JOLLY DAYS

A World Of Meaning

Helen Vendler about poetry and John Ashbery and John Ashbery writing about poetry and about art and about life:

There seems to be a general belief among readers that to write about “poetry” is somehow not to write about “life.” But “poetry” is the construction by consciousness of an apprehensible world. Every person constructs such a world and lives in it. When the poets write about poesis, they are writing about what is done every day by everyone. Most of us do not reflect on it as we do it, but we live nonetheless in our construct of the world. Because the poet writes his constructions down, he cannot be unconscious of them; he must reflect on their structures, their idiom. In recording and enacting the process by which we come to consciousness, form an identity, see our selfhood shadowed and illuminated by circumstance and finally bid farewell to illusions of immortality, Ashbery reveals the nature of personal life in our era. To say that a poem is “about poetry” means, surely, that it is consciously about the way life makes up a world of meaning.

The poets do not write about poesis as a process exclusive to themselves. The arrangements of memory, the articulations of the dreams of the ego, the inventions of culture, are poesis. If we do not understand ourselves as self-constructing animals, we mistake the source of authority, projecting it onto external fictions. The poets, by describing their act of self-making, call us to witness our own processes of soul-making…

Brilliant.

Ashbery:

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.