Planisphere, John Ashbery, Carcanet, 160pp, £12.95

A planisphere is a circular map of the night sky. It has a plastic rivet in its centre, around which moves another opaque circle, the same size, this one with a little window. When the calibrations along the side of the two circles are properly aligned, one can see the constellations appropriate to any particular latitude, longitude, date and time. It is the kind of thing that was given away free in the seventies inside magazines that, as the accompanying television campaigns had it, would build up week by week into ‘a compendium of the world’s knowledge’.

While I and my fellow nerds were busy working out where exactly the Pleiades were, John Ashbery was writing Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) which, by winning every gong you can think of, marked his acceptance into the mainstream of American letters. This period also saw the condition, or affliction, that we now think of as postmodernism finally assume a stable, recognisable form. The two things are not unconnected, and reading Ashbery’s new volume I found myself wondering once again about what postmodernism actually was and why no one really talks about it any more.

One persuasive argument is that postmodernism was a phenomenon restricted to a relatively short movement in the United States. In the 1950s, this story goes, the tactics and techniques of the avant-garde were rediscovered in New York and Los Angeles – contexts very different from its European origins in London, Paris and Berlin. In the U.S. rampant consumerism and a different conception of the role of art in society resulted in a collapse between high and low culture that was celebrated by a new kind of art, typified by the work of Warhol and his cohorts.

Ashbery’s own biography can be read in this context. Educated at Harvard, his first collection was selected by Auden to win the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Very soon after, however, he travelled to Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship and lived there until 1965. It was in France that he wrote The Tennis Court Oath (1962), a volume of such ferocious disjunction it is still spoken of in awe by the cadres of the experimental jet-set. But this was not the path Ashbery would take. There is one very funny moment in Planisphere where he satirises those who equate poetic disruption with political revolution: ‘To smash the nexus, underemploy/ the conjoining verb’ (‘FX’). The poems that Ashbery wrote when he returned to New York in 1965 are full of conjoining verbs. He stepped back, in other words, from the fragmented, rebarbative forms he had been pursuing and began writing in a way that, while not exactly accessible, was clearly governed by the traditional poetic pleasures. The next decade would see some profound achievements: The Double Dream of Spring (1970), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Houseboat Days (1977).

Ashbery once said that every line should have at least three interesting things going on it, that the poet should load every riff with ore. The remarkable thing is how consistently he has managed to do this over the years. As a consequence the reader is forced constantly to adjust and readjust their relationship with his poems, responding especially to micro-shifts in tone, diction and imagery within and between lines. This is the beginning of ‘Pernilla’, one of the best poems in Planisphere and strongly reminiscent of his earlier work:

Please don’t apologize for pissing me off, you were
probably right, and I was halfway out the door
anyway, the living room door, leading to the hall
and all it contains. How is it that things can get
shiny and be peeling simultaneously? Seriously, Pa …

The rapid, almost invisible movement between very distinct and often jarring moods is very typical. The first line hesitates between polite entreaty and vulgar irritability, while the next remains sceptical even as it makes its resigned concession. Then, as so often in Ashbery, a cliché intervenes but one which is then so swiftly contextualised that it is defamiliarised, made strange: ‘and I was halfway out the door/anyway, the living room door’. The dependent phrase, which seems syntactically to be a clarification, in fact draws attention to the strangeness of the original cliché: how can someone be halfway out of a door? One thinks of Robert Gober’s surrealist sculptures where a fully-clothed arm or leg sticks out from a wall or a piece of furniture. And yet with all this formal jiggery-pokery, there is a recognisable thematic consistency to the passage quoted. On the one hand a sense of contingency, partiality, perplexity, and on the other the deep undertow of age and death: at eighty-two, on any reckoning, Ashbery is more than halfway out of the ‘living room’, and who knows what the hall contains. After the excerpt above the poem continues in a folksy, down-home idiom for a few lines before one is brought up short by a beautiful haunting reference to ‘One who calls in need out of the dusk’. I will return to this line.

Planisphere extends and varies the themes and tactics of Ashbery’s oeuvre. There is no new formal ground broken, but rather an intensification of the collisions and juxtapositions of the earlier work. These poems are more antic, more frantic than the work of the seventies and eighties. And as with other recent collections the trademark zaniness and whimsy are at times cranked up to such a pitch that the tone is hysterical in a clinical rather than comic way, like a Benny Hill chasescene scored by Stockhausen. There is also a sharp edge of crisis to the book, with hints of an attitude towards mass culture and the masses themselves that is more Wyndham Lewis than Andy Warhol: ‘I spent years exhausting my good works/on the public, all for seconds./time to shut down …’ (‘In a Wonderful Place’); ‘And the people?/They’ve left too,/wedged in a fucking dream’ (‘The Logistics’); ‘Someone will come along/to take care of you, polish the millions of you/talking slang, happy as a zoo’ (‘A Penitence’); ‘For the gummed masses it’s the heartbreak/of sameness, as all lines flow together’ (‘The old Jurisdiction’).

In terms of style Ashbery has often seemed to draw deeply on the early modernist prose of writers like Henry James. Modernism reacted to the collapse of moral and political certainties by retreating to the sphere of consciousness or the unconscious, constructing versions of the intimate movements of thought and the texture of individual experience. One way to think of Ashbery as a postmodernist is to see him as ironising those tactics by translating them into an interpersonal, dialogic, conversational idiom. Hence in many of these poems it feels as if we are overhearing one side of a surreal conversation between two (or three, or four) streams of consciousness.

And yet in doing this, by exploding the modernist dream of a consciousness sealed against the encroachments of the world, something is lost. Both Ashbery and his reader forgo the possibility of a vantage point from which they can discriminate between a line like ‘One who calls in need out of the dusk’ and the soundbites, pop songs, headlines, advertising slogans and fragments of political jargon which surround it. The many elegant phrases which lace themselves through these poems begin to sound like just another register, just another mode of speech, rather than any expression of inwardness or emotion. This problem has been worrying Ashbery for some time, so that rather than a postmodern celebration of the collapse of boundaries his recent poetry seems to be anxiously acting out the consequences of that collapse in a much more critical way. He shares this with many of his contemporaries, and it is at the heart of lines like:

Yes and when all dreams come up
for renewal, wiser to seek the unknown
in the interior at its last address.

Dreams and thus the unconscious, so important to Ashbery the surrealist, are here described using the clichés of the insurance policy or the tax disc, which bodes ominously for the (modernist) advice to ‘seek the unknown in the interior’ of the self, which may or may not have moved on from its last address. There is a rueful sense here that even the unconscious has been colonised by the twentyfirst- century’s strange combination of bureaucracy and mutability. And yet, crucially, the search continues. Ashbery may not be expecting his book to add up to a compendium of the world’s wisdom (even if it is arranged alphabetically) but he goes on spinning the wheels of his planisphere, murmuring the constellations’ names and squinting up into the dark.