leaning on learning

Your knotted hair
Around your shoulders
A shawl the color of the spectrum

Like that marvelous thing you haven’t learned yet.

J.A., “The Skaters,” p223

Today I was reading from The Double Dream of Spring while
watching the snow fall and missing a meeting I was supposed to be at, but had forgotten about.

A lot of the poems mention learning. Thinking about learning, I remembered the above lines, my favorite lines from “The Skaters.”

I felt like the poems were instructions for my life. Undecipherable at times, but when have I demanded that something be decipherable?

Learning as a symbol. I don’t think J.A. really puts much stock in learning-learning. See “And You Know” where the last line is “And the night, the endless, muggy night that is invading our school.”

But there is some kind of learning to be done. I can barely sense the learning, it’s in the poetry, I see it in the repetition of symbols (words), working with the same words in different settings.

There’s a theme of repetition here, the “vicus of recirculation” just like in Finnegan’s Wake. Why am I continually surprised to realize that artists are so repetitive? I always seem to think artworks were supposed to be “original,” meaning never to repeat themselves. In Ashbery, words recur recur recur.

One of those words is “learning.” Another is “night.” I could list quite of a few of them. I develop a private meaning for myself and feel comfortable whenever I see the word again, like a signpost.

It’s a happy learning. “Evening in the Country” – “I am still completely happy.”

The encounter is strong and fresh as climbing into the boughs of a cherry tree in bloom one chilly April day in Washington DC.

Susan’s Shultz’s intro to The Tribe of John; Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. She calls Shapiro’s book “quirky.” I was discouraged by this article’s engagement in some kind of aggressive literary war I didn’t even know was going on.

There needs to be a book, something like Simic’s book about Joseph Cornell, which responds to Ashbery in terms of the art.

Sadly, the books are due back at the library March 18th. And this is the Final Renewal, as stamped in red on the renewal slip. I know, this is not a big problem, I could check them out again in a week or even purchase them. But I choose to look at it romantically, like I’m being torn from the arms of the poetry I love.

Look up Ann Lauterbach, discussed in the link above:

Lauterbach herself, who remarked in an interview, “My affinities to Ashbery are certainly there, although I think of myself as more psychological in tone and perhaps more intent and intense; I do not have his laconic, insouciant, inclusive temperament. As I think Ashbery is our great poet, it would be odd not to have learned from him, but as with all great presences, the question is: what part to learn?”

I might also have to dip into Wallace Stevens again, maybe I’ll find him more congenial this time.