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Famed, acclaimed, 86-year-old poet John Ashbery has a new poem in this week’s issue of The New Yorker: “Gravy for the Prisoners.”
Ashbery doesn’t mess around: the reader knows from the strange title that there will be cross currents in the poem. Why would prisoners be given gravy? Maybe not enough food or the wrong food. Maybe a sickening glop. Maybe a treat. Maybe extras, on top of their regular ration. The poem begins with logical disjunction, missing information, and a gauntlet thrown. In addition, there is a “Let them eat cake” feeling to the title — as if whatever is being offered is meaningless, when what prisoners want is freedom, not gravy, unless the gravy is the means to being free.
If “prisoners” are to be the topic of the poem one wonders if we are dealing with real prisoners in real jails, or hypothetical prisoners, like prisoners of fate, or prisoners of personality or human possibility, or in fact, prisoners of the state. Somehow, “prisoners” here reminds me of pensioners — as I am, and as is Ashbery. So then, you are reminded of being a prisoner of age.
In that case, no gravy would ever be enough; it would merely be a temporary sop, seeing as how nothing would satisfy, in the face of age, as having the impossible reclaimed: health, the dead, moments of enlightenment, hope.
It’s a fifteen line poem, in two irregular stanzas, the first stanza being the shorter, as if perhaps it represents the less complicated thought. The stanza is made up of a fully formed almost informative sentence and a confusing fragment.
The first sentence:
I wouldn’t try to capture it
on the page, or in a blog, the inauspicious
leavings of a day.
Well, right off, you have the problem of “it.” Whatever it is that he wishes to “capture” has already flown off and is reduced to the confusing and all-purpose “it.” He clarifies somewhat; “it” is “the inauspicious leavings of the day.” One wonders why he isn’t going to memorialize the day in writing, given that everyone and her brother keep a blog. Maybe he intends to memorialize the day some other way.
“Inauspicious” is important. Wikipedia tells me that an “auspice (Latin: auspicium from auspex) is literally one who looks at birds . . . . In ancient Roman religion, the auspices provided divine signs to be interpreted by an augur. An augur would perform a ceremony (known as “taking the auspices”) and would read flight patterns of birds in the sky.”
So we already have the idea of received instruction regarding reality: the auspice and the augur will identify and interpret patterns. In this poem, however, that role is devolved to the self, a self who proceeds with enormous doubt, saying, as it does, that the leaving of the day were inauspicious.
In fact, maybe the poem has several speakers, and maybe one is warning the other “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Or, one side of the person is saying to himself, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Then the fragment begins: “Closer to dream . . .” He muses on the way the day that has just past is like people who once walked in the streets. He also muses on the way the past resembles the “hum of the streets,” thus suggesting that the memory of the day, being like a hum, is beyond words — dreamlike. So he is questioning the sense of trying to put into words something that doesn’t originate in words. The use of the word “closer” is in a way confused: is it “to be nearer”? Or is it in the sense of a baseball pitcher who is the “closer”? The closer is the guy who gives shape to the game, the artist, the thriller, the dominator. Who is the person who is the closer to dream? The artist?
Ashbery opens the second stanza with a colloquial address to someone or to himself. He admits, “Yeah, I know.” We have to fill in the blank. He is sheepish, somehow, about admitting that he wants to do the impossible, wants to capture the past on the page, and at the same time doubts he can use writing to remember what is important. Maybe he’s admitting the paradox: he knows writing is a questionable activity, he says he’s not going to write, but he’s writing! But the act of writing makes him doubt its meaning, when, after all, the past is a lot like a hum, a lot like a dream.
Then he says to his reader, his pal, his companion, himself: “Know what I’m saying?” Maybe I do. You want to capture it, but it’s elusive. You want to use words, but maybe the memory of what’s important is in a different language, so to speak.
So in the second sentence of the second stanza, he seems to try to capture “it.”
He says, “The grounds were ultimately too big for the compound.” What is difficult is that grounds and compound are slippery words. Grounds could be landscape, could be reasons, could be basis, could be setting, could be something transformed into bits of its former self, like coffee grounds. And compound could be a group of houses, could be a mix of two or more chemicals, or two or more things, like sentences, and compound could be a verb that communicates complication. So compound suggests complication and ground suggests the process of grinding — the process of transformation through reduction. Maybe he means the most obvious thing: that the surroundings were too large for the place where we were. Maybe he means the most complicated thing: that we reduce the past, grind it down, and lose parts of it. Maybe he means we compound the past and complicate it. At any rate, memory is so reductive and so vast that there is no encompassing it. There was no getting into it. Meaning is ultimately “too big” for the container.
Then we have a dreamlike event within one of these houses of the compound. It is as if the branches of a tree are shadowed on a wall inside the house, and it seems like the tree is flying. The writer marvels that “patterns are coaxed.” It is as if the four walls of a room are the stanzas or parts of a piece of art, and “out of thin air” patterns (and art) are constructed. Later in the poem, there is the suggestion of a temple and a person who tends a temple, but this is different: this “house” is a space where visions occur, where realizations happen, where pattern reveals itself, where art occurs. What is strange and beautiful at the same time, this person is “reading” the shadow of a moving tree, rather than the flight of birds, and applying a pattern to it. The speaker is doubting that the patterns we apply to existence are any more reliable than the auguries of ancient divination. The speaker is doubting the power of language, doubting the power of art to define existence.
It is as if it is in our nature to do such things, or in the nature of our environment. And then all of a sudden, in the middle of these colloquial musings comes a difficult word.
I have a pretty good vocabulary, and I know I do not know what an “aedile” is. He says he spent days as an “aedile.” So I look it up. It turns out to be a show stopper. An aedile, according to Cicero (according to Wikipedia), was one of four officials in the Roman Republic responsible for the care of the buildings, especially temples, roads, sewers, and whatever in the city, as well as the care of public morals, as well as the care for the food of the city and the provisions laid in in case of disaster, and the care of the games. Being an aedile was an office that paved the way to even higher office, such as Senator. Augustus, however, diluted the importance of the aediles, although they did look over the brothels and baths. Suddenly, the office has a seedy mission; suddenly the aedile’s only responsibility is policing what should be private.
In addition, the aedile loses the responsibility for the welfare of the people; the saving and guarding of grain for emergency. That brings you back to the title: “Gravy for the prisoners.” Without that care-giving function of the aedile, there will be no gravy for the prisoners. One has to wonder, anyway, if what is life-saving is not actually food, but vision. A sense of pattern. Art. So is art the real gravy for the prisoners?
The aediles were responsible for the care of the aedes, the temples. A temple was where you learned or were morally guided, hence our own word, edify, but the ultimate duty of looking after the brothels and baths became an extremely narrow definition of edification. The poem may be asking if it is art that is the true edifice or place of guidance.
This speaker says he spent some time as an aedile. Perhaps he means it ironically, as in having been a teacher or a priest or a bureaucrat responsible for the city. He says, though, that no such fantastic visions happened to him when he was working, such as having a vision of a tree flying up.
Even so, he says,
. . . wisps
still buttonhole us in random moats:
Wisps of what? Well, Dictionary.com suggests small bunches of straw or hay, as well as a lock of hair, as well as a stream of mist or smoke, as well as a delicate boy, delicate as a willow. I wasn’t expecting that last one. To translate this sentence, I find that I have a vision of a boy buttonholing another person — this teacher, this priest, this bureaucrat — in an open area, outside the barricade of the castle walls of our daily life or ordinary personality. It is as if the speaker is saying that encountering this boy is a vision. Like the tree flying up.
And then he finishes up. He asks his companion, or us, if this was what we were expecting. Well, I would say no. I was surprised by the turns this poem seems to take. I was surprised by “aedile,” as also by “wisp.”
But I get the impulse: to remember the past, whether it be the past of the day or the past of a life or the past of humanity, it is difficult to give that memory shape, given that the past doesn’t exist in words so much as it exists in patterns, for instance, or mood, or dream. But, in fact, we notice things like huge events of the mind or spirit, especially when they are associated with pattern — or art.
Yet most of us in our hum-drum lives don’t have great experiences. Even so, there are people we encounter who stick with us, and there are wisps of dream, or thought, or realization that hit.
These “wisps” may have an erotic nature; “buttonholing” suggests it.
Finally he asks, “And if not, why not?”
Given that this poem seems to have an erotic aspect, the appearance in the poem of the aedile, the public functionary, the caretaker of morals, is important. The poem is asking asking why we don’t remember and respect these wisps of experience, be they whatever they happen to be.
But here’s the thing: this is a poet who is not obsessed with making sure we understand him. He is more obsessed with making sure we understand that we may not understand him.
To enjoy the poem, I think you have to be happy knowing that people can be quite be inaccessible, difficult to get, or different, mysterious, or unique, or puzzling, like jazz. To enjoy the poem, you kind of have to enjoy the fact that people often like to mess with you. You have to expect and kind of enjoy the gaps that communication and self-presentation present. And I think you have to enjoy the contradiction of someone speaking in colloquial familiarity, all jokey-like, and then suddenly bursting in with formal difficult language. You have to enjoy a poem that represents a self talking to itself on several levels, in several stabs at language, almost as if the self were two or three or more people talking at each other. One has to have a sense of the self as having great difficulty understanding what it says, even to itself.
What’s really hard about this poem for the reader is it’s difficult to remember. It is so dis-jointed and dream-like, it’s difficult to box up. There’s no story, no rhyme, and there is all this dis-jointed language. Perhaps that’s his point.
One shred of formal poetry remains: there is a rhythm to the language (a conversational rhythm) which is hypnotic. I think perhaps it is the hypnotic part that is important.
The images happen along, almost like images from a train window; you’re in the back-streets of the mind, and there are no street signs. But beneath the fractured communication there is a succession of images: prisoners receiving food; the pattern of branches shadowed on a wall, a tree blowing in the wind, people in the streets, huge grounds of a compound, (echoed later by the idea of a castle bounded by a moat) and then the image of these aediles – these censors? And always, there is the idea of communication that is like a phone call that is interrupted with static.
I am interested in the way the poem sync with this particular New Yorker issue and its star: the Chinese writer Yu Hua. Here’s one connection between the poem and Hua: that Yu Hua is subject to censorship, that his writing is available in the moats around the castle, that his writing may be the gravy for the prisoners of the state, that the idea of empire is central to the poem, that China may be a vast empire, that art may be what guides us. (Of course, speaking of the Roman Empire, one must always be reminded, also, of us.) For more from Yu Hua himself on censorship in China see his February 2013 editorial in The New York Times (click here).
In addition, the tree image in this poem syncs with the image of the tree on the cover.
But back to John Ashbery and “Gravy for the Prisoners.” I find the poem speaks to me, after all. What I like about contemporary poetry is that it forces the reader to have a conversation with it. This is my conversation, limited and bound by my restricted vision as it is. I would love to hear from anybody else who has other thoughts about this poem.
Another interesting juxtaposition is the poem’s placement within the issue, smack in the middle of a story about a very weird man who pulled off some of the biggest hoaxes in the art world. See “The Giveaway.” The motivation of Mark Landis is perhaps more inscrutable than Ashbery’s poem. I very much enjoyed your attempt to explain the poem as prompting a dialogue for the reader to have with him/herself and see his Gravy for the Prisoners as throwing crumbs of ideas to us poor, confused mortals buttonholed into our own little moat-protected life-affirming castles we’ve constructed for ourselves. I also see humor in the one line of the poem that doesn’t seem to be contained within the boundaries of the rest of the poem and so mimics itself in saying “too large for the compound.”
Susanne – so glad to hear your voice! Now I see that joke: the line of “too large for the compound” running larger than the boundaries of the poem. I hadn’t noticed that placement of the poem within the Landis story, a peculiar story indeed! But both the story and the poem ask what art is. It’s odd to have Ashbery, who seems to have copied no one except what he sees as reality, sandwiched within a story about a man whose art (or craft) is solely about copying. But you could ask if Ashbery is attempting to copy the way people think.
Ashbery evidently studied painting himself and was for a time an art critic. His poem continues to grow on me, especially after reading your interpretation. I tend to think much more logically and so try to find connections that probably were not intended. In the same way that his one line seemed overstretched beyond the poem’s boundaries, the shortest line (noticeably shorter than the rest) is “out of thin air.” I’m wondering also if the “No such titan ever visited” is just random? “No such” seems to refer back to something. But what? Therein lies the mystery. So this was not what I was expecting, in answer to his final question, but as you said so eloquently, the telephone call has been interrupted with static.
Hi Susanne – “No such titan ever visited/during my days as aedile.” is a line that stopped me, too. First of all, titan is not capitalized, suggesting a generalized meaning, such as person or thing of enormous size or significance. I thought it referred to the previous hypothetical transformative event described as a tree taking flight and patterns being “coaxed into recurring on adjacent walls”. I didn’t realize on my first reading that the coaxing seems to describe the act of painting, and in this case, it would be the way a painter paints a tree such that it seems to take flight.
I am put in mind of seeing Livia’s frescoed dining room walls in Rome – the gorgeous dimmed birds and trees, so delicate they seem a miracle.
So I think that line about patterns being coaxed onto walls refers to the act of painting, and Ashbery may have a particular painter in mind.
But the titan line – “No such titan ever visited/during my days as aedile,” is a leap: he’s not referring to the walls any more, he’s referring to the painter, or someone like a painter, who is a titan who can make recur on a wall the pattern that he sees in nature/reality.
Even though this functionary, this “aedile”, never met a painter, he has met “wisps” – and these “wisps” (whether they be experiences, sights, or real people) have the power to compel our notice – they “butttonhole” uis.
So I think he is suggesting that the ordinary person can have extraordinary experiences. Yet sometimes we miss them, are not expecting them. Maybe we are so busy concentrating on what we think are “titans” we don’t see the transformative experiences that occur in our own lives.
And taken with the idea of “aedile” (censor or bureaucrat or teacher), maybe we are way too invested in received instruction or received ideas to be aware of transformative events and people. Maybe we are our own censors, and prohibit ourselves from accepting transformation.
Maybe, too, prohibitions exist in society that we accept. So – who is the titan? who is the aedile? who is the artist? who is the censor?
I like the way the poem begins with someone saying they won’t try to capture any meaning in a blog, but then goes on to try to capture menaing, however difficult it is.
Just a couple of other observations. I wonder if there is any intended connection between “leavings” of a day in the first stanza and in the second stanza, the tree taking flight, with trees having both leaves and their patterns being coaxed onto the adjacent walls.
Also, if read literally, there seems to be a contradiction in the line “The grounds were ultimately too large for the compound.” Usually, a compound becomes too large for the grounds within which it is contained. Here, it’s the grounds that are too large, so a tree leaves, taking flight. A strange, dreamlike reversal of what we would expect in reality.
Hi Suzanne – That connection between leavings and leaves is terrific – given that Ashbery only implies the word “leaves”. That echo is there – I feel it. He is talking about writing, and so he is also the painted leaves left by the painter on the wall to the imprinted leaves left by the writer on his written pages. That contrasts with the speaker’s doubt that writing can be effective, given the fact that writing is language and the past is more like a hum, more like a dream, and dreams are often highly visual, with only rare punctuation by speech.
Speaking of titan again, it reminds me of Titian, but a letter has been left out and the capital omitted. Such is memory and the leavings of the day: much is left out.
This whole thing reminds me me of ‘do we dare to eat a peach?’ I still think he is asking if we dare create art, given how imperfect our perception is.
I have to say I really enjoy the fact that he’s thinking about thinking.
So sorry! I left out a word: “…he is also connecting the painted leaves left by the painter on the wall to the .imprinted pages (leaves) of a book…
But I also make a connection now between the leaves of a tree to the words of our minds, and then there is the implicit connection to leaves falling, and words falling. In fact, if leaves are falling from a tree, it could actually look as if it is the tree that is rising, not the leaves that are falling. So there’s a vision – the tree rising away from it’s leaves, not the leaves falling away from the tree.
And in a painting, the leaves are in the act of falling – they never actually fall.
So if we are talking about opposites, the poem suggests that is is “wispis” of experience that are titanic, or wisps of people, or experiences that happen in the moat, not the castle – all opposites of what we might expect.
I am put in mid of Alice Munro, who at every turn insists on the opposities we contain.
Another thought comes to me concerning the element and passage of time in the poem. In reference to the streets, there are “the people who once walked along them.” We are unable to capture adequately that fourth dimension, especially if memory is involved. It is also hard to capture time in paintings, but the recurrence of patterns on the walls suggests one way of capturing the passage of time. Ashbery seems to slip easily into a vague past, conjuring up days when he was an aedile, presumably in Roman times. He sort of breaks down barriers to entering that fourth dimension and is comfortable with the vagueness of memories, as he slips back into the past so easily, as in dreams. One wonders if his days as aedile is meant as our collective days as humans and how our collective history can still affect us, wisps of it still buttonholing us in our random moats.
These are just my random thoughts, as I take off now for the day.
Suzanne – Thanks for the conversation. It made the poem come alive.
My pleasure! One final shot:
Ghosts lurked in his poem,
in almost every stanza,
dead poets asserting themselves
as you read between the lines;
modern voices as well.
Yet it was all him,
or “he” to be grammatical;-)
Unique and freshly stated,
he grappled with our sense
of knowing, turning our world
inside out and upside down
till we recognized what we’d
missed many times,
before he put it all together.
Cheers!
Hi Betsy and Susanne,
I almost didn’t want to comment so as not to ruin Susanne’s perfect send-off of the discussion, but I just have to say that I am so glad you’ve decided to add discussion of NYer poetry to this site. I really enjoyed this discussion, and it broke the poem wide open for me. Fascinating!
I read this poem a couple of times when I first came across it and didn’t know what to make of it, aside from making a mental note to look up “aedile” later. But when I went back to read it again while reading Betsy’s discussion of it, I got a clear-as-day picture in my head of the tree flying against the wall as formed by shadows and light (as when headlights make pictures fly across one’s wall at night). I hadn’t got that before and I was amazed at what language can do.
Anyway, as one who is fascinated by the language of poems but doesn’t have much experience discussing them, I thank you both. I look forward to discussion of future poems!
Oh, and I realize you probably won’t be discussing every single poem, but I just have to say I don’t get the other poem in the issue (“Lola’s Secret Potion” by Linda Kunhardt) at all and have read it and tried to make some sense of it quite a few times. Anyone?
I just want to say thanks for all for making this such an interesting thread. I got to the poem itself a bit late in the week and am just now catching up here.
All the best to all of you :-) .
Thanks, Trevor. Having back and forth “talks” over the weekend with Betsy was a little like having a house guest, without having to do any cooking or cleaning linens. As a widow, I miss the repartee of having a partner who likes to indulge in drawn out literary discussions. So this was fun. I envisioned a New Yorker cartoon of Ashbery reading our dialog online, scratching his head, and saying, ”Ah, so this is what I was writing about!”