a response to “the erotics of pedagogy.” but not yet.
john ashbery. i am teaching him today: “poem in three parts” from self-portrait in a convex mirror. i taught gertrude stein on friday, which i thought would be a useful comparison for ashbery–both writers attempt to shape language around experience, emphasizing the pleasures specific to language. for ashbery, it’s the pleasure of letting your images spin out and away from logic:
Nameless shrubs running across a field
That didn’t drain last year and
Isn’t draining this year to fall short
Like waves at the end of a lake,
Each with a little sigh,
Are you sure this is what the pure day
With its standing light intends?
Loosely, fields and water and a clear bright day but tightly? No so much.
For Stein, it is the pleasure of the way words sound:
Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters hut and shutters and so shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and so.
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exacts as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly as a resemblance , exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.
The way words tumble around in the mind and on the tongue and make some sense but not consistently. And there is the pleasure here of gratuitous words–many authors are so stingy with them and, in real life communication, people generally only want to hear the ones that get them something. It’s a circumstance of limited time–I don’t want to spend too much time listening to people ramble on and on either, even though I like reading texts that ramble on and on.
I wonder how they will take Ashbery?
Stein was difficult. The best I got was that “If I told him” sounded, or made the reader feel, anxious. Today I am going to ask them what they thought that anxiety was about.
