'Kind of Getting It': Helen Tookey on John Ashbery

Helen Tookey

As someone who is still very much in the early stages of getting to know John Ashbery’s work, I found the Spectator’s interview with him following the publication of his latest collection Quick Question both engaging and thought-provoking. Clearly aimed at the non-specialist reader, the interview did a good job of drawing out Ashbery’s thoughts about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, particularly music and painting, and about the productive tensions Ashbery perceives between different kinds of communication through language.

John Ashbery has received
numerous honours including
the Pulitzer Prize and a
McArthur 'genius' Fellowship

Ashbery talks about his envy of composers, whose works are not ‘pinned down to one particular meaning, as language is’, but can nonetheless create in their listeners a ‘sense of satisfaction and understanding’. He also admires the way that a painting, because we perceive it instantaneously as a whole, can communicate to us immediately. ‘Poetry requires time’, he notes; but on the other hand, ‘somehow you look at it, as you can with a work of art, and kind of get it, before you finish reading it’. This recalls T.S. Eliot’s assertion that ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’. What is it, then, that poetry might be communicating to us, before, or separately from, any ‘understanding’ that we might have of it (or even in the absence of any such understanding)?

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that his ideal book of philosophy would be a book of poetry. I have recently been puzzling over what he might have meant by this, and discussing it with poet Jeffrey Wainwright, whose last two collections (Clarity or Death! and The Reasoner) both grapple, I think, with the question of how the space of poetry might also be the space of philosophy. My instinct is that the answer relates to Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing: within language, there are things that can be said, but there are also things that can only be shown. In his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he refers to what cannot be said as ‘the mystical’; in his later Philosophical Investigations, he is more inclined to mean the workings of language (or specific forms of language) itself. Ashbery, in this interview, makes several interesting stabs at indicating what it is that he thinks gets ‘shown’, rather than said, in his poetry. Here he elaborates on his stated wish to ‘stretch the bond between language and communication but not to sever it’ (slightly confusingly, Ashbery is here using ‘communication’ to mean strictly verbal, logical communication, whereas Eliot above is using it in an almost opposite sense, to mean non-verbal, non-logical communication):

Language has its own meaning, which is separate from meaning as communication, or so it seems to me. For example, that language that we hear in dreams is very important to me. I wake up with these words that have just been spoken, and they somehow have a meaning beyond what is possible, even beyond expression. So what is that? It’s almost like the meaning of music. It’s a sort of super-meaning that I don’t know much about except that it constantly attracts me.

'Quick Question with the 
hushed intensity of its 
music and great lyric 
beauty, could only 
be Ashbery.'
Financial Times

Here he seems to be indeed groping towards the idea of some genuine form of ‘meaning’ which nonetheless remains ‘beyond expression’ – the thing that we ‘kind of get’. Again, he returns to painting as an analogy: ‘You look at a painting and say, oh there it is: I see it and I get it’. (It’s worth noting that he is talking about abstract painting rather than obviously representational painting.) What then is this ‘it’? He notes: ‘One thing that seems to get under people’s skin is my frequent use of the word “it”, without any particular attribution, and that again was something that I guess came naturally to me, maybe from seeing so much abstract art’. Here the it, it seems to me, is connected to the idea of showing: the ‘it’ of the abstract painting is the set of relationships among colour and shape and form that the painting shows us, and perhaps the way in which this conduces to a certain emotional response in us, which we can’t necessarily put into words but which we can and most certainly do experience – a kind of ‘communication without understanding’, if by understanding we mean verbal and logical understanding. (As an aside, I wonder whether Ashbery would have encountered such opposition to his ‘it’ were he writing in French or German: English has no direct equivalent to the French il y a or the German es gibt, which seem perfectly to express this sense of the givenness or there-ness of some ‘it’.)

Ashbery makes the case lightly in response to the usual question about lack of intelligibility:

I have always felt that the most important thing that a writer should do is to write something that people will understand. But I also want to write poetry that expresses my usually tangled thoughts without condescending to a reader. How is it possible to have both of these things happen? I sort of hope they somehow will. But I can’t be the judge of whether they do or not. 

What the interview demonstrates most interestingly, I think, is that what’s at stake isn’t simply a matter of the ‘tangledness’ of Ashbery’s, or anyone’s, thoughts; it is also, and more fundamentally, a matter of believing that, alongside its logically communicative functions, language also has a kind of internal energy, which can be set in play in the space of a poem, similarly to the ways in which relations of colour and shape can be put in play in the space, or field, of a painting. In his eighties, Ashbery remains refreshingly energised himself by this pure linguistic energy, and engagingly hopeful that both he and his readers will continue to ‘kind of get it’.


Helen Tookey was born near Leicester in 1969. She studied philosophy and literature at university and has worked in academic publishing, as a university teacher, and as a freelance editor. Her short collection Telling the Fractures, a collaboration with photographer Alan Ward, was published by Axis Projects in 2008. Her verse was anthologised in New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011). She is Managing Editor at Carcanet Press.