A Moral Responsibility?

To the Editor:

I am pleased that Alexander Theroux, in his review of my first five books of poetry, recently reprinted by Ecco, finds occasional “rich” and “singular” virtues in them, as well as “masterful poems” and “fabulous” and “incomparably lovely” lines (Book Review, Aug. 3). And I very much like his remark, “In Ashbery’s poems, we are given a life we have to face and must look to so with grace.”

I’m also pleased that when Theroux doesn’t like my poetry he lumps me with “the likes of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Strein, the queen of tautology, and yam-in-the-mouth Charles Olsen, a total fraud, and Louis Zukofsky of whose uncircumscribable poem ‘A’ critic Hugh Kenner once admiringly pronounced, ‘Critics will take a thousand years to solve it’ . . . he meant this as praise.” For me it is a high honor to be associated with this list of great modern poets (and, elsewhere in the review, with John Berryman, apparently another of his be^tes noires), though only the queen of tautology has influenced me very directly.

Theroux goes on to say that certain works of mine that he considers “impenetrable,” like theirs, are “nothing less than irresponsible.” In my case: “for a writer to write codswallop? Jabber? . . . can become nothing less than infuriating, I would even assert it is morally indefensible” (italics mine).

I have probably written my share of codswallop, though I’m not sure what it is--like slumgullion, perhaps? Another excellent word. And jabber, yes, I’ve been guilty of that too. But my point is that Theroux’s article, while ostensibly a review of my early books, is really about his rage at certain major 20th century writers and about his notions of the moral responsibility of poetry, both of which emerge there only as the tip of the iceberg. Rather than trashing Stein, Pound, Olsen, Zukofsky and Berryman en passant, it would have been more enlightening for the reader if Theroux had outlined the nature of his case against them a little more amply, then and only then dropping the shoe of the morality issue. (“Yam-in-the-mouth” simply won’t do as a summation of Olsen; perhaps he has him confused with Karen Finley?) I for one would have been interested to learn why a writer of Theroux’s stature has it in for a handful of America’s great modernist poets.

John Ashbery, New York

Alexander Theroux replies:

There is not a word in my review that did not speak directly to either Ashbery’s fine poetry or various other incomprehensible doodles of his which he has the whim, even if I do not, to call by the same name. I am unaware of shooting at any be^tes noires in my review of his books other than those who practice the crapulous and farcically self-defeating act of offering bad or half-made work under the guise of serious poetry to be pondered, when it remains in fact impossible to be understood. It is apparently for my presumption in condemning such bumph that Ashbery accuses me of “rage” and of having some sort of interest to declare. “Great modernist poets,” he implies, should be above such criticism, although how the writer of the following lines from “Idaho”

“Carol!” he said. Can this be the one time

????????????????????????????????????????

Biff: The last Rhode island reds are

“diet of hamburgers and orange juice”

I see into the fields of timothy

one

the others time

change

, , , , , , , and they walked back,

small hand-assemblies”

can presume to call upon anyone to clarify or outline the nature of anything is beyond me. I only ask the reader to take Ashbery’s own measurement by that for which he blames me and to which, in his letter, he takes exception.

Willful obfuscation in a writer is completely indefensible simply because, like jealousy, it mocks the meat it feeds on. It is the ugly matching bookend of that other moronism, the greeting card verse of simple-minded hacks. I have no more truck with the doggerel of Rod McKuen, Maya Angelou, etc., than I do with Charles Olsen, who was incapable of writing a lucid sentence, or Gertrude Stein, who flunked her English literature courses at Harvard.

Obscurantism is morally wrong precisely for the lie it tells in the pretense of coming forward with the truths it simultaneously--and always posturingly--refuses to divulge. Alexander Pope in “The Dunciad” only inadvertently made oblique references to contemporaries we today would never know, had not scholars filled the void by research. Henry James’ “The Bench of Desolation” has always been a hard nut for me to crack, much as I admire the man and, in that and certain other stories of his, I find myself impatiently rattling the book. I remain bewildered by passages of Meredith’s “The Egoist” and chapters of Doughty’s “Travels in Arabia Deserta” and far too many poems in Pound’s “Cantos.”

Is it a perfect world? It is not. And poets are among its bravest inhabitants. While I believe a good bit of incomprehensibility in a poet is often the result of attempted flight rather than of sheer ineptitude, a good deal of it is caused by the vice of intellectual snobbery and the assumption that whatever one writes is good, what Robertson Davies once referred to as the “shame of brains.”

It is clear that Ashbery, who accepts my compliments but refuses my cavils, is the one who betrays his art by abusing it and not I, who criticizes him for it. Asking for integrity in a poet’s work is “trashing” him? How can a poet of such byzantine contrivances miss my homely truth? Who should know better than he the moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of calling gibberish “poetry” or nonsense “modernist”? We have evidence he is able to write a simple line. What kind of modernist mind do we need to understand “Once I let a guy blow me. . . .” as he writes in “Poem in Three Parts” or, “Was there a note of panic in the late August air/because the old man had peed in his pants again?” as he pointedly asks in “As You Come From the Holy Land”?

Only a fool would try to insist that poetry be easy to write or easy to read. No one who treasures such poets as Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, as I do, can possibly fail to acknowledge the unavoidable fact that difficulty increases with candlepower and vision. An incoherent poem is, nevertheless, no more tolerable than a drunkard’s rant, except that it is more disgraceful. Ashbery himself would seem to confess to what Yeats called the “fascination of what’s difficult” when, speaking of handling vision, he writes in “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” from “Shadow Train,” “before you know/It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.”

I would like to answer the question that Mr. Ashbery disingenuously asks as to why I “have it in” for certain poets. It is the result of nothing more than the healthy refusal to be had by them. My ambition is not that hacks stop writing or that they stop publishing, but for anyone to try to fob off twaddle as poetry, without criticism, is another matter entirely. May I request that Ashbery do me a favor in return? Only explain for me why there are, respectively, precisely 40 question marks and seven commas in a row in “Idaho” and whether using, respectively, 39 and six would have ruined the meaning of that, um, poem.