[New-Poetry] Re: Tracking the Elusive SoQ

[Chris Stroffolino]

I love that Ashbery presents such weird problems for the lang-types  
who want to condemn others to "SoQ" or whatever they wish to call it...
in this poem (though a short, and relatively 'slight' one for what JA  
was doing at this time, when the lang-pos were just starting to wage  
their young turk schtick--ah the summer of sam and sex pistols and  
the death of robert lowell....),
what Ashbery does with, say, the phrase "simple unconscious dignity"  
in the final lines of the poem
can be, I suppose, taken an endless number of ways---but it does seem  
held as a value,
and while that could seem to defend something like "SoQ" too much to  
those who see it as an abnegation of responsibility,
or "engaged poetry," it also has a force that can be seen as a  
'corrective' (at the very least) to the perils of over-consciousness
that can lead so many to irony, or having very few values like  
'language itself'--
But Ashbery doesn't do this by scolding, as I feel say Robert Hass  
(his blackberry poem) or Robert Duncan or others
(interesting that I'm choosing poets celebrated in the Bay Area, as  
examples here) who often get celebrated as
"serious" and "visionaries," do. Rather, in appealing to the  
suggestive intelligence, even in the modesty of this poem
("narrow ravines"--"might still be putting out shoots"), Ashbery  
seems to leave rooms for all kinds of possibility of languaging,
from that called SoQ to that which criticizes it....

Chris

On Apr 15, 2007, at 6:57 AM, David Graham wrote:

> For some reason I'm not ready to investigate right now, the phrase  
> "elusive SoQ" reminded me of this poem.
>
> I confess I haven't been keeping up with the great SoQ-hunt much,  
> and so don't even know if the Pope has officially inducted little  
> JA into the school yet.  Still, "this poetry of mud" does make me  
> smile.
>
> Crazy Weather
>
> It's this crazy weather we've been having:
> Falling forward one minute, lying down the next
> Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.
> People have been making a garment out of it,
> Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning
> At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls
> To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray
> Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.
> You are wearing a text. The lines
> Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need
> Any other literature than this poetry of mud
> And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily
> Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had
> A simple unconscious dignity we can never hope to
> Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody
> Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,
> Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots,for all we  
> know.
>
> --John Ashbery.  Houseboat Days. Penguin, 1977.
>
>
>
> ========================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
> Poetry Library:
> http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
> ==========================================
>
>
>
> On Apr 15, 2007, at 4:27 AM, TheOldMole wrote:
>
>> From Blogger Tom Morgan, a genealogy:
>>
>> Looking at the early (2003) posts on Silliman's Blog, I pieced  
>> together a SoQ lineage. The unbroken chain looks something like  
>> this: [post 1810*] William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, John  
>> Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant,  
>> Sidney Lanier, James Russell Lowell, Conrad Aiken, Archibald  
>> MacLeish, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, Galway  
>> Kinnell, James Wright, Robert Pinsky, and so forth. Robert Frost,  
>> of course, should fit in here somewhere.
>>
>> http://inthebecomingundone.blogspot.com/2007/04/origins-of-soq.html
>
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