” and “uptight”) Eliot knew what he was talking about. Like him, I enjoy poetry with an emotion I can hear before fully understanding, not poetry with an emotion I can only hear by fully understanding. Moreover, I have been routing around in some the latest scholarship on the high modernists, and I have found that their relationship with “low culture” is a little more complicated than Altieri makes it out to be. Of course, in the 70s, the high moderns were still tied to the whipping post for their elitism (the lashes for Anti-Semitism, fascism, etc. were deserved).