Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme—Now It's Out! Here's What's in It!

Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme—my latest book of essays—has just rolled hot off the presses at MadHat Press.  What's it all about? Well, the jacket copy gives you an overview (and a few complimentary blurbs):

What is the community for poetry? What is its fate, its future? Poet and critic Robert Archambeau begins Inventions of a Barbarous Age with these questions before ranging over the ridges and valleys of the contemporary poetry scene, pausing on the way to investigate mystic and Gnostic poetry, the norms of criticism, and the poetics of camp and the sublime. Taking in poets from W. H. Auden to Kenneth Goldsmith, and topics from poetic comedy to poetic tribalism, Archambeau is one of poetry’s great omnivores, and numbers among the leading poetry critics of his generation. 

~ 

Robert Archambeau is fascinated by the place poets stake out for their art, the claims they make about the relationship of poetry and power; and he is (sometimes uncomfortably) shrewd in ferreting out the motivations for such claims. His essays have the advantage of the best occasional writing—immediacy, a sense of responsiveness, conversationality—but Archambeau is also a “big ideas” critic, spinning his momentary interpretations of texts into penetrating insights about the place of poetry in the world.
—Mark Scroggins 

Archambeau writes prose that’s consistently welcoming, curious, and free of the anxiety that marks so much criticism.
—Jonathan Farmer, Slate Magazine

A notable poet/critic, Archambeau’s a perfect example of how one person can take on both roles.
—Barry Schwabsky, The Nation

Archambeau is one of our smartest poetic sociologists, and he tackles the biggest problems facing poetry in our time.
—Norman Finkelstein, Contemporary Literature

If you want to see someone having fun while thinking provocatively about contemporary poetry, try Archambeau. I always do.
—Stephen Burt 

Archambeau has perfect pitch.
—Marjorie Perloff 

If you really want to know about the book, though, here's the table of contents, along with a few notes on each essay:

I. The Future, The Present

            You Will Object: Four Futures for Poetry

            Poetry as ubiquitous, as commodified, as self-obsessed, as community-building. You don’t like one future? Try another!

            Who is a Contemporary Poet?

            In which I continue an old argument with Kenneth Goldsmith about what counts as contemporary. The fight is called off when Giorgia Agamben clobbers us both.

            The Future of Genius

            Does the old category of ‘genius’ have a future? The origin and destination of a category of literary analysis, with reference to Brooklyn hipsters in Warby Parker glasses.

            Invitation to the Voyage: Notes on the Trajectory of the Poetic Image

            How the literary image changed from Dante to Baudelaire, and what that says about where it has been and may be heading.

            Charmless and Interesting: The Conceptual Moment in Poetry

            What Conceptualism has going for it and what it doesn’t do very well, with reference to the old aesthetic category of “charm” and the newly-re-theorized category of the “interesting.”  As in “Conceptualism? Well, it’s… interesting…”

            Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Contemporary Rhyme in Poetry

            How has rhyme changed since it ceased being an unexamined norm in poetry? How can it be done well now? With a lot of talk about Anthony Madrid’s amazing unpublished history of rhyme and an examination of Michael Robbins’ The Second Sex, among other books.

II. Poetry and Community

            When Poetry Mattered

            Poetry matters most when things are really, really bad.  We should be so lucky that poetry matters less here than elsewhere, now than then.

            The Disinheritance of the Poets

            What happens when privileged people get kicked out of the realm of power and money and end up in the realm of poetry? More about rich white guys elbowing other people out of the way, intentionally or otherwise.

            In Solitude, In Multitude: Crowds and Poetry

            A quick trip through the 19^th and 20^th centuries of flâneurs, introverts, countercultural snobs, and poets othered for their identity, with reference to Crowds and Power.

            Between Facebook and Montparnasse: Poetry’s Lonely Time

            Long story short: we live at the moment of dialectical synthesis between bohemian enclaves and the academic dispersion of the poets across the vastness of all those rectangular states.

            Proud Men in Their Studies: On Mark Scroggins

            Wow, did Scroggins not like this.

            So a Poet Walks into a Bar: Notes on Poetry Readings

            Just what the hell is a poetry reading all about? Find out now, via rhetorical theory!

III. Mystics and Gnostics

            A Stranger from the Sky: Sun Ra as Poet and Alien

            Why haven’t we been taking Sun Ra seriously as a poet? He’s closer to T.S. Eliot than fans of either of them are likely to want to admit.

            The Open Word: An Essay and a Letter for Peter O’Leary

            The most linguistically audacious Catholic mystic in poetry since Gerard Manley Hopkins.

            A Scribe and His Ghosts: The Poetry of Norman Finkelstein

            Norman Finkelstein: because you needed proof that wit and mysticism could work together.

            “That’s a Real Angel You’re Talking To”: Robert Duncan and Mythological Consciousness

            This is really about the challenge Duncan’s insistence on the reality of myth poses to modern consciousness, and to Duncan himself. I mean, I’m not sure we really can read Duncan the way he wanted us to.

            Kenneth Rexroth’s Other Worlds

            In which I argue that Robert Hass owes a lot to Rexroth, and that Rexroth understood the sublime intuitively.

            A Strange and Quiet Fullness: The Uncanny Charles Simic

            In which I argue that despite some Cold War attitudes that don’t hold up all that well, Simic is the real deal when it comes to the uncanny in poetry.

            John Crowe Ransom’s Quarrel with God

            Long story short: a preacher’s kid starts to doubt God, has his doubts confirmed in the First World War, writes a defense of Christianity that is really an attack on Christianity, and develops a poetic based on these beliefs. It hardens into a dogma and damages the poetry, but it couldn’t really have been otherwise.

            History, Totality, Silence

            This is the most “high theory circa 1995” title of anything I’ve ever written. It brings in Walter Benjamin, John Matthias, and Levinas.

IV. Others

            An ABC of Gertrude Stein

            This is pretty much what it sounds like. G is for Genius, N is for Narcissim…

            The American Poet as European, or Egon Schiele’s Ladder

            This is mostly about aesthetic distance and what it can do for, or to, you.

            Poetry Ha Ha

            I don’t think we’re really good at talking about comedy in poetry. This is my attempt. A lot of Henri Bergson, a bit of Freud and Hobbes, and some funny stuff from Aaron Belz.

            Camping Modernism: Timothy Yu's Chinese Silences

            Why I think Tim Yu’ 100 Chinese Silences is a necessary rethinking of Modernism via pastiche and the aesthetics of camp.

            Ambiguous Pronouns are Hot: On Rae Armantrout

            In which Rae Armantrout does the voice of Paris Hilton (remember Paris Hilton?) and makes some crazy things happen with gender and power.

            If I Were A Freudian This Essay Would Be Called “The Mother’s Penis”:

                        A Note on Daisy Fried

            Another take on gender and power in poetry.

            Poetics of Embodiment

            If you don’t read Swedish, you should probably go hang out outside Jennifer Hayashida’s house and set off fireworks to praise her for translating Karl Larsson—because he knows how to explain the way embodiment comes into contact with language and power and lays open the dark disparities of our moment.  Also, there’s stuff about Joy Division.

V. On Criticism

            Hating the Other Kind of Poetry

            In which I examine what’s at stake in partisan poetry sniping, and try to understand my own sense that it’s a mug’s game.

            The Work of Criticism in the Age of Mechanical Recommendation

            What can a critic do that a recommendation algorithm can’t?

            The Avant-Garde in Babel

            What we talk about when we talk about the avant-garde, and why we’re probably all talking about different things. My attempt (with much help from Per Bäckstrom) to purify the language of the critical tribe.

            Fanaticism! Intolerance! Disinterest!

            This is really a kind of poetics of camp, along with an argument for why we need such a thing. It takes a turn through Kant and Schiller and back out via Situationist thinking about “the sepulcher of aesthetic disinterest.”

            The Abject Sublime, or: Jean Genet’s Vaseline

            Because a queering of the sublime via the abject shows us just how bad we usually are about distinguishing between different types of beauty, and because Jean Genet is the poet laureate of abjection.

VI. Afterword

            Death of a Bookseller

            This is really an elegy for a man who taught me as much as any of my professors. He ran a dusty bookshop in Chicago. Both he and the store are gone, and always with me.

You can find the book on Amazon and at the MadHat website, as well as at the more poetry-and-litcrit-friendly sort of bookstore (try the Grolier Poetry Bookshop if you're near Harvard Square).

Poetry and Stupidity

Poetry and stupidity are, it seems, secret kissing cousins. Who knew? Lawrence Raab, that's who. Check out his short, punchy essay "Poetry and Stupidity," now online as part of the Essays & Comment monthly feature I edit, and sometimes write, for Plume.

Raab's essay starts like this:

1. OBSCURITY

One of the shortest and most provocative pieces in Paul Valéry’s “A Poet’s Notebook” reads in its entirety:

STUPIDITY AND POETRY. There are subtle relations between these two categories. The category of stupidity and that of poetry.

I can’t recall when I first read this, but I remember thinking it was true. Also funny. Also like some zen koan designed to knock me on the head. Was it true because it was so obviously untrue? Or because it seemed to provide no way to ascertain its truth? Or perhaps I just believed it because I didn’t want to feel stupid.

That Valéry’s equation didn’t appear to make sense was a plus for me. Did it even want to make sense? A little further down the same page, I found:

OBSCURITY, A PRODUCT OF TWO FACTORS. If my mind is richer, more rapid, freer, more disciplined than yours, neither you nor I can do anything about it.

This was spikier, more aggressively funny. Or maybe not funny at all.   And obscurity, unlike ambiguity, somehow seemed connected to stupidity—how dumb you felt when you didn’t get the joke.

The whole thing is online here.

Last month's feature, "The Barbarian Invasion of Poetry" (which I wrote) is available here. 

The Mathematical Sublime: Mark Scroggins on Contemporary Poetry

Mark Scroggins is, hands down, bar none, my favorite critic of contemporary poetry. His latest collection is out now from MadHat which, under new leadership from Marc Vincenz, is turning into a press I'm very into watching (they're about to publish the latest book by Michael Anania).  The Mathematical Sublime takes a broad and ecumenical look at contemporary poetry, often of the more adventurous kind, and examines a host of fascinating figures. I mean, Scroggins has taste in poetry, damn it, no matter what one thinks of his Doc Martens and skinny jeans in (shall we say) surprising colors. Poets discussed include:

Charles Bernstein
John Matthias
Eric Selinger
Norman Finkelstein
Maeera Shreiber
John Wilkinson
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Peter Quartermain
Nathaniel Mackey
Charles Alexander
Rae Armantrout
Daniel Bouchard
Julie Carr
Cris Cris
Stephen Collis
Joseph Donahue
Cecil Giscombe
K. Lorraine Graham
Janet Holmes
Tony Lopez
Tom Mandel
Geraldine Monk
Jennifer Moxley
Tom Pickard
Patrick Pritchett
Kit Robinson
David Shapiro
Ron Silliman
Stephen Vincent
Craig Watson.
Geoffrey Hill
Susan Howe
Robert Duncan
Ronald Johnson

Also, due to Scroggins' idiosyncratic reading, the great Victrorian John Ruskin and some guy named Robert Archambeau.

The fool who does not buy this book is, to paraphrase that icon of literary acumen, Mr. T., to be pitied.

In Which I Host A Deranged Literary Cooking Program

Some interesting reflections on my most recent book of poems, The Kafka Sutra, are up at the Queen Mob's Teahouse site.  Stu Watson has a number of nice things to say, but the one I'm thinking of keeping for a future blurb is "one at moments can almost imagine Archambeau as the host of a deranged literary cooking program." Read all about it here!

Inventions of a Barbarous Age, or: How I Finally Dressed Like Mark Scroggins

Here's the cover of my next book, Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme. I'll post something about the contents soon, but I'm not here to talk about the contents today, I'm here to talk about the cover.  Because it represents the first time I have presented myself as spiffily as Mark Scroggins, whose The Mathematical Sublime: Writing About Poetry will appear from the same publisher at the same time.

Mark, you see, is a snappy dresser. Here he is in his ordinary togs. If you wish to imagine me on the same day, think rumpled cargo shorts (summer) or rumpled Brooks Brothers (winter).  Either way, Mark wins:

But compare our book covers:

Twinsies! In fact, the resemblance is so strong that MadHat will be offering the books in a special, bundled deal for a reduced price.  Go nuts!

The Barbarian Invasion of Poetry (Hurrah!)

The barbarians are here! They've breached the walls of the fortress! The city lies in ruins! Poetry is at their mercy!

Well, it's all a bit more complicated and not so grim. Find out more in the first monthly installment of the new "Essays and Comment" feature at Plume. I will be editing, and sometimes writing, the feature.  I wrote the first one, "The Barbarian Invasion of Poetry (Hurrah!)" and it begins like this:

This just in: the Empire of Poetry has fallen to the barbarians. The fall was not sudden—it took place over the course of the last seventy years or so, and even before then alarmed sentries spoke of shaggy hordes moving in the dark forests beyond the far-flung border outposts, clutching their axes and the icons of their strange, compelling gods. Let me begin by making clear that I, bred within the confines of the old and dying Empire, welcome the barbarians as friends, and as a force to invigorate our aging and insular imperium. 

When I speak of barbarians, I speak of them as the Italian novelist and essayist Alessandro Baricco does in his study The Barbarians: An Essay on the Mutation of Culture, a book largely unknown in America, despite having been serialized in one of the most prominent Italian newspapers, giving rise there to a nationwide discussion of the changing nature of cultural production and consumption. For Barrico, the barbarians are a group on the rise, and not just in Italy, or even Europe, but worldwide. Ever more visible, they cause great distress among the more hidebound Catos committed to the old and dying virtues of the Empire—not, it is important to note, a distress that Barrico shares. Barrico sees the barbarians everywhere, marked not so much by their different culture as by the different way they think about culture, be it musical culture, literature, cuisine—even wine and soccer (Barrico is, after all, Italian). The old ways of the Empire are deeply traditional, rooted in an appreciation of the specific history of whatever cultural form is under consideration. But the barbarians see things differently. They are eclectic, these nomads from beyond the borders, and less attached to the traditions of the imperial past.

It goes on to talk about Frank O'Hara, Claudia Rankine, Michael Robbins, C. Russell Price, and others, with some notes on how to drink wine and listen to music.  You can find it here.

Culture in the Provinces: A Very Short Note

I like just about everything about Sweden, even the weather. I like their intellectuals, too, mostly for being both meticulous and down-to-earth—at least by the standards of intellectuals. But when I think about the position of intellectuals in Swedish culture, I always think about a moment from the late 90s. I was at a party in the medieval Swedish university town of Lund—a quieter, less touristed version of England’s Cambridge. The man who’d hired me to give some lectures had kindly invited me to his house to a gathering of all his friends, including one of his oldest and dearest. The two had known each other since childhood, growing up in a small town and dreaming of Brecht’s Berlin theater and Picasso walking with Gertrude Stein left bank. My host had become an established professor in a fine old Swedish university, a man who spoke a refined English and (though it was hard for me to judge) a beautiful version of his native tongue. He wrote gracefully about culture for the main Swedish newspapers, translated poetry, and had authored a study of Renaissance sonnet sequences. His old friend, though, was the real success—and like so many truly ambitious citizens of small countries, had left to make his mark on a bigger stage. He held a chair at the Sorbonne, was the world expert on certain elements of classical civilization, was a member of the Swedish Academy, voting on the Nobel prizes. At the party he took me aside, punched me lightly on the arm, and said “You want to know about Swedish culture? Look at him…” he made a graceful, Gallic gesture at the host, laughing gently at someone’s witticism across the room. “In Sweden, there are 2,000 like him. The rest have snowmobiles.”

Make of it what you will.

Moleskine Outtakes: Three Short Notes

Like you, I love to have a small notebook in my pocket.  Me, I like Moleskines, preferably green (I am deeply superstitious about color).  The notebooks are usually filled with nothing more interesting than lists: things I need to do; writing deadlines I need to meet; things I'm meaning to read, and the other detritus of the bookish mind. But sometimes I scribble something else, a little more coherent.  When I was younger, these were often bitter little rhymes, like:

Lacking Auden's glib facility
Robs my heart of all tranquility
But I must say it helps a bit
That his later work was shit.

(I have either mellowed in middle-age, or learned to find things in the later Auden that I could not find when I was an eager young bastard).

Anyway: here are three outtakes from my most recent Moleskine.


The Pure Judgment of Taste
Setting morality aside, there's truth in this: the failure to appreciate something is a failure to understand it. But understanding, of course, brings us to the question of morality which, it turns out, can't be set aside.

The Climate for Poetry
Walls can stand without a roof, sure, sure. But a roof's only unimportant if it isn't raining.  I'm writing this because someone told me a poet should never explain his work.

The Book Written in a Variety of Styles
I know, I know, everybody's supposed to "find a voice" or "brand himself" or pursue a consistent project or whatever.  You know: produce a book that is somehow coherent.  But my plan? My plan was to be different, not to do what everybody else does, precisely by virtue of doing what everybody else does.

The Snowflake or the Storm? Reading Ashbery's "The Skaters"

You're probably yearning for a 2400 word reading of John Ashbery's "The Skaters," aren't you? Well, you're in luck! I've just edited this out of the manuscript of Making Nothing Happen: Poetry in Society, Poetry for Itself.  Sadly, the one footnote in the passage is a bit uncooperative as to format, so I've just included it in parentheses in the main text.  Have at it!

The Snowflake or the Storm?

            John Ashbery's long poem “The Skaters,” like his earlier poem “Europe,” has its origins in an old book purchased from a Parisian book stall—in this case Three Hundred Things a Bright Boy Can Do, in which Ashbery found the passage “some sounds, of course, it is almost impossible to reduce to writing, as for example, the hollow scam and murmur produced by a multitude of skaters…” This, along with the book’s similarity to the “Things to Make and Do” sections of his childhood Book of Knowledge, overwhelmed Ashbery with nostalgia for his childhood in upstate New York (Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde, 122). The poem’s sense of loss and loneliness reflects not only this moment of nostalgia, but Ashbery’s circumstances. Begun in 1963, it reflects a period when Ashbery, still reeling from the reception of The Tennis Court Oath, felt particularly “bewildered, defeated, and alone” (Shapiro “Interview”). Out of this solitude and nostalgia came one of the earlier sustained achievements in what would become the dominant mode of the longer poems Ashbery’s mature period—what we might call, not the long narrative poem, but the long anti-narrative poem.

            The anti-narrative poem has many qualities of the narrative poem: scale, a variety of incidents, and, unlike most of “Europe,” a discursive, talky, reflective narrator. What it lacks, though, is a sense of orderly progression, a sense that the parts can all be linked into a coherent totality. It is not only anti-totalization: it is anti-teleological, in that the parts serve no single end. The critic Brian McHale describes the anti-narrative nature of “The Skaters,” and the ways in which it is commonly read, with admirable concision:

Unlike the more obviously disjunctive poems of Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath period, “The Skaters” often appears to make sense locally, inviting the reader to expect to make global sense of the poem. Instead, one encounters an intractable flux of verbal “found objects,” shifting styles and registers, teasing literary allusions and echoes, fragmentary narrative episodes and descriptive scenes. How is one to negotiate or manage such flux? Critics tend to select “key” lines or passages, treating these as interpretative centers or “nodes” around which to organize the heterogeneous materials of the poem. Other materials come to be subordinated in various ways (explicitly or, more often, implicitly) to these “key” passages or are simply passed over in silence, so that the poem is reduced to a skeletal structure of points that yield most readily to a particular interpretative orientation. (591)

“The Skaters” embodies this “intractable flux” at the level of form, with its digressiveness and its non-sequiturs. It also thematizes its own non-totalizability and anti-teleology, and links them to both Ashbery’s isolation from utilitarian society and his homosexuality.

            The first of the four sections of “The Skaters” opens with an image of a group of skaters on a frozen pond:

These decibels

Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound
Into which being enters, and is apart.
Their colors on a warm February day
Make for masses of inertia, and hips
Prod out of the violet-seeming into a new kind
Of demand that stumps the absolute because not new
In the sense of the next one in an infinite series
But, as it were, pre-existing or pre-seeming in
Such a way as to contrast funnily with the unexpectedness
And somehow push us all into perdition. (Collected Poems 147)

The movements of the skaters stump “the absolute” because they don’t seem merely novel, but somehow predestined—and so we are introduced already to questions of telos, or end, and of pattern and non-pattern. After further considerations of novelty and order, the poem offers us images that elaborate upon these themes:

A child’s devotion
To this normal, shapeless entity....

Forgotten as the words fly briskly across, each time
Bringing down meaning as snow from a low sky, or rabbits flushed from a     wood.
How strange that the narrow perspective lines
Always seem to meet, although parallel, and that an insane ghost could do     this,
Could make the house seem so much farther in the distance, as
It seemed to the horse, dragging the sledge of a perspective line. (Collected Poems 149)

What are we to make of the images of meaning here? Snowflakes in a storm, and rabbits in rout, are decidedly not oriented toward a specific end: they are chaotic, plural entities, unpredictable in movement. Meaning, then, is plural and chaotic. All of this seems to be in contradistinction to the orderly world of the painting with its single-point visual perspective, where everything is assigned a clear position in an ordered space. But even the orderly world of perspective can be subverted here by the perverse eyes, as it is when the perspective line of a road’s edge leading to a vanishing point becomes, instead of something static, something pulled along by the horse in the picture. The apparently ordered is as prone to disorder as the onrushing crowd of rabbits. Later, when we read of a “great wind” lifting a number of panels, including the painting of the horse, into the air, we see “the perspective with the horse” disappear “in a bigarrure of squiggly lines.” The orderly world of perspective shifts into something like a cubist arrangements of lines and misaligned planes (150).

            These images for the shifting nature of meaning and order prepare us for what amounts to a farce of interpretation, a passage of the poem purporting to be an interpretation of the poem itself (Helga, here, is a character introduced into “The Skaters” only briefly, and for unclear reasons):

It is time now for a general understanding of
The meaning of all this. The meaning of Helga, importance of the setting, etc.
A description of the blues. Labels on bottles
And all kinds of discarded objects that ought to be described.
But can one ever be sure of which ones?
Isn’t this a death-trap, wanting to put too much in
So the floor sags, as under the weight of a piano, or a piano-legged girl
And the whole house of cards comes dinning down around one’s ears!
But this is an important aspect of the question
Which I am not ready to discuss, am not at all ready to,
This leaving-out business. On it hinges the very importance of what’s novel
Or autocratic, or dense or silly. It is as well to call attention
To it by exaggeration, perhaps. But calling attention
Isn’t the same thing as explaining, and as I said I am not ready
To line phrases with the costly stuff of explanation, and shall not,
Will not do so for the moment. Except to say that the carnivorous
Way of these lines is to devour their own nature… (Collected Poems 152)

We need, it seems, explanation: the labeling and describing of the poem’s elements, the mapping out of how the parts compose a whole. But what details signify? Ashbery has put “too much in” for the structure to remain stable, he has failed to leave enough out for the poem to be reduce to a comprehensible whole. Of course the questions of what to put in and what to leave out only matters if one wants the poem to add up, as Ashbery clearly does not want it to. It is the poem’s own excessiveness that leads it to devour anything that might present itself as the poem’s essence.

            Near the end of the first section of “The Skaters” we return to the image of snowflakes in a flurry, reworked, now, as a meditation on the relation of part tow whole:

This, thus, is a portion of the subject of this poem
Which is in the form of falling snow:
That is, the individual flakes are not essential to the importance of the whole’s becoming so much of a truism
That their importance is again called in question, to be denied further out, and again and again like this.
Hence, neither the importance of the individual flake,
Nor the importance of the whole impression of the storm, if it has any, is        what it is… (Collected Poems 152-153)

The parts are not the parts, the final sentence tells us, nor the whole the whole: neither can be put in a consistent relationship to the other. Even the seemingly most significant sentence in the passage bends and warps to avoid being reduced to paraphrasable meaning: “That is, the individual flakes are not essential to the importance of the whole’s becoming so much of a truism that their importance is again called in question, to be denied further out, and again and again like this.” The possessive attached to “whole,” and the parts that follow it (including the nonstandard relation of “so” and “that”) bend the syntax into a kind of pseudo-meaning. Even as we sense we are being told something about the irreducibility of the poem to a single meaning, we witness a sentence enter into suggestive irreducibility.

The second section of “The Skaters” links the idea of the non-teleological to social alienation and the cultural position of the homosexual in the middle decades of the twentieth century—a position with no pre-fabricated narrative along the lines of the heterosexual man’s prescribed path from singleness to married family man climbing the career ladder. The section depicts a tourist’s voyage, a cruise with no apparent end. The joyful narrator revels in this, except when the specter of utilitarian work raises its ugly head:

Now we are both setting sail into the purplish evening.
I love it! This cruise can never last long enough for me.

But once more, office desks, radiators—No! That is behind me.
No more dullness, only movies and love and laughter, sex and fun. (Collected Poems 158)

The opposition between an aesthete’s delight in the exotic and the dullness of the workaday world, with its emphasis on actions as means to definite ends, comes straight out of “The Instruction Manual.” Fortunately, the specter of work has been confined to the past here, and we are liberated from its strictures. The voyage continues, and our protagonist settles into a spectator’s relationship with the world. “This is just right for me,” he tells us, “I am cozily ensconced in the balcony of my face” (158): he stands back from his own existence, looking on at the world from on high as a kind of aesthetic spectacle.

            This continues until the voyage is stopped by inclement weather, and we hear that “The whole voyage will have to be cancelled” (159). It is significant that, when the aimless voyage is cut off, we find ourselves stranded at on an island where we hear “The Wedding March,” and see a “couple descend/The steps of the little old church” (159). The wedding march is a journey very much at odds with the wanderings of the aesthete-tourist: it is teleological in the extreme, leading to the social and religious sanctioning of a union that, at the time of the poem’s composition, could only be specifically heterosexual. When the voyage does resume, it is with the accompaniment of some of the poem’s most homoerotic imagery —”man nightly/Sparingly descends/… all of him/Pruned, erect for vital contact” (161).

            To understand the importance of this passage, we might turn to D.A. Miller’s classic of queer theory, Bringing Out Roland Barthes. Here, Miller tells writes of a heterosexual couple, telling us “the couple is in full and open possession of a story, a story, moreover that one hardly exaggerates in our culture to call the story. Outside the heterosexual themes of marriage and oedipalized family,” he continues, “…the plots of bourgeois life… would all be pretty much unthinkable” (44). Judith Roof, glossing the passage, adds “our very understanding of narrative as a primary means to sense and satisfaction depends upon a metaphorically heterosexual dynamic” (Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative xxii). Most narrative forms in western culture have revolved around plots that, in the era before gay marriage and the raising of children by gay couples, have been overwhelmingly oriented toward heterosexual norms, and have marginalized homosexuality. {{FOOTNOTE: An example may be in order here by way of clarifying what is meant by the heterosexual bias of narrative form, and gay alienation from traditional narrative. In demonstrating the heterosexual bias of conventional narratives, Judith Roof asks us to consider the role of the “female comic second” in Hollywood film. This character, generally a wisecracking yet not traditionally feminine friend of the female lead, serves a supporting role in the marriage plot, but has little or no real narrative herself. When we watch, for example, the scenes in which Ida Corwin appears as the female comic second in Mildred Pierce, and take them in isolation from the rest of the film, we find only fragments and narrative stasis: she has no arc to follow. Roof has argued, in All About Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels, that lesbians received no narrative role in midcentury American popular culture, and were offered only characters without narrative with which to identify.}} Ashbery’s presentation of the wedding march as the antithesis to the aesthete’s voyage without destination invites us to see the wandering of his voyager—and the narrative wandering of “The Skaters,” as tied to his homosexuality. This is not, of course, to say that no gay works involve traditional narrative, nor that all anti-narrative works are linked to homosexuality. Rather, it marks Ashbery’s own eschewal of conventional narrative as connected to his sexuality as well as to his eschewal of the values of a utilitarian society and its office desks.

            The concluding sections of “The Skaters” continue to underline the connection between Ashbery’s alienation from mainstream (heterosexual and utilitarian) society and his refusal to let his narrative reduce to a totalizable meaning or a teleological end. In section three, for example, he contemplates his status as a “professional exile” (171), and presents himself as a Crusoe figure, marooned at a far remove from the ordinary world where people work and marry. And near the end of section four he speaks of the need “To refuse the square hive”—a term redolent of both labor and breeding (178). Then, in the final lines of the poem, he presents us with a kind of cosmic order, in which “The constellations are rising/In perfect order: Taurus, Leo, Gemini” (178). But this perfect order is not the order of the constellations as it is traditionally seen: Ashbery has inserted his own birth sign, Leo, outside of its conventional place. We can take it as the subversion of traditional order through the assertion of his own idiosyncratic identity. If we do, we find we are once again in the world of Dwight Macdonald, defending the individual against the forces of homogeneity.

            “The Skaters,” then, is very much a poem of aesthetic autonomy, escaping co-optation to any totalizing interpretation. It is also marked by Ashbery’s origins: his sexuality, his alienation from utilitarian work, and his generation’s emphasis on the individual rather than on any collective political program.