william watkin's blog (since 2003)

Today I posted the last parts of both my analysis of Daffy Duck in Hollywood and my chapter on postmodern poetry. These were part of a submission package for a book-length study of postmodern poetry for students but for various reasons the publisher and I could not see eye to eye, I think they felt me too daffy and I not even daffy enough, events occurred and I decided that although we need a proper introduction to postmodern poetry I was not the person to write it. I am now working on a different project on postmodern poetry as exemplary of what I call the poetics of incommensurability. Am left with this material which I think is good but perhaps not publishable in a journal so for now it finds a home here.

Note: this was to be the second chapter of a book on postmodern poetry of which the sections "Postmodern Poetry" formed the introduction. Immanent Moments of Numinous Duck Geist Cohen’s description of the ambiguity of Ashbery’s critique and simultaneous consumption of mass cultural products is not only the most accurate analysis of this poem, it is a profound insight into the relationship of postmodern poetry to postmodern culture. Yet, for every moment of ‘low’ cultural revelation, the poem has at least equivalent numbers of ‘high’ art insights, and I don’t mean references to opera or plays by Maeterlinck. The poem, as much as it is about culture, is also about being. The very act of stating that Daffy is in Hollywood suggests he also has a life elsewhere, which is both impossible and true at the same time. Daffy reproduced on screen, as he must be due to the material demands of celluloid film, is not limited to Hollywood. [i] Daffy has a private life in that he lives in ou...

Subjectivity and Hollywood Ashbery’s highly developed rhetorical strategies are designed less to prove his craftsmanship than to confront the naturalised rhetorical mediation of all forms of experience. This is Perloff’s point, that postmodern prosody is a type of avant-garde insurrection in the halls of the poetic institution. The other side of the critical fence in relation to postmodern poetry concentrates less on its materiality and more on its interventions on subjectivity and everyday discursive practices. A lot of work has been done in consideration of Ashbery’s take on the postmodern problem of subjective uncertainty, both because his poetry often openly addresses this issue and because his poetry causes us to question his and our own subjectivity. John Koethe grapples with this idea in relation to the presence of the poet’s voice in the poem, so recognisable and yet so hard to pin down: But even though Ashbery’s work embodies the presence of a particular psychological ego,...

Words Words Words I have already provided a detailed analysis of the disruptive strategies of referentiality and allusion used in the poem, but words are also utilised here in more positive ways. Postmodern poetry does not just question the materiality of the signifier, it also innovates that materiality in semi-utopian gestures of how signification might operate away from the hegemony of communication, exchange and transparency typical of contemporary rhetorical stances. Ashbery loves words. Let’s go back to the last quotation and note the number of strange words and phrases he uses here, words that you may never have encountered before, at least not in a poem, at least not all together: Anaheim, riot act, Etna-size, firecracker, jock-itch sand-trap, asparagus, algolagnic, nuits blanches, cozening, micturition, Tamigi, Skeezix. Why was it that you never met these words in close proximity like this before? Well, the more cynical might suggest because they make no sense placed toget...

Wait…How will it end?, Lineation Once inside the poem we are lost, the title being no use as a detailed guide. In addition to which, the poet seems intent on taking the communicative certainties we have, those of expressive seriality, concatenation, causality, referentiality, syllogism, and difference, and exploding them before our very eyes. Take the following section as typical: “Up The Lazy River, how happy we could be?” How will it end? That geranium glow Over Anaheim’s had the riot act read to it by the Etna-size firecracker that exploded last minute into A carte du Tendre in whose lower right-hand corner (Hard by the jock-itch sand-trap that skirts The asparagus patch of algolagnic nuits blanches) Amadis Is cozening the Princess de Clèves into a midnight micturition spree On the Tamigi with the Wallets (Walt, Blossom, and little Skeezix) on a lamé barge “borrowed” from Ollie Of the Movies’ dread mistress of the robes. Wait! I have an announcement! [i] One of the central laws of p...

Arise Sir Daffy Duck, Titles The establishment of authority in the poem echoes the same process in all aspects of life and is political in this regard. This also includes the author as some form of authoritative presence. The title is usually where this imposition of power begins. The semantic domination of the title over the poem is represented semiotically by its placement above the poem, spatially and, usually, typographically differentiated. In the penguin edition I am using, the title DAFFY DUCK IN HOLLYWOOD is capitalised, a good four or five lines above the rest of the poem, and in a larger font. Why does this matter? As Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann have argued in relation to textual and hypertextual materiality, the conditions of the production of the work are always the result of certain material conditions inherent to a culture and a technology. [i] The title suggests, in a meta-narratological fashion, first that the poem has a single theme, and second that the poet wan...

An introduction, analysis and guide to reading John Ashbery Daffy Duck in Hollywood His Strange Materials, Materiality and Heterogeneity While postmodernism undermines predominant dialectical patterns such as form and theme, object and subject, the usual pattern for the reader of postmodern poetry is to deal with the material challenges of a work, before then placing these challenges within some sort of wider, thematic appreciation. Therefore, in the second half of this chapter I want to first look at the materiality of postmodern poetry, before tackling its essential thematic base, which is a reinvention of the subject. In the first instance, however, I want to replace the concept of form with that of materiality. Form presupposes a static coherence of matter into a structure and while coherent structures exist all over postmodern poetry their status is contingent and their purpose to attack formalism. In addition, there is one central element of materiality which needs to be foregrou...

An introduction and guide to reading John Ashbery Daffy Duck in Hollywood Postmodern Elusive Allusion “Daffy Duck” shares with The Waste Land an allusiveness which serves to better differentiate the issues of reference and contextual legitimation within modernism and postmodernism. The many sources of the poem have been tied down by John Shoptaw, in particular in a long footnote to his main analysis. He reveals, for example, that La Celestina was a sixteenth century play by Fernando de Rojas, “I thought about you” a Billie Holiday song, Amadigi di Gaula a Handel opera, Hellen Topping Miller a lesser known novelist; that greige is a combination of grey and beige high quality paper, and the Gadsen Purchase land in Mexico bought by the US in 1853. [i] Perloff has also followed these allusive pathways in search of some kind of context only to conclude, correctly, that they do not help much: “For example, even when we know that the source for ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’ is Chuck’s Jones’ cart...

An introduction and guide to reading John Ashbery Daffy Duck in Hollywood Legitimate Contexts of Reference, or the Lack of them Moving away from a basic consideration of postmodern form as figment not fragment, perhaps the other key difference between modernist and postmodernist practice concerns not so much how the parts internal to the poem connect and cohere, but how the poem can be integrated into a wider matrix cultural discourse. This matrix is strictly regulated by a number of core values relating to individuality, community, emancipation, value and power. We call this matrix the Enlightenment tradition and as Habermas argues we use it as the background against which we establish the legitimation of all other acts and values. The values engendered by this tradition are those universal ones of humanity we cherish so much in our art and our democratic governance. Indeed, in terms of postmodernism in all its manifestations, it is the threat to humanist value systems posed by postmo...

An introduction and guide to reading John Ashbery Daffy Duck in Hollywood From Fragment to Figment “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” was written in 1975 and published two years later as part of the highly regarded collection Houseboat Days. It is a long, apparently disjointed poem dominated by a wide variety of different discursive voices all competing for the reader’s attention. It has no clear theme or structure, and purposefully defies summary, but basically it begins with Daffy reflecting on his plight, moves through considerations of high and low culture, before ending with an imposed lyricism which may or may not resolve the issues to hand. The often quoted and exhaustively analysed opening of the poem has a daffy Ashbery launching into a cacophonous symphony of rampant signifying that one might compare to a form of verbal dioarehha or haemorrhaging, or to switching channels on the radio or TV: Something strange is creeping across me. La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars Of...

An introduction and guide to reading John Ashbery Daffy Duck in Hollywood Outwork This is the most complete guide to reading John Ashbery's "Daffy Duck in Hollywood." It relies on all the available scholarship to date. At the same time it is a first attempt at establishing this work as the archetypal postmodern poem. As such it is a detailed introduction to postmodern poetry. It alos compares an archetypal postmodern poem with and archetypal modernist poem, Eliot's The Waste Land to show differences between modernism and postmodernism. Introduction: Some of the finest Donald Duck t-shirt in our time has been written in poetry. [i] Is it possible to choose a favourite or, Enlightenment style, define the very best based on assumed, communally held conceptions of value? People around me are always asking what I am working on and when I tell them postmodern poetry they say oh, what’s that then, and I pause to reflect, often for a very long time indeed. I think, wouldn’t i...