william watkin's blog (since 2003)

A rare image of the elusive poet John Ash Not much if anything has been written about the work of UK poet John Ash. This is a shame. Along with Lee Harwood, he represents the successful export and development of New York School poetics intoa European environment. Which is not to say that he is also his own man. In fact the much mentioned similarities between Ash and Ashbery, the basis in some sense for this paper, are overstated. That said, here I am stating them. This was originally presented at the Symbiosis conference in UCL towards the end of last century. Sorry, couldn't resist the grandeur of that phrase. Like so many of my earlier works it was accepted for publication by Symbiosis only to be cut when the editors got chicken over using theory to analyse poetry. Ashbery's Fragment The beginning of dizain 3 of John Ashbery’s “Fragment” expresses the paradox of poetic edges: “This page is the end of nothing / To the top of that other” (Ashbery 78). The poem was written in a...

Conclusion: Koch's Seasons on Earth By way of a conclusion I want to consider three things in relation to Koch’s “Seasons on Earth.” The first is the nature of the edge of absence that Derrida calls the nonpassage, a paradoxical territory called death into which we cannot travel and yet simultaneously must travel both eventually, but also within everyday life. It is against this radical absence that all our structures of presence are constructed. The second is the paradox of the elegy which is a structure of presence to give a voice or an extra life to absence. And further how this is problematised in structures which are themselves elegiac, in this case New York School nonrational poetics. How can one deal with the presence of absence in a mode of expression that is itself structured through absence before presence? What is the poetic nature of absence dealt with through absence? Finally, the third issue is that of the text or what is left over after the damage of mourning,...

John Ashbery and Elegiac Edges Ashbery clearly articulates the relation between elegy, language, the wave, and his poetic practice in the crucial central section of “A Wave”: And as the luckless describe love in glowing terms to strangers In taverns, and the seemingly blessed may be unaware of having lost it, So always there is a small remnant Whose lives are congruent with their souls And who ever afterward know no mystery in it, The cimmerian moment in which all lives, all destinies And incompleted destinies were swamped As though by a giant wave that picks itself up Out of a calm sea and retreats again into nowhere Once its damage is done. And what to say about those series Of infrequent pellucid moments in which One reads inscribed as though upon an empty page The strangeness of all those contacts from the time they erupt Soundlessly on the horizon and in a moment are upon you Like a stranger on a snowmobile But of which nothing can be known or written, only That they passed this w...

Theories of Elegy Traditional theorists of elegy have spent a great deal of effort coming to terms with this and trying to theorise how elegy can even exist. Eric Smith defines the genre of elegy, in his book By Mourning Tongues: Studies in English Elegy, in terms of what all elegies should have: a lost beloved, a process of mourning, consolation, and a monument. One might add into this Ellen Zetzel Lambert’s sense of the importance of the pastoral which provides a place to mourn, [i] and Peter Sacks’ psychoanalytical sense of the origins of elegy within funeral rights and vegetation myths and their use of the “trope.” [ii] The “trope,” or replacement for the lost beloved—a wreath, their name repeated over their grave, an inscription, or a full elegy—speaks of the paradox of mourning which Smith also notes. [iii] The sign given in place of the lost beloved which actually, the theorists note, causes the loss to be doubled and doubly confirmed. The failure of the “trope” is pre...

Mourning and Melancholia in Koch and Ashbery What I want to try and do now is reconcile the pleasure of New York School aesthetics, their semantic attachments, with psychoanalytical conceptions of mourning and melancholia and more traditional literary conceptions of elegy. In Freud’s formulation of mourning and melancholia the two processes are indistinguishable up until a certain point. In both instances the subject lacks, or in this case has lack foisted upon it, and a process is instigated which Freud calls “reality testing.” Reality testing is the systematic withdrawal of the subject’s love from that which can no longer be loved and it is carried out, according to Freud, “bit by bit” in a manner which confounds him: Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged...Why this c...

Kenneth Koch's Seasons on Earth and Elegy Koch’s “Seasons on Earth” also opens self-consciously to exploit the paradoxes of the beginning of poetry: There is a way of thinking about happiness As being there at one’s side, so that one has but To bend or turn to get to it; and this For years I thought was true. Or that a basket Of sensual sensations brings a bliss That makes one as a winner is at Ascot. With Ko I had the first idea; the second (Some first one, too) went with the story of Papend. (Koch, Seasons 3) The textual source here, the much earlier poem Ko, refers to his original season on earth. Ko’s opening words are “Meanwhile at the university of Japan” (Koch, Seasons 23) which should open up for the reader of the much later “Seasons on Earth” Koch’s metonymic theory of poetry: the “first idea.” Again it is an issue of edges, the edge of the absent previous line and of the long narrative of Ko whose “meanwhile” places us in the middle between absence and presence, and, ...

Ashbery's A Wave and elegy “A Wave,” like “Seasons on Earth,” utilises a non-elegiac central trope to deal self-consciously with the presence of the elegiac at the heart of writing poetry. Just as Koch’s choice of the cycles of the seasons disallows any breaks per se, so the endless oscillations of wave motions don’t automatically guarantee Ashbery access to either the opening or closing edges that serve physically to delimit, and so define, a poem’s textual body. However, unlike perhaps the majority of his poems, “A Wave” does have clearly definable opening and closing semantic edges, as well as a rational relationship between the title and the poem proper. The title, as has been noted, not only conveys the central trope of the poem, which also occurs usefully in its middle, it also describes the structure of the poem which, John Shoptaw shows, consists of a tripartite process: the wait or anticipation of the wave, the maximum rise of the wave typified by the crest, and the wak...

This article stems from an unused chapter in my first book, In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell 2001). It was made into an article but it was too long for submission and I got distracted by life. The work then fed into my second book, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh 2004). Yet in fact none of the article was used in either book so that it remains both central and supplemental to everything I have done thus far. So hey here it is for the first time. A bit naive now but in the end even back then I was not so stupid. Oh, when I use the term nonrational I am using a Kristevan term that I now longer care for. I don't mean irrational or made but work which exceeds the generic dictates of thetic, so-called rational thought. The avant-garde in other words. Death in New York: The Edges of Elegy in New York School Poetry Paradox, scandal, and aporia are themselves nothing other than sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual ...