Book Review: Flow Chart, by John Ashbery

Is it self-indulgent? Is it plain mad? When I was a boy they told me I was hermeneutic, and this was meant to dissuade me. Well, eat this; yet another installment of:

Ryo's Annotated Bibliography

Ashbery, John. Flow Chart: A Poem. New York, NY: Noonday Press, 1991.

A book length poem divided into six sections, just over two hundred pages, this is an intimidating work, not only for its length but too for its density and breadth. I'm not sure you are going to find a work that comes anywhere near Flow Chart in terms of variability of tone, image, narrative, diction, allusion, subject, etc. Anything is possible in this poem. That being said, I do feel some overarching comments can be made regarding both theoretical and rhetorical structuring. Ashberry embeds things multiple times within themselves, but what he ultimately returns to is discursion, a frank, questioning tone objective in its perspective and quick, always, to examine both sides, rebutting itself, though the reader has to pay fast attention to where he or she is at, as Ashbery will of course, unannounced, slip into an entirely different realm of concerns. This is not to say that this is the most fragmented, associational text you'll read, however. Ashbery allows large chunks of development, staying centered around a theme, scene, or narrative—and in larger swaths more fundamental concerns will linger. The effect is like wandering through a series of drastically different rooms, different in terms of size, color, strangeness, concreteness, mood, music, etc etc. But, sometimes the walls are solid, and sometimes they only appear solid, and sometimes there are no walls at all, just varying areas of light. All of this makes it extremely difficult to pull out an overarching concern, but one does seem to glimmer forward, which is established by the gesture the poem makes of decentered inclusivity. Ashbery allows a kind of ?breathing space? for any and all perspectives of the world, the commingling of which, in its constant flux, makes up the body of his own perspective, on a global scale, the perspective of the poem as a whole, ?And these marginalia—what other word is there for them?—are the substance of the text / by not being allowed to fit in.? (p. 37). However, Ashbery also recognizes, in an almost Hegelian way, the need for an overarching truth, an actual ?something? rather than the ?something something.? The fact that this absolute cannot be found leaves the speaker at times hopeless, though he argues against this hopelessness for what can be salvaged. In more specific terms, the poem is concerned with itself, its success at communication while maintaining democratic (i.e. inclusive) principles, which, in some ways, are a response to a failure in communication:


Everybody must vote. Everybody's vote must be accepted into the

tilting radio tower that is collapsing in one's own best interest in one

dark swoop of mingled horror and relaxed apprehension: to accomplish

anything more would be a joke. (p. 38)


Ashbery is pointed in his commentary: this inability to communicate, the ruination of the radio tower, while it might be fundamental to our human condition, is furthered by our own social and individual dispositions and our subsequent behaviors. We lack a vigorous response to our own undoing, our horror is ?mingled,? and our apprehension ?relaxed.? He is most pointed, I think, toward corporatism and consumer culture, evident by the title and approach of the poem as a flow chart, but also seen in local moments throughout:


[…] utopias can crumble

in that split-second, and you may wake up finding you have more than you

ever wanted to own,

but by that time the dream is falling in on itself in slow motion or someone

is dismantling it. (p.48).


Ashbery, of course, speaks of a Jeffersonian utopia, but I think the notion has deep, alternate implications throughout this text. He is largely cynical about utopias, though toward the final pages he invests himself in a developed vision:


Thus, all things would happen simultaneously and on the same plane, and

existence, freed

from the chain of causality, could work on important projects unconnected

to itself and so

conceive a new architecture that would be nowhere, a hunger for nothing,

desire desiring itself. (p. 200).


Asbhery's utopia is not agrarian but physical, astronomical and atomic and philosophical—a unified field, ?simultaneity,? the effect of which, it seems, might be an end to ?desire,? even, nostalgia for desire (which, perhaps, undercuts the utopia). It appears that what prevents us from achieving this is the ?chain of causality,? the flowchart itself, which requires of ?existence? constant attention to its own preservation. Unfortunately, we are only afforded the chain, existence is always under threat, so that whatever moments of truth that come to us come as phantasmagora, like invisible stones one can only see because they've been shat on by birds, invitations in the mail to the gluing of the top of a mountain back on, or better yet, comes to us ?here and there, if only in the gaudy hues of the diaphanous wings / of some passing insect,? and yet, there is hope, as the speaker continues, that ?that is enough, however, to send the scribes back to their tablets.? (p. 113). Thus, Flow Chart, for me, becomes about what we can salvage, what might still have value in our hyperreal and overabundant world. Certainly the implications are for the self, and Ashbery is most beautiful when closing his work, addressing the self. It seems, even as we are being constantly shut out of any significant understanding of who we are, we have a predilection to always try and work our way back in, to,


[…] live up to that image of ourselves as it gets

projected on trees and vine-coated walls and vapors in the night sky: a

distant

noise of celebration, forever off-limits. By evening the traffic has begun

again in earnest, color-coded. It's open: the bridge, that way. (p. 216)


This has certainly become one of my all time favorites. Flow Chart 4-ever!

Blooming Doomsday

With the world ending and all it's getting harder and harder to write for posterity. Global warming, nuclear proliferation, the Doomsday clock going Daylight Saving Time, and other pressures on our existence, are creating an inhospitable environment for the writer who hopes to be appreciated by readers of tomorrow. From the look of things, by tomorrow there won't be any readers. But if by the grace of a strengthened Kyoto Protocol there are still literate people alive you can be assured these privileged survivors will be too busy looting, drinking, smoking, crying, sobbing, sun-bathing, praying, and freely fornicating to bother curling up in the passenger seat of an abandoned Mercury Mountaineer with your dense and highly literary book. They won't have time to read the novel's footnotes when they're living out the footnote of human history. Without posthumous fame and appreciation is there even a reason to write?

The short answer is no. The long answer is no I don't think so. The answer is strongly influenced by the criteria of the question. It's my opinion one should never write for posterity. For one thing, you'll never see any of that money. And only the very devout believe, as some religious texts claim, God reserves Heaven's best seats for writers, where they can, without obstruction, observe later generations of readers increasing their posthumous fame. Observe, however, that these books were all written by writers, many of whom were likely considering their own posthumous fame in writing that passage.

It's with some anxiety, then, that certain literary writers observe the end of human life. In situations like these sometimes all that's needed is a change in perspective—the proverbial frown inversion. With the decimation of the planet comes an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to refocus one's literary efforts. While not a novel idea, perhaps writers should reconsider the aesthetic whims of the living. There is much to be gained. Money, for instance. You can still address the big human issues affecting us today. War, famine, greed, these are still viable subjects. Add one thing—a hero, who, with a little bit of wit and a measured amount of muscle, can overcome the big bad blank. Envisage an actor who might play your hero. Tom Hanks is good. So is Tom Cruise, but not so much. Consider carefully because you'll get more money if your book's made into a movie. Videogames might follow. At night, you can nestle your sleepy head in the nooks of the embossed title of your latest thriller. And do not worry about that other quote from the holy book "Lay not up for yourselves literary treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal." Moths have been genetically engineered away from book consumption to use in ethanol production. Metals are for missiles and only the most desperate of thieves would rob a bookstore.

Another option might exist. The hyper-literate indulges the intellect and the bestseller boils the blood but what pricks the space between these two? It won't be that which hatches elaborate plans or bullies others with a shaking fist. It's a kind of literature that shows its reader that life is present beneath the surface of facts and rising sea levels. This kind of literature proves, by eliciting an elusive tremor in that place not intellectual and not excitable, that our experience of life exists only marginally within the knowable world. There is a whole other margin, and by writing in it, there is some profit.

Nabokov, a victim sometimes of his own intellect, provides an incomplete definition of this writer—"A creative writer, creative in the particular sense I am attempting to convey, cannot help feeling that in his rejecting the world of the matter-of-fact, in his taking sides with the irrational, the illogical, the inexplicable, and the fundamentally good, he is performing something similar in a rudimentary way to what…" The editor notes that at this point two pages are missing from Nabokov's manuscript. But in a moment of inspiration, he finishes the paragraph with this later fragment—"under the cloudy skies of gray Venus."

Perhaps the future isn't bleak ... just a little overcast. In the end we've still got love and beauty, and we can walk hand-in-hand while we learn the ins and outs of this new planet.

Two blank pages between then and now. Time to start writing.

Interview Project #7: Simone Muench

The first poet I saw read their own work was someone I can't remember. But the second? The second one I do remember. I remember colors: reds and greens and girls' dresses and other things I'm sure I'm remembering wrong. I remember grittiness: the kind where there's dirt and blood and dry flowers hanging by a window. I remember fingers (or was it one finger preserved in a jar?). I remember all of these things like some irascible collage where words turned into images and images into words and everything rubbed up against everything else. I remember, for the first time, noticing the spaces within a poem and how things act/react in the spaces they share. It was fantastic. It was revelatory. It was Simone Muench.

Simone's most recent book, Lampblack & Ash, was winner of the 2004 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. In her introduction to the collection, Carol Muske-Dukes writes that the poems "speak to the reader like high-speed oracles." Oracles indeed. Go read.

Simone also has a chapbook (Notebook. Knife. Mentholatum.) at one of this interviewer's favorite presses, New Michigan Press. And last I checked, you could find yourself a copy of her first full-length collection, The Air Lost in Breathing, at Abe Books.

A number of Simone's poems can be found at various places: DIAGRAM and Glimmer Train and Poetry 365 and The Melic Review and new stuff (those orange girls) at Three Candles.

There are also some interesting reviews and interviews and chats out there for you to gander: here and there and there and here. And you can read a variety of informative and amusing and noteworthy snippets from Simone at Sharkforum.

And so.

What are you working on these days? Any work coming out in the near or semi-near future?

I've been working on a manuscript called Orange Girl that will be released in chapbook form in July from Dancing Girl Press, run by the multi-talented and tireless Kristy Bowen. I hope to extend it to a full-length manuscript. The term "orange girl" historically refers to girls during England's Restoration period who sold oranges at the theatre. Selling oranges was often a euphemism for prostitution. All of the titles are extracted from the OED circling around the word "orange"; for example, "The orange-girl is generally allowed to enter an auction-store, for auctioneers are mortal, and sometimes eat oranges."

The series initially arose out of a collaborative exercise I did with poet Kristy Odelius. We exchanged 20 lines a day, ala Harry Mathews. I've also collaborated with William Allegrezza (moria) in a more integrated manner and we have a long poem forthcoming in Dusie.

What sorts of things have you been reading?

Since it's the holidays and I've been on a road trip to Kentucky and Louisiana, I have several books in which I've managed to make it to the half-way mark: Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Buffyites and shoplifters of the world unite); a serial killer book called The Apprentice; Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis's superb book of poetry Intaglio; Benjamin Peret's From the Hidden Storehouse trans. by Keith Hollaman; Rio Bravo by Robin Wood and Cat People by Kim Newman--both part of the great BFI series. When I'm home and have access to the internet I usually peruse crimelibrary.com and horror reviews at bloody-disgusting.com.

Regarding your own work, do you have a favorite and/or most-representative piece?

I have two favorites that are quite different from one another, even though both are homages. One is an old poem to Tom Waits. I like its simplicity, and that out of all of my poems it's probably the one closest to song lyrics. It's certainly no "Kentucky Avenue" or "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis," but I wanted to work in Waits' dedicatory and elegiac manner, within that liminal space of song and poem. The other poem is "By Your Mouth," an homage to the French surrealist Robert Desnos. If I had to pick a representative piece, this would probably be it--a love of metaphor's associative logic, three sections, a faux-sonnet, and couplets, my favorite stanzaic form.

Which writer would you say has had the biggest influence on your writing?

No writer, but a bevy of writers: Wallace Stevens, Angela Carter, Julio Cortazar, Robert Desnos, Faulkner, Plath, Celan, and Neruda. These are the people I return to for direction, sustenance, and illumination. More contemporary writers with influence include Charles Wright, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Yusef Komunyakaa; my teachers Marilyn Krysl, Reg Saner, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ed Dorn, Anne Winters, and Michael Anania; and my UIC cohorts Kristy Odelius, Mary Biddinger, Jackie White, Chris Glomski, Garin Cycholl, Kimberly Lojek, Mackenzie Carignan, and Sean Starr, among many others. I believe in the "the exhilaration of influence" as opposed to "the anxiety of influence."

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

I'd say quite important. Originally from rural Louisiana, I can't seem to shake the country road dust out of my poems. They are enamored with soil. My grandmother and mother are horticulturists so I'm beholden to them for all the flora and fauna that inhabit my poems.

If your work were to be made into a film, who would direct it?

As you've probably gathered, I'm not good at singular responses, so Germaine Dulac of The Seashell and the Clergyman, Georges Franju of Eyes Without a Face, Maya Deren, Ladislaw Starewicz (he created an amazing stop-motion film called Fetiche (The Mascot) that's on a dvd with Dreyer's Vampyr, Dario Argento, and Andrzej Zulawski (I actually wrote a poem in response to his disturbing film Possession). Mainly these directors because of their configurations of desire, violence, the marvelous and the bizarre.

Though in the end, I'd probably pick a Mervyn LeRoy/Busby Berkeley combo with Ginger Rogers singing one of my poems in Pig Latin...or Billy Wilder with the inimitable Barbara Stanwyck playing the title character. I certainly wouldn't turn down Wong Kar Wai or Zhang Yimou with Christopher Doyle as cinematographer either. This is pure wish fulfillment so I'll stop now before this becomes the entire interview.

Are there any "words of wisdom" that linger in your head when you're writing?

The response that makes me smile every time I read it is Frank O'Hara's answer to writing poems: "You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep...As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you."

You meet someone for the first time and they ask you the proverbial, "So, Simone, what is it that you do?" What do you tell them?

For a period of time I was taken with the reply, "I'm a mathematician." It's a great conversation killer. I still say it occasionally when I'm not in the mood to talk about what I do. Instead of saying I'm a poet, I usually tell people I teach. I also tend to prefer to talk about film before poetry. I enjoy how animated people get when discussing movies. I'm always intrigued by what people are viewing, and what they like/dislike and why, especially in terms of genres.

Your poems are loaded with colors, especially reds and oranges. How conscious of color are you when writing? Do you write with color in mind or do those images just seem to come of their own volition?

I think that I'm a better visual learner than aural learner, and I often "see" my poems cinematically. Color helps anchor the poem for me. In my previous response to directors, I specifically mentioned Argento, Wong Kar Wai, and Zhang Yimou because of their innovations in coloration. And I've always loved Stevens, partially because of his obsession with color, most expressively in "Disillusionment of 10'Clock" but also beautifully illustrated in his poem "Gray Room."

A number of your poems are comprised of couplets. What is it about that form that appeals to you?

I think of poems as collaborative acts; they are call-and-responses. The couplet perfectly illustrates this idea via its two-part form: dialogic; question & answer; holler & echo, etc.

Your poem, "One Swallow Doesn't Make a Summer" (from Lampblack & Ash) opens with a fantastic list of what "a poem is" (e.g. "cuttlebone," "Baudelaire's concubine," "a lunar reader"). Can we get a few more?

Well instead of accreting more of my own phrases how about C.D. Wright's idea that a poem is "new ways of moving under my dress."

What is your take on the phrase "Southern poetry"?

Adjectives are sometimes employed as a tool to diminish what one does, a reduction technique whether it be "southern poetry," "chick flicks," "erotic fiction," "woman poet," etc., and certain adjectives are more devaluing than others. For some reason, the phrase "Southern poetry" has always had a ring of regional exclusiveness, so I don't use the phrase. In an interview Charles Wright says, "Of course I see myself as a Southern poet. That's where I'm from. But I don't see myself as exclusively so, or seamlessly contained therein." I think his answer demonstrates his, and my own, discomfort with adjectival categories and the impulse to side-step them.

Favorite poetic form?

Each semester, I have my students create forms by collaboratively deciding on 8 stipulations for a poem (creating decisions about stanza length, punctuation, syllabic count, etc). Those end up being some of my favorite forms. I like the bouts-rimes for the same reason--that it invites collaboration around a collective group of rhymes. Denise Duhamel wrote a double sestina called "Incest Taboo" that's pretty impressive, and has always made me want to attempt one, though I've yet to do so.

Favorite landscape?

I love water and caves and forests. Big cats in big trees are good too.

Dogwood or gardenia?

Couldn't choose. I grew up with gardenias in my grandmother's yard in Benson, Louisiana. They smell so sweet I used to lick the petals. Similar to the gardenia is another plant my grandmother grew called magnolia fuscata, better known as banana shrub. It smells remarkably like bananas, but much to my disappointment as a kid, it doesn't taste like them. Later, when I lived in the Ozarks in Arkansas, dogwoods and redwoods threaded the woods. When they bloomed in Spring, the whole mountain seemed to shimmy.

What is the "Great American Poem"?

I think that's an impossible question to answer, at least for me. However, if I were to choose a few poems beyond the obviousness of Whitman, I'd probably list Stevens' "Sunday Morning," Berryman's The Dream Songs, and agree with McCombs' choice of Charles Wright's Country Music but in a do-si-do with C.D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining. And the list goes on.

The Ugliest Books of 2006

Bookslut has published its list of 2006's worst-looking book covers. I've always been particularly sensitive to the aesthetics of book covers, and since learning that most authors have absolutely zero control over what goes on the cover of their book (and, in some cases, even its title), the whole enterprise seems almost frightening. Especially when it produces such ugly results. Check out Bookslut's list and nominate your own candidates in the comments.

There is consolation in the fact that, with Carson Ellis on our team, DL3 won't suffer a similar fate.

Happy New Year!

While I can offer nothing so elaborate as Nate's wonderful Interview Project postings I am blessed with the timing of the New Year for my post, so I can offer up the obligatory New Year's statement, full of updates and platitudes, wishes and hopes for the future and all that. Here goes:

Just before Christmas, we had lunch with our publisher, and he's looking forward to working with us once again. We were proud to report to him on some of the news of the journal, including the new website and blog, the writers we've got on board for the upcoming issue (including TC Boyle and Peter Markus), as well as Carson Ellis' cover art and picture portfolio. I just saw the cover a few days ago, and it's beautiful. There are still two weeks left for submission to the non-fiction contest, and we challenge you to make your first New Year's resolution to send in that essay that you've been hiding on your computer, or on your desk under a pile of bills, to-do lists and unanswered letters to your mother. We've gotten tons of great submissions, and encourage you to get in the running for the prize.

We're looking forward to a productive second semester, with many of the Dislocate staff having reached the halfway point of their MFA careers. To my peers, I say the following: may 2007 bring better writing habits, marvelously creative feats of the imagination, and a minimum of grief from your students. Happy New Year.

- Emily