John Ashbery’s “East February” was first published in the March 24, 2014 issue of The New Yorker and is available here for subscribers.
“East February,” by John Ashbery, compelled my interest this dark March morning. After all, when an 87-year-old poet speaks, you want to listen, you want to understand. So here goes.
The whole poem feels to me somewhat valedictory: the references to February, or winter, to it being late, and being so late it’s almost grotesque. To start there — at “grotesque” it sounds like how I feel about my own old age approaching. I view that with alarm — the approach of my own very old old age. At 70, I still feel young, but at 87, Ashbery must at least feel the approach of very old old age.
Again, the valedictory feel resumes in the second stanza, when the poet uses the phrase “hymn to dowdiness.” To be dowdy is typical of the old — I feel that already. We are so thrifty, we are so enamored of the past and past fashions. The poet mentions “foxtrot”: it’s one of those things so very out of date that it is hardly done at all any more. In the same breath, he mentions “performance art.” The poet says he looks back on foxtrot and performance art “fondly,” as if performance art is already in the past. Is it? When did that happen? Actually, I think he means that performance art, now so fresh, will eventually be “dowdy” — a thing of the past. Actually, this speaker is hardly aware that the foxtrot has passed — he conflates the time for foxtrot and performance art.
The very next lines muse on whether or not this writing is a “hymn to dowdiness.” It is as if the poet is wondering whether the style in which he is writing is already a thing of the past, something silly, something done as if Howdy Doody had done it, something as if it had been influenced by Howdy Doody, that T.V. puppet of the fifties, that original puppet. It is as if the poet is wondering what produced the poems — was the impulse primarily the culture? Was he merely a mouthpiece?
Somehow, as a valedictory, this is not triumphant. It’s doubtful. That is probably not an unusual feeling for an artist, to doubt the lasting nature of their work. It’s certainly familiar to this more ordinary mortal — to doubt, in one’s darker hours, one’s life.
People drop in on this speaker, although one of them says rather curtly, “My crew will be in touch.” I am reminded of a producer coming for an initial interview, say someone who represents someone from 60 Minutes, then leaving, saying, “My [production] crew will be in touch.” To make the arrangements.
“My crew” also smacks of a slang way to refer to friends, although in the mouth of this speaker it feels awkward.
Because I am reminded of old age by the poem, “crew” reminds me of an ambulance crew, or of a doctor dismissing a patient by saying, “My nurse will be in touch.”
“Touch” here is important — because no one is actually touching anyone. No one is actually communicating very clearly. If the poem represents conversations that actually did occur, the representation is in snippets, and a lot is lost.
In that way, these “snippets” remind me of the horror of very old age, the dementia, the Alzheimer’s.
The conclusion:
A mouse can show what works,
even if no one knows why
It reminds me of medical experiments, reminds me of illness, reminds me of medication that doesn’t actually work, reminds me of impending death.
I am writing about this poem because this poet, John Ashbery, is so famous. I am trying to see what it is so many people see in him. What I see is ordinary conversation that has been clipped, snipped, and compressed. I see a hallucination. I see echoes of real life, but not real life, except as we see it in nightmare or a drugged state. In the ordinary language, in the lack of a central ego, I see a rejection of egotism, pomposity, belief systems, propaganda, authority, and all that, as the poet himself might say.
There is a fear of surety, yet there is also yearning. I feel the yearning for things to last, for friends to come over, for people to get to know each other, for people not to withdraw into poses like “My crew will be in touch” or behind facades like the mouse experiments have shown . . .
Why “East” February? I don’t know — except that perhaps the poet or the speaker lives on the upper east side, a very posh place to live, and even there, February (and death) is part of the seasons. Perhaps, as always, “east” represents dawn. So the speaker is thinking of dawn in February — such opposites. But seen that way, there is that yearning again.
Why is the grammar fractured in that sentence about “not expecting friends” or “friends that you don’t know yet are coming over”? It’s as if the speaker has gotten upset in the middle of trying to say something. It feels like the speaker is hoping some friends will come over but wonders if a companion will be offended by this.
But the companion in this poem feels like death to me. It’s as if the speaker is saying to death, “I want to put you off — look I have friends coming over — they’re still alive — (you don’t know them, yet) — so give me a break, just this once.”
I am reminded of the phrase “skeleton crew.” As if the crew that will be in touch are the grave diggers and the mortuary.
As with Galway Kinnell, John Ashbery compels my interest. Both are almost beyond me. It’s odd, though, regarding how difficult I think Ashbery to be, how quickly I got a take on what he might be trying to say.
As interested as he is in conversation, though, I echo with this hope: that someone out there will come in out of the dark and add to all this. One of the benefits of a poet like Ashbery is that he surely does invite conversation.
What I hear is this: all is change. And yet we yearn for that not to be.
Alzheimers is, as you say, such a term of horror. Some are saying now that except in the extremest cases, we should avoid the term and instead use “cognitive deficits”–implying that there are some things we can’t remember, but many other things we still can.
Also the term makes you feel less hysterical the next time you walk into a room and can’t think why.
I appreciate your careful remarks, sshaver. Thank you for reminding me the power that some labels can have on both our beliefs and our expectations. I forgot myself.
There is so much we do not know, both about how cognitive deficits work, and how people with cognitive deficit can still have meaningful lives. USA Today ran a column a while back on the joy some people with the word-loss typical of Alzheimer’s can still have playing golf, if that was their sport in the past. I recall a friend saying that his mother still loved to dance, despite the other cognitive losses she had suffered. My own father still retained his sense of humor, long after other capabilities had faded.
So I am glad to be reminded of these things by your positive point of view.
Surely Ashbery means any variety of things when he says “It’s late, isn’t it, / almost grotesque.” That aging is a process of failures that can be grotesque is only one possibility. That death is grotesque is another – or being aware that death is close at hand. That art may or may not last, may or may not go in or out of favor – that is also a difficult proposition.
So sorry that my choice of words distracted you from Ashbery’s poem. So glad you reminded me of the openness of attitude any person with cognitive deficit deserves.
Another equally important aspect, for me, in reading this poem, is the amazing lack of ego that the poem projects. Would this be humility?
It certainly is not the poet as superman or expert or last word. The poem doesn’t celebrate the poet, or glorify him or glorify his wizardry with language. The awkwardness feels very human. That the speaker(s) sound unsure also feels very human.
As for what state of being human – I am unsure…I associate the jumbled form of the poem with the half thought that accompanies dozing or waking or coming to. I associate what the poet is doing with a representation of the difference between what life seems to be like to us, what we strive for – to be in control – to what life is really like – so much going on at every turn that our sense of it is necessarily jumbled.
But each line, its position, and its form, could be debated.
“A mouse can show what works / even if no one knows why, he said.”
For instance.