Χαίρετε, νικῶμεν
11 years ago
Monday, February 15, 2010
John Ashbery
Oh what the?! "They Dream Only of America" is a strange poem. I get all prepared for another "we are America" poems, only to find from the beginning that "they dream only of America to be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass"-does this mean they want America to be lost? And this 13 million pillars of grass-why not blades of grass-why pillars? Pillars are permanent, strong, immovable, strong, phallic. Not blades easily stepped on. The final stanza reminds me of Stockholm syndrome-specifically the final lines "there is nothing to do/ for our liberation, except wait in the horror of it/ and I am lost without you". Dependency on the captor turns into sympathy for and love of the captor-only who is the captor, and who is being held captive?
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Heidy,
ReplyDeleteThe poem sounds like the first you've read by John Ashbery. As such, it's a difficult one in that it is obscure, in many ways as obscure as the opening lines you quote: "They dream only of America to be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass." Here, the speaker describes what others dream of--not that they want America to be lost, but to be lost in America, in "thirteen million pillars of grass..." In some ways, this can be read as a convoluted metaphor for the poem, seeking obscurities to mask its intent. It can be read in the context of Ashbery's biography in that he was in France at the time the poem was written and no doubt many people, especially young people Ashbery would know at the time, thought of America as an ideal, rather than an actual place. Or, it could be, as many critics suggest, a confession of homosexuality and its social otherness in America (Ashbery is gay)--as suggested by thirteen million pillars, being the number of homosexuals in America at the time in question... Of course, no interpretation is definitive. You can choose to read the poem different ways on different days throughout your lifetime. Meanings will shift and accumulate over time so, provided the poem was appealing and engaging enough to hold your interest and inspire multiple readings; the overall effect will be one of shifting impressions left upon you by the work over time. So, it may take years of contact with the poem for its meaning to resolve into a spectrum of feeling you find comfortable enough to call "meaning." No doubt, this must seem a bold and very ambitious thing for anyone to attempt in a poem, but Ashbery has been more successful at this kind of thing than almost anyone else in English. It's different, but good--a kind of hyper-poetry which, as Wallace Stevens once put it, "resists the intelligence almost successfully." Good luck, relax and keep reading.
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ReplyDeleteAbove, Ken wrote that "it may take years of contact with the poem for its meaning to resolve into a spectrum of feeling you find comfortable enough to call 'meaning.' "
ReplyDeleteI am wondering if this is a reference to the author's "meaning," or a reference to the "meaning" we give the poem? I grant that it could take a while, and perhaps many readings, even years, to fully grasp authorial intent (to the extent that it is possible to do this), but our own "meaning" wouldn't seem to take nearly as long.
Granted, the "meanings" we give a poem can, and will, change, but I don't think I'd have to study a poem for years before I was comfortable saying what it "means" to me. Maybe that's not what is being asserted in the above quotation, but it's the thought that I had.