The Rhetoric of The Closet in John Ashbery's Some Trees

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
"Our Days Put on Such Reticence": The Rhetoric of the Closet in John Ashbery's "Some Trees"
Author(s): Catherine Imbriglio
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 249-288
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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CATHERINE
IMBRIGLIO
"Our Days Puton Such Reticence":

The Rhetoricof the Closet in
John Ashbery's Some Trees
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,

Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
JohnAshbery,"SomeTrees"
But she, of course, was only an effigy
Of indifference, a miracle
Not meant for us, as the leaves are not
Winter's because it is the end.
JohnAshbery,"Illustration"
tW~ *
of the
has it
bery's
terms.
ith few exceptions, notably in the work of Harold

Beaver, Thomas Yingling, Lee Edelman, John
Shoptaw, and David Bergman, most critical writing about John Ashbery has not characterized any
extensive eroticism in Ashbery's poetry as homoerotic, nor
explored relationships between homoeroticism and Ashcelebrated disjunctive language strategies in sociohistorical
The term "critical writing," as I am using it here, is, in fact,
I wish to thank the poet Reginald Shepherd for several invaluable, illuminating conversations regarding many of the issues raised in this essay. I'd also like to thank Mutlu
Biasing, William Keach, and Robert Scholes for their generous responses to the various
stages of my work.
"Some Trees" is reprinted from SomeTrees(New York:The Ecco Press, 1977) by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for John Ashbery. Copyright ? 1956 by John Ashbery.
LiteratureXXXVI,2
0010-7484/95/0002-249 $1.50
Contemporary
? 1995 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
250
CONTEMPORARY
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somewhat misleading: Beaver's comments appear in a review of

ShadowTrain,Yingling's in a text devoted to a study of Hart Crane,
and Shoptaw's in three places, one a 1991 biographical entry on
Ashbery, the second an essay nominally about Ashbery's influence,
and the third a comparative overview of Ashbery's and James Merrill's poetry. So far, Shoptaw's "influence" essay "Investigating The
TennisCourtOath,"Bergman's chapter "Choosing Our Fathers:Gender and Identity in Whitman, Ashbery, and RichardHoward," and
Edelman's "ThePose of Imposture:Ashbery's 'Self-Portraitin a Convex Mirror'" provide the most extensive discussions on this subject
in the critical vein.
In the present essay, I hope to extend the work begun by these
writers by arguing that an inquiry into the ways sexuality is produced and policed in Ashbery's early poetry may reveal something
about the postwar politics of literary production in general, as well
as add another layer of context to the literary,aesthetic, and epistemological frameworks that most critics call upon when responding
to the difficulties of Ashbery's poetry. In particular,I hope to show
that linking Ashbery's disjunctive strategies to a notion of reticence,
one specifically related to representations of sexuality ratherthan to
variations on modernist and postmodernist conceptions of difficulty, as is usually the case with Ashbery criticism, may provide the
grounds for productive new readings of Ashbery's poetry.
The general lack of critical attention to the homoerotic in Ashbery's texts may be partly explained by the fact that it is only relatively recently, since the appearance of important studies from Robert K. Martin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Moon, Yingling,
and others, that inquiry into areas of meaning that emerge from
articulations of homoeroticism in literary texts has been seen as a
legitimate, vital area of critical activity. These writers call attention
to the set of conditions which, up until the late seventies, enabled
suppression of discussions about male homosexuality within the
field of literary criticism. Sedgwick, especially, in Epistemologyof the
Closet, an important sequel to her groundbreaking study of male
homo/heterosexual relationships BetweenMen:EnglishLiteratureand
Male HomosocialDesire, criticizes the academy for a know-nothing
attitude she characterizes as "the core grammar of Don't ask; You
shouldn'tknow":
IM BRIGLIO
251
Don't ask; Youshouldn't know. It didn't happen; it doesn't make any difference; it didn't mean anything; it doesn't have interpretive consequences.
Stop asking just here; stop asking just now; we know in advance the kind
of difference that could be made by the invocation of this difference; it
makes no difference; it doesn't mean.
(53)
Sedgwick's criticism here is directed against customary disciplinary devices that have been deployed by academic institutions in
order to contain or curtail inquiries into representation of male-male
sexual desire, especially in the works of canonical authors. In terms
of poetry, Whitman remains a test case: Thomas Yingling has argued convincingly that Whitman's central position in the Americanist canon has come at the expense of the homoerotic body and its
centrality to the poems. In so arguing, Yingling makes the point
that interpretive practices must constantly be seen in relation to the
materialist cultural politics which shape, restrict, and inform them,
making it essential to identify and acknowledge what's at stake: "It
is time to acknowledge ... use of gay texts for gay readers...
What we are engaged in is a battle for the scene of persuasion in
which the text of homosexuality will be interpreted" (23). This need
to recognize that critical debate takes place within a politics of interpretation is still not always acknowledged in literary studies, with
the result that some forms of interpretation can still be dismissed as
"political" or "ideological" while others are seen as carrying more
"objective" weight because they fit within the prevailing critical
frame.1
In the case of Whitman, whose poetry has been so heavily associated with American democratic ideals, issues like these, involving
the dividing lines for what will be institutionally recognized as "political," still have the potential for being especially provocative
when applied to the interpretive practices surrounding the meaning and significance of representations of the male body. I might
cite, for example, David S. Reynolds's essay "Of Me I Sing: Whitman in His Time," which appeared in the October 4, 1992 issue of
1. For a specific example of how this plays out in actual practice, see Ed Cohen's "Are
We (Not) What We Are Becoming? 'Gay' 'Identity,' 'Gay Studies,' and the Disciplining of
Knowledge."
252
CONTEMPORARY
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The New YorkTimes Book Review. Reynolds, in trying to place Whitman in a nineteenth-century historical context, seems to be invalidating subsequent interpretive contexts, specifically those which
make a claim for the poems' homoerotic primacy. For Reynolds,
Whitman's "poems bring to all kinds of love a fresh, passionate intensity" (29; emphasis added). His essay provoked this response on
a flier from The Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts advertising two December 1992 performances of Jonathan Katz's Comrades and Lovers, which is described as "A Theatre Piece for Voices
Focusing on Erotic Intimacy Between Men in Walt Whitman's Life
and Work":
1992 marks the centennial of Whitman's death, and the academic establishment still insists that the sexuality of our greatest poet was
polymorphous and undefinable: he was perhaps "bisexual," or a "secret womanizer," or occasionally "homoerotic," but certainly not "homosexual." As recently as October of this year, Prof. David Reynolds
argued in The New YorkTimes that because the word "homosexual" had
not been invented yet, the passionate same-sex intimacy suggested in
Whitman's poems cannot be understood as a sign the Good Gray Poet
was the Good Gay Poet.
What this exchange underscores is Sedgwick's point in Epistemology about the ongoing potencies and problematics resulting
from the appearance at the end of the nineteenth century of categories of "homosexual" and "heterosexual."2 Sedgwick's book grows
out of what she calls "the potent incoherences of homo/heterosexual definition" (2), about which she argues that "the historically shifting, and precisely the arbitrary and self-contradictory, nature of the way homosexuality (along with its predecessor terms) has
been defined in relation to the rest of the male homosocial spectrum
has been an exceedingly potent and embattled locus of power over
the entire range of male bonds, and perhaps especially over those
that define themselves, not as homosexual, but as against the homosexual" (185). Such an embattled site has consequences in the history of canon formation, as both Sedgwick and Yingling point out.
2. For discussions of the history and ramifications of this appearance, see Cohen,
Talk;D'Emilio, "Gay History"; Foucault; Halperin; Katz, Gay AmericanHistory and Gay/
LesbianAlmanac;Chauncey; and Weeks.
IMBRIGLIO
253
Yingling, for example, attributes Hart Crane's troubled status

within the modernist canon to decades of criticalinvestments in a
white, male, heterosexist literary tradition, a tradition in which, for
much of this century, homosexuality has been persistently erased or
marginalized.
Given this sort of intellectual climate where, well into the 1980s,
male-male desire was generally considered an inappropriate or unproductive area for mainstream critical inquiry, it is not surprising
that members of the criticalestablishment would find it convenient
and/or proper to ignore or minimalize erotic implications in a poetry
that from the start inscribes "reticence"as a poetic value, a source
and a condition of its own idiosyncratic "composition as explanation" (to borrow a title from Gertrude Stein). It is only quite recently,
for example, that Helen Vendler, a principal Ashbery advocate, has
used the term "gay" in discussing Ashbery's work. In one passage
in her 1992 New Yorkerreview of Ashbery's Flow Chart,she writes,
"Here, in shorthand, is something about (so I gather) growing up
among adults, and growing up gay, and changing by night (in one's
own mind and perhaps in that of others) into a monster, and (another source of adolescent embarrassment) shooting up to over six
feet" (75). And Charles Altieri, generally one of Ashbery's most astute critics, has so far refrained from even this minimal amount of
specificity: in "Ashbery as Love-Poet," Altieri considers the generic
problems of writing love lyrics and seeks out transhistorical"provisional constants" (8) from which to address the fluctuations in Ashbery's poetry. From this perspective, Ashbery's representations of
love, measured against the general conventions of love lyrics, may
be universally applied: "Perhapswe best acknowledge the singularity of a love by registering the ways in which it seems to become
exemplary for us of something that extends beyond the particular"
(10). Ironically, however, such stress on universal applications for
love poetry has the effect of covering over historical actualities
which have prevented homosexual love, once it is so named, from
being associated with universal and/or exemplary categories. Examining the way Ashbery's poetry registers such actualities, on the
other hand, might complicate our understanding of the way categories like the universal and the particularare applicable to the poetry,
as I hope to show.
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One can only surmise at this point how much the critical reluctance to use the term "gay" or "homoerotic" in reviews or in critical
texts, even in passing, has been in deference to Ashbery's wishes
and how much has been due to larger cultural conditions which
have affected what can get said and in what forums. What does get
said by critics while a writer is still alive, however, must be viewed
as part of a complicated field of insider-outsider relationships
within the poetry "industry." Many of the critics who have written
on Ashbery are poets themselves and/or have known Ashbery (and
one another) either personally or professionally; in this respect, the
critical trajectory for the poetry seems partly determined by the protocols that necessarily develop when critics have limited access to
archival material and more access to the living author, who can, and
in Ashbery's case, does, participate in setting the terms for discussion and circulation of his own poetry.3 (One will not find Ashbery's
poetry, for example, in two of the current major gay and lesbian
poetry anthologies, The Penguin Bookof Homosexual Verse, edited by
3. The critical reception of Auden's work could serve as an important paradigm for
what I am calling the critical trajectory for Ashbery's poetry. (In an interview, Ashbery
says he "particularly admired Auden, whom I would say was the first big influence on
my work, more so than Stevens" ["Art of Poetry" 37].) According to Gregory Woods,
Auden tried to dissociate his poetry from his private life, so that "Unfortunately, where
sexuality is concerned, the critics have not found it difficult to act within the spirit of the
ban on biographical revelation. Auden's reluctance to write openly about his homosexuality resulted in a corresponding reluctance, on the part of his commentators, to grant his
sexual orientation any but the most limited relevance to his work. In a curious way, the
'discretion' (for which, read 'ambiguity' or 'obscurity') of the poems was accepted as a
gag on any attempt to understand the experiences which were their source and often,
indeed, their subjects. Critical perception of the poems has largely failed to reach what
turns out to be a rich strain of interest in the nature of homosexual love and, thus, managed to distort Auden's view of sexuality, and of love in general" (169). In an accompanying footnote, Woods documents more than fifty studies which avoid any mention of
homoeroticism or homosexuality (247-49).
In an even more revealing footnote, Woods quotes from a letter Auden wrote to Robert Duncan asking Duncan not to write about "the homo-erotic patterns in Auden's poetry" (247n6). Auden's request is grounded by concerns about both his livelihood and his
credibility: "'As you may know, I earn a good part of my livelihood by teaching, and in
that profession one is particularly vulnerable. Further, both as a writer and as a human
being, the occasion may always rise, particularly in these times [1945], when it becomes
one's duty to take a stand on the unpopular side of some issue. Should that ever occur,
your essay would be a very convenient red herring for one's opponents' " (247; Woods's
source is Faas 195).
IMBRIGLIO
255
Stephen Coote, and Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, edited by
Carl Morse and Joan Larkin.) But while it's difficult to fault critics for
not delivering what amounts to a kind of literary "outing" in the
face of Ashbery's emphatic insistence in interviews that his "poetry
doesn't have subjects" ("Craft Interview" 117), reticence, as feminist and cultural critics have shown, is a concept which needs to be
interrogated for the ways it articulates culturally imposed silences
and stereotypes relating to race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual
orientation.4
One needs to be cautious, however, in responding to the reticence that gets produced in both Ashbery's poetry and in his interviews. Keeping in mind that while there is debate within gay
communities about whether gay men and women should stress
difference or similarity in conducting relations with a dominant
heterosexual culture, there seems to be some consensus that individuals have the right to control the definition and circulation of
their sexual identifications within discourses of sameness or difference. And Ashbery, at least in the context of trying to clarify
his poetic motives and methods, chooses to use vocabularies of
similarity. When asked, Ashbery stresses that in writing poetry
particular details or specific occasions are not what interests him;
he is more interested in "trying to set down a generalized transcript of what's really going in our minds all day long" so that his
poems "are about the experience of experience" ("Experience"
245). Love poems, in particular, are constructed for their universal appeal:
Well, if my poetry is oblique, it's because I want to slant it at as wide an
audience as possible, odd as it may come out in practice. Therefore, if I'm
writing a love poem it won't talk about specifics but just about the general
feeling which anybody might conceivably be able to share.
("Interview"[Tranter]102)
In the same vein, Ashbery has chosen not to discuss for publication
the representation of sexuality in his poems except in a vague, general way. (When he does discuss love or sexuality, he usually avoids
4. The issue of cultural and textual silences has been addressed from a wide range of
theoretical, critical, and personal perspectives. See, for example, Macherey, Eagleton,
Olsen, Rich, Kammer, and Moraga and Anzald6a.
256
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terms which are gender specific.) The following exchange between

Ashbery and John Koethe contains what is probably Ashbery's
most extensive comments in print on the subject of sexuality in his
poetry; the reticence here should be read for its wry, subdued humor as well as for the ways Ashbery manages to both dismiss and
verify the significance of the eroticism in his poetry:
. . . Even though your poems aren't love poems, they often
seem to be poems with sex as their unofficial subject. At the very least
there's a certain eroticism to the language, which tends to be sensuous in
many ways. Are you conscious of this at all?
ASHBERY: No, I sometimes throw in a little sex just because you ought to
have as many things as possible in a poem. There might be a lot of suppressed or sublimated eroticism in my poetry because, as I say, I write off
of people whom I'm thinking about. Some of them are people to whom
I'm sexually attracted. But I try to keep that quiet, not out of prudery, but
just because it seems there are more important things, though I don't yet
know what they are.
KOETHE:
("Interview"[Koethe] 182-83)
This interview took place in 1982, six years after Ashbery won a
literary triple crown (the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics
Circle Award and the National Book Award) for Self-Portraitin a Convex Mirror. By 1982, Ashbery's disjunctive poetic strategies were
pretty well established, so much so that already in 1980 at least one
reviewer, Paul Breslin, could complain that "one has the sense of
Reading Ashbery Again, rather than of reading a new poem by Ashbery" (43). The disjunctive strategies, however, which have generally been interpreted from abstract epistemological perspectives, introduce into the poetry an economy of reticence whose speech acts
are at odds with the stress on similarity and general connectivity
that one finds in the interviews. These dissociating poetic speech
acts, structured by reticence, have active materialist implications.
While Ashbery's poetry does, as Mutlu Biasing has cogently observed, "[take] on the larger formulas of articulation, dismantling
the 'syntax' of their rhetoric" (200), it takes them on not in a private
or public vacuum but in a specific historical domain. The poetry has
a historical context, a context in which, as Eve Sedgwick argues,
following Foucault, "modern Western culture has placed what it
IMBRIGLIO
257
calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to

our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, [so that] it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and
relations by which we know" (Epistemology 3). "Coming out" of
such a historical context, Ashbery's poetry, as I am going to argue,
especially the early poetry of the 1950s, reflects, in part, some of the
difficulties of articulating sexual difference in the face of repressive
social and cultural prohibitions. These prohibitions produce for gay
men and women a condition of social and cultural unacceptability
that Ashbery might be responding to in one of his earliest mirror
poems, "The Thinnest Shadow," from Some Trees (1956):
A face looks from the mirror
As if to say,
"Be supple, young man,
Since you can't be gay."
(43)
Ashbery's use of "gay" in this poem is interesting on at least two

counts. The first concerns the historical accuracy of the term as a
synonym for "homosexual." Jonathan Katz, in his Gay/LesbianAlmanac, gives convincing evidence that prior to the word's appearance
in what one might designate "official" cultural texts (for example,
the first appearance of "gay" as an alternative for "homosexual" in
the New YorkTimes in 1963), the word "gay" was in active use in homosexual subcultures as a privately understood, self-designating
term (15). Katz's documentation includes excerpts from Robert Duncan's "The Homosexual in Society" (see specifically Duncan's "It is
significant that the homosexual's word for his own kind is 'gay'"
[qtd. in Katz 594]), published in Politics in 1944, as well as a glossary
of homosexual slang by Gershon Legman published in 1941 (see especially Katz 571-73 and 577). Also, according to Katz, one of the
"earliest uses of 'gay' for homosexual documented in the United
States" occurs with a "throwaway" line in the 1938 film Bringing Up
Baby: in a scene where Cary Grant is "Asked persistently why he's
wearing that unusual outfit [a woman's nightgown], he finally retorts in exasperation: 'Because I just went gay all of a sudden'"
(537).
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Besides the references supplied by Katz, I know of four other

relevant pre-Stonewall texts in which the word appears: in 1945,
Tennessee Williams used it in two letters to Donald Windham (164,
167);in 1951, Donald WebsterCory discussed its function as an affirmative code word (103-113); in 1956, a scandal sheet called Tip-Off
featured a homophobic piece entitled "Why They Call Broadway
the 'Gay' White Way" (Duberman 220-23); and, in 1955, Frank
O'Hara used "gay" in his poem "At the Old Place" (223-24; the
manuscript of the poem is dated July 13, 1955 [535]).5The article in
Tip-Offis one indication that by the mid fifties, if not sooner, the
term had entered general circulation. The O'Hara poem is especially relevant because the poem tells us that Ashbery, who is referred to by O'Hara as "J.A."and "Ashes," is one of a number of
men who go dancing with O'Hara at the "Old Place";presumably,
J.A./Ashes hears the "in-crowd"joshing (spoken by one member of
the group) in which "gay" is used: "'I knew they were gay / the
minute I laid eyes on them!'" (224). As O'Hara's poem was not
published until 1969 (535), "gay"in "TheThinnest Shadow" may be
an important early use of the word in an "official,"that is, prizewinning, cultural text.
The injunction to "be supple . . . since you can't be gay" is impor-
tant in another respect: these two lines might be described as a response to a "mirrorstage" where socially acceptable conditions for
self-definition doubly fragment inner and outer correspondences.6
In a context where, from the perspective of legal, religious, and
medical institutions, homosexuality is a crime, a sin, or a disease, a
gay subject looking in the mirrordoesn't just simply get a sense of a
separate, individuated (if alienated) self; instead the subject looks
and gets a sense of a severely separated, severely alienated self, one
whose inner recognitions aren't supposed to be, in that they can't
5. For the references to Williams's and Cory's texts, I wish to thank David Savran and
Bradford Robinson, respectively. For the evolving historical nuances leading to "gay" as
a term of choice, see Chauncey 14-23.
6. John Shoptaw's reading of this passage is relevant: "The young Ashbery's response to this repressive climate was neither fight nor flight but a resourceful evasive
action. In 'The Thinnest Shadow' the poet counsels himself (with a disturbingly paternal
tone) to make himself a thin, moving target" ("John Ashbery" 5). I would argue, however, that Ashbery's early texts are more subversive than evasive, as I hope to show.
IMBRIGLIO
259
be legitimately spoken of or publicly enacted. If one's natural sense

of self is thus appropriated by a culturally sanctioned "reflection,"
one way of counteracting such a division of self is to be "supple"
(and subtle) in the way one responds to problems of self-articulation, by creating, for instance, a linguistic space which would
both express and destabilize distinctions between prescribed definitions and behaviors and one's own. In the context of the poem
(whose language strategies evoke the wit one finds in Edward Lear
or children's poetry), the speaker, who figures himself as a thermometer, as a sort of gauge for the temperature of his and other
people's social responses ("A tall thermometer / Reflects him best"),
is conflicted about fracturing and filling this space: "All his friends
have gone / From the street corner cold. / His heart is full of lies /
And his eyes are full of mold" (43). As "mold" here can be read as
"having the power to shape" as well as being a reference to an internalized process of negative cultural differentiation that has shaped
the speaker into a vessel containing images of decay, the doubleness entertained by the word indicates a way the mold of socialization might be cracked, if not entirely broken. That is, if "supple"
is interpreted as "adaptable"as well as "easily bent," the lines "Be
supple, young man, / Since you can't be gay" can be said to be located at an initial stage of Ashbery's defining a "supple" disjunctive
strategy which in its textual bending and adapting has enormous
potential for subverting all sorts of imposed orders. Coupled with a
parallel quest for poetic legitimacy and viability (along the lines of
what new things can get poetically said), these disjunctive strategies create a space from which to enact a powerful, distinctive, and
disruptive poetics. Such a poetics is at once rhetorically open and
reticent; its poetic strategies enact a "rhetoricof the closet" which is
initially a solution (one can enclose and disclose at the same time) to
all sorts of problems of articulation(including those of sexual difference), a solution which in the later poetry becomes more and more
"standardized" as its substance, so that, on the surface at least,
these later poems' disjunctive, decontextualized investigations
may seem primarilymotivated by familiaraesthetic or epistemological concerns.
In speaking of a "rhetoric of the closet," I want to make it clear
260
CONTEMPORARY
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that I am not arguing for an essentialist reading which would limit

the activity of Ashbery's texts. Rather I am aligning myself with
Sedgwick's position that "the relations of the closet ...
have the
potential for being peculiarly revealing, in fact, about speech acts

more generally" (Epistemology3). Because Ashbery's reticence is
also what enables him to incorporate his awareness of the legitimating and delegitimating principles inherent in the constitutive nature of discourse, it is also the means by which he can actively
engage with and subvert such principles. In this respect, the reticence which appears in Ashbery's texts often resembles, but is not
always the same as, the silence which activates the gay closet, a
concept difficult to pin down definitively, as Sedgwick's carefully
worded definition indicates: "'Closeted-ness' itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence-not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and
starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially
constitutes it" (3). But though the reticence in SomeTreesmay accrue particularityin relation to any number of differentially constituting discourses-for example, the discourses of modernism and
romanticism-it can also be seen as a speech act whose performance reflects the conditions of the closet. By almost requiring
that readers take into account the ways reading is affected by discursive and historical contexts surrounding both writer and readers, however, the disjunctive strategies point to a way the silence
of the closet can also be broken by "fits and starts." What follows,
then, is a reading which tries to connect some of the textual instability of Ashbery's early poems to a kind of reticence affected by, in
Sedgwick's terms, "the potent incoherences of homo/heterosexual
definition" (2). These structuringincoherences, modulated through
Ashbery's complementary search for poetic self-definition, become
recognizable in the poems' built-in tensions between the universal
and the particular, in their configurations of gender, and in their
rhetorical responses to the prevailing punitive cultural conditions
of the fifties.
The title poem of SomeTreeshelps establish reticence as an important conceptual underpinning for Ashbery's poetry:
I M B R I GLIO
261
These are amazing: each

Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
(51)
This poem seems activated by the very reticence it finds in its own
acts of spatial and temporal representation. The doubleness of the
can refer to either
key modifier "such" in the last stanza-"such"
degree or kind-alerts us to the possibility that the poem is both a
self-referential illustration of reticence (that is, reticence such as
this, inscribed above in the poem) and an intricate response to a
larger, long-term manifestation of reticence outside the poem, a
manifestation which characterizes the temporal condition of "our
days." In ascribing agency to "our days" and thus minimalizing the
agency of the speaker, reticence becomes not only a rhetorical unwillingness but an externally constituted near inability to explain.
At the same time, the curtailment of subjectivity opens up a field for
understanding (and for amazement) even as the poem minimalizes
agency and distorts logical explanations within its enclosed space.
For the lovers in this poem, the "reticence" taken on by "our
days" matches a basic condition of inexplicability set forth right
262
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
from the beginning with the trees' projected "still performance."

This "still performance" in turn functions as a correlative for the
tentative first stages of love which make the boundaries of the perceiving and speaking self seem open and interchangeable with the
wider world:
you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
In these lines reticence (in the form of an ellipsis) disrupts logical

expectations, destabilizes the traditional mind/world dichotomy,
and creates a new (and minimalist, that is, reticent) perceptional
field of cross-identifications: we are what the trees tell us we are,
which is that their/our "merely" being there means something.
Within this reticent rhetorical field the trees may promise an opportunity for explanation (here last in line in a hierarchy of promises),
but the poem's internal logic of reticence requires that within the
borders of the poem the explanation go unspoken ("soon / We
may"). The gender of the lovers goes unspoken too, as does the context of the love affair and the need for other, wider contexts and explanations for "our days," but in terms of the poem's compositional
relationships, relationships which emphasize displacements (such
as those moving back and forth between the lovers and the trees),
the lack of explanations is alleviated by the final, accomplished joining, the simultaneous metonymic substitution (the visual accents of
the trees, the metrical accents of the poetry, the inexplicable accents
of love) operating in the last line so that what we have is composition as explanation: "these accents seem their own defense."
That this poem wants to make some universal claims about the
ways reticence can enhance the intimacy of love seems fairly clear.
The poem's formal and rhetorical gestures accommodate the goals
of a compositon which seems to want to exclude as much as possible time, specificity, and even desire. (The poem is more about perceptual transformations which are the secondary effects accompanying love, transformations which provide a means of describing
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love in terms other than those representing desire.) Ashbery, however, during the course of his career, has taught us to be wary of
perfect closures, self-contained structures, and tight correspondences. In the light of Ashbery's subsequent work, "Some Trees"
should be read as a poem whose reticence both supports and undermines its structures of coherence. One could go through the poem
and point to internal instabilities which reflect external ones: "as
though speech / Were a still performance";"Arrangingby chance";
"soon / We may"; and so forth, right down to the final conditional,
"seem," and the not quite perfect equation put forth by the reticencel
defenserhyme. But indeed the internal threats of destablization in
this poem seem minor compared to the immediate and literal external threats, for most of the poems which "surround""Some Trees"
seem to threaten it, beginning with the two most proximate, "Illustration"and "Hotel Dauphin," and moving on out through the rest
of the poems in the volume. These poems are indeed "glad not to
have invented / Such comeliness": they do not mean to present the
reader with a mild "silence already filled with noises, / A canvas on
which emerges // A chorus of smiles, a winter morning." Instead
they mean to destabilize themselves and "Some Trees"with a narrative and/or rhetorical violence that seems directed against that
poem's momentary calm, against its (en)title(ment), against its "accents [which] seem their own defense," against its formalizations of
love. These "other" poems work out of different, more aggressive
systems of the reticence/defense configuration found in "Some
Trees."
In contrast to the "comeliness" which is an internal/externalfocal
point of "Some Trees," for instance, "Hotel Dauphin" and "Illustration" take on death as one of their subjects, both maintaining at
least a tenuous relationship to the conventional elegy. For the purposes of this essay, however, I am going to concentrate on "Illustration," first by grounding it within a more conventional reading and
then, after digressing a bit to take up the issue of the universal and
the particularin relation to Ashbery's poetry, by circlingback to discuss how homosexuality is made intelligible through that poem's
configurations of gender.7
7. For an important, though from my perspective "discreet," introductory analysis of
Ashbery's early poems, see David Shapiro, who notes that "Ashbery's early work is
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CONTEMPORARY
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"Illustration," like "Some Trees," is an attempt at "composition as

explanation," but one whose motive for metaphor is much more
indeterminate. It is about a "novice" (an initiate? a nun?) who commits a public suicide by jumping off a city building. (Actually the
text says "she drifted softly downward / Out of the angels' tenderness and the minds of men" [49].) The death of the novice/poet/
muse figure provides the unconventional, comic occasion for a serious meditation about poetic inspiration, apprenticeship, and form.
Her suicide is performance, figuration, and ceremony ("For that the
scene should be a ceremony // Was what she wanted. 'I desire /
Monuments,' she said. 'I want to move //Figuratively'" [48]), and in
a sense the poem could be said to be about (re)figuring the ceremonial and performative transgressions necessary to achieve poetic
heights. (The poem both raises and deflates the possibility of such
ambitions.) The poet/muse figure is a bit ridiculous: she wants adulation, propitiatory offerings (which she denies she wants), and
high drama. The police just beg her to "come off it" (48), and after
her climactic performance she drifts out of "the minds of men." If
one interprets this poem allegorically, keeping in mind allegory's
sense of textual belatedness, the poet/observer who appears in part
2 can be read as rejecting the kind of exhibitionist poetry (in the
form of a "monumental" sacrificial romance) represented by the
Desiring Yeatsian ceremony and monupoet/apprentice/nun.
in
this
is
the
ments,
case,
equivalent of poetic suicide; envisioning
such desire from a skewed, comic perspective, however, is an "illustration" of poetic inspiration.
Like "Some Trees" (and many of the other poems in this volume),
"Illustration" works off a rhetorical base of desirable and undesirable correspondences.8 Part 2 states its case for going beyond corresignificant for the preponderance of dream imagery" (35) and that it "often explores
sexual ambiguities in a fractured narrative" (36).
8. One might trace here the beginnings of Ashbery's "ironic" mode of thinking. In
arguing against Emerson as the central, authorizing figure for an American poetic tradition, Mutlu Biasing proposes four structural tropes with which to differentiate the approaches poets take in representing their understanding of the relationship between
language and the world. Connecting metonymic, metaphoric, and synecdochic thinking
with poetic strategies of allegory, analogy, and anagogy, respectively, Biasing explains
how the fourth, "ironic" or "anomalous," way of thinking (with its literalist poetic strategies) can be said to contest such structurings: "[Hayden] White observes that while the
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265
spondences, in particular, conventional correspondences (that is,

metaphors, which are, in effect, like moths climbing into a flame
and hence, like the nun, suicidal):
Much that is beautiful must be discarded
So that we may resemble a taller
Impression of ourselves. Moths climb in the flame,
Alas, that wish only to be the flame:
They do not lessen our stature.
We twinkle under the weight
Of indiscretions. But how could we tell
That of the truth we know, she was
The somber vestment? For that night, rockets sighed
Elegantly over the city, and there was feasting:
There is so much in that moment!
So many attitudes toward that flame,
We might have soared from earth, watching her glide
Aloft, in her peplum of bright leaves.
But she, of course, was only an effigy
Of indifference, a miracle
Not meant for us, as the leaves are not
Winter's because it is the end.
(49-50)
To achieve its figuration, the language in part 2 suggests movement in a direction that is predominantly up (with the exception of
the poem's last four lines), so that beginning with the downward
glide of the naked novice disrobed by the wind in part 1, the text
contains traces of erotic suggestions that were not present in the
love poem "Some Trees." Within this erotic context, the poet/
firstthreetropesare'naive,'implyingfaithin the capacityof languageto graspthe nature
of things in figurativeterms, the trope of irony is 'metatropological':
it uses figurative
language self-consciously,in orderto questionits claimsto knowledgeor truth"(5). For
Biasing, Dickinson, Crane, and Ashbery use anomalous (ironic) strategies; Poe, Eliot,
and Plath, allegoricalones; Emerson,Stevens, and Bishop, the metaphoric;and Whitman, Pound, H.D., Williams, and O'Hara the anagogic. In "Illustration," the allegoric,
metaphoric, and anagogic are all seductive strategies, but these ways of thinking, while
not quite discarded, begin to break apart under the pressure of the poem's ironies.
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CONTEMPORARY
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speaker paradoxically (and therefore ironically) rejects the allegory

of (poetic) desire even as he uses it as a vehicle for interpretation.
(The poem, for example, concludes with a clever textual climax, one
which anagogically, that is, apocalyptically, tries to level the form/
content dichotomy by demonstrating what happens when allegory
does, and therefore does not, achieve its object/goal, finish/end: "as
the leaves are not / Winter's because it is the end.") Beauty (and the
beauty of allegory, with its hopes for final possession of endlessly
deferred meaning) must be discarded in order to attain a tenuous
poetic growth, one sustained by unstable, provisional resemblances of metaphor: "Much that is beautiful must be discarded / So
that we may resemble a taller // Impression of ourselves." This resembling a taller impression, in a sense, is what the nun is doing.
But she is also like the metaphoric moth, self-destructively wishing
to bethe flame, the anagogic taller impression. These grand suicidal
moths (and nuns), the text claims, do not lessen the poet/speaker's
stature. (The speaker twinkles-flickers, glimmers, is amusedunder the weight of his own indiscretions.) He can both claim and
disclaim the rhetorical strategies of correspondence by substituting
his own metatextual performance for the nun's. Within such a performance the poet can even imagine that he might soar in exhilaration launched by his recognition that there are numerous possible
attitudes toward the flame (of inspiration). That is, he might have
soared, but he does not. Of the many possible attitudes "toward
that flame," he chooses one which excludes him, rejecting the potential allegory he has set up: "Butshe, of course, was only an effigy
/ Of indifference, a miracle // Not meant for us."
One might, of course, stop here. Stop, that is, by confining the
interpretation of this poem to a discussion of the poem's own examination of poetic heights and grounds, rendering a typical reading which might go something like this: In this poem Ashbery
uses allegory to deconstruct allegory, in order to interrogate and
update the terms for poetic function.9 In doing so he re-creates a
9. Donald Revell gives an interesting alternate reading (but one which is typical of
current Ashbery criticism) of the latter half of this poem: "The phrases 'mean' by failing to
add up, by congregating possibilities, most of them contradictory, but not synthesizing
them. The particular (e.g., the effigy) and the general (e.g., the undetailed miracle) no
longer function as categories in such a congregation because Ashbery refuses to allow
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267
sort of comic elegy whereby he offers a change of venue for modern poetic practice by rewriting the terms of both the visionary
experience and its loss, a loss not quite like the one caused by the
intrusive Calidore who, in trying to know more about the naked
graces in book 6 of The Faerie Queene, causes them to disappear.
(In Some Trees Ashbery evokes Spenser in another, but "madder,"
mirror poem, "Eclogue.")
Limiting the discussion to the "situation of poetry" (to borrow
Robert Pinsky's apt title) is just about what Auden does in his rather
unenthusiastic foreword to the book he chose as the winner for the
Yale Series of Younger Poets award. In his introduction, Auden
makes a distinction between the public and private functions of poetry and their connections to the sacred. For Auden, in the golden
age of antiquity, the sacred was real and poetry could convey that
sacred reality; while contemporary poetry may engage in the imaginative life, it's a life which is too particularized to convey universal
sacred principles. In writing this foreword, Auden seems to want to
caution Ashbery against an excessive subjectivity which neglects
the universal, sacred, public function for poetry. He uses the subject
of "Illustration," for example, to criticize indirectly the tendency
toward the private that he finds in Ashbery's texts:
Further, a modern poet who celebrates his inner mythological life cannot escape asking himself: "Do I really believe in my mythology and, if I
do, ought I to believe it?"
The subject of Mr. Ashbery's poem "Illustration" is a woman who acts
out her private mythology and denies the reality of anything outside herself; that is to say, she is insane.
(14)
Even though Auden does not turn out to be a particularly perceptive first reader of individual Ashbery poems, he does perspicaciously foreground what will become an ongoing issue for Ashbery
criticism: the question of whether the poetry is so private and particularized as to severely curtail its ability to communicate anything
of significance to the reader. In response to such criticism, Ashbery
has insisted on the universal applicability of his poetry: "What I am
them to refer to anything beyond themselves. As winter is the literal, intentionless end of
nature, this passage represents the literal, unaggressive end of metonymy" (16).
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CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
trying to get at is a general, all-purpose experience-like those

stretch socks that fit all sizes" ("Experience"251). This tendency,
however, on the part of both Auden and Ashbery, to rely ratheruncritically on convenient but tricky cultural formulations such as the
universal and the particularis not without problems. It suggests, on
the one hand, an apparently unrecognized (at least publicly) and/or
unquestioned complicity with dominant cultural imperatives, imperatives such as those that Arnold Rampersad criticizes in his essay "The Universal and the Particularin Afro-American Poetry."In
calling attention to, in this case, racist cultural assumptions on
which universal standards of truth and beauty have been based,
Rampersad writes: "In a colonial situation, an inevitable contradiction exists between the universal as interpretedby the dominant culture and the local as derived by the colonial out of the experiences of
his own oppressed group. Historically there has been little to encourage the black writer to reconcile his experience of the particular
with an understanding of the universal as advertized by the dominant culture" (5).
Rampersad's point about the difficulties of reconciling the universal with the particular for black writers could be extended to show
that Ashbery's texts are not exempt from the materialist implications surrounding these culturally loaded binaries. One could argue, for instance, that the universal applications that Ashbery
claims for his texts are inextricablylinked to his privileged positioning in relation to culturally constructed categories of gender, race,
and class, the latter two especially involving concepts and conditions which are never really the object of Ashbery's dismantlements
(as the concept of culture is), but in fact are reinscribed in his poetry
over and over again. Class, with its usual overtones of economic,
social, intellectual, and artistic empowerment (as well as associations with one of the most entrenched gay stereotypes, linking gay
men with high culture), is important for the way its particulardiscourses and others associated with the patriarchy significantly
shape the reticence in Ashbery's texts. In minimizing the particular
(if one follows Ashbery's characterizationrather than Auden's) in
his poetry and writing so abstractly,Ashbery exposes the logic (and
illogic) of rhetorical and hence epistemological formulations, but in
doing so, he also exposes the depths of his and any receptive audi-
IMBRIGLIO
269
ence's investment in maintaining and reproducing such structures,

even if only for the purpose of keeping them continuously available
for deconstruction.
This issue is no less fraught with confusions when one turns the
mode of address to issues of sexuality. Sedgwick, who argues that
the always unstable nexus of homo/heterosexual definition "has
been a presiding master term of the past century, one that has the
same, primary importance for all modern Western identity and social organization (and not merely for homosexual identity and culture) as do the more traditionally visible cruxes of gender, class, and
race" (Epistemology 11), maintains that one of the contradictions internal to a twentieth-century understanding of homo/heterosexual
definition involves a "contradiction between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance
primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority
(what I refer to as a minoritizing view), and seeing it on the other
hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the
lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a
universalizing view)" (1).10While she obviously leans toward favoring the latter viewpoint during the course of her book, Sedgwick
does not want to "adjudicate" between these two positions because
"no epistemological grounding now exists from which to do so" (2).
And what about Ashbery? Judging from the purposeful evasions
and generalizations that take place in the interviews, it would seem
that he is also caught between the contradictions of what Sedgwick
calls "this conceptual incoherence" (86). On one rare occasion when
he does write about homosexuality for publication, however, Ashbery relies on these contradictions to discredit rather vehemently an
instance of homophobic exclusion, in this case the surrealists' condemnation of homosexuality. Writing for The New Republic in 1968,
Ashbery appears to be aligning himself with the minoritizing view
10. In an important critique of Frank Lentricchia's antifeminist and heterosexist recuperation of the patriarchy in Ariel and the Police, Lee Edelman makes a similar point: "For
like the question of feminism, to which it may never be entirely assimilable but from
which it is never wholly separable either, homosexuality is indeed an 'all embracing
issue' whose decisive effects in the shaping of modern ideologies of gender and sexuality
can be traced in the strategic blindness at work in his own [Lentricchia's] cultural critique" ("Redeeming the Phallus" 45).
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CONTEMPORARY
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("since homosexuality affects a relatively small fraction of humanity"), though his remarks contain grounds for deconstructing such
a position:
As the Surrealist movement pursued its stormy course, exclusions,
anathemas and even suicide followed in the wake of Breton's rulings and
pronouncements. Sexual liberty, he proclaimed, meant every conceivable
kind of sexual act except for homosexuality-a notion that would have
seemed odd to the Marquis de Sade, the Surrealists' unimpeachable authority on matters sexual. This exception may seem unimportant, since
homosexuality affects a relatively small fraction of humanity, but to restrict something proclaimed as "total" is to turn it into its limited opposite. And in this case one of the most brilliant of the Surrealist writers,
Rene Crevel, happened to be a homosexual. His suicide a few days after a
notorious row between Breton and Ilya Ehrenburg (who with his customary finesse had qualified the Surrealist movement as "pederastic"), at the
time of an international Communist cultural congress in Paris from which
the Surrealists were excluded, was a blow to Surrealism and to literature.
Though Maurice Nadeau in his History of Surrealism avoids linking
Crevel's suicide to this incident and calls it an act of "attempted affirmation" (of the irrational, apparently), it seems obvious that Crevel must
have felt like an exile in the promised land he helped discover. And what
is one to think of a vanguard literary movement that found it necessary to
excoriate Antonin Artaud?
(ReportedSightings6)
"But to restrict something proclaimed as 'total' is to turn it into its

limited opposite": by exposing the exception that negates the rule,
Ashbery demonstrates just how easily a universal/particular binary collapses. This attack on the surrealists' exception also implicitly calls into question the delimiting premise about homosexuality
that precedes it and, in doing so, leaves open the possibility that
homosexuality touches more than the "relatively small fraction of
humanity" who identify themselves as gay. Crevel's death, for
starters, "was a blow to Surrealism" and, presumably, to anyone
interested in surrealist writing or art. It's possible to go from here
and produce an ever widening circle of affected persons; more immediately relevant to my discussion of Ashbery, however, are the
various and sometimes conflicting ways parents, friends, and relatives of gay men and women are affected by a loved one's sexual-
IM BRIGLIO
271
ity. The reactions of these individuals may be positive, negative,

indifferent, or mixed, but invariably they are reactions that return
to the gay subject; in the case of Some Trees,many of the poems
seem shaped in response to a nonsupportive, even hostile, familial
and social environment. Any of these poems' gestures toward universality or particularity therefore are marked by the destabilizing
permissions and prohibitions emanating from oppressive social
contexts.
The instability of the universal/particulargestures in the early poetic texts becomes apparent when one looks at the scene of instruction provided in one of Ashbery's most accessible poems, "The Instruction Manual." Briefly,the speaker, a sort of voyeur in the land
of his own imagination, daydreams about a "City I wanted most to
see, and most did not see, in Mexico!" (14). Instead of working on
the manual that he is supposed to be writing "on the uses of a new
metal" (14), the speaker imagines himself observing some of the
people in his city. He focuses on people in twos: a mustachioed man
and his wife; a young man and a young girl; a mother and the picture of her son; a father and a daughter. The poem can be (and has
been) interpreted as a dramatization of the romantic imagination's
inability to sustain its visions-at the end of the poem the speaker
has to turn his "gaze" back to the instruction manual-but there is
another sense in which the speaker, if he remained in the Guadalajara of his imagination, would be, like Crevel, "an exile in the
promised land he helped discover."11If one pays attention to the
economies of inclusion/exclusion, completion/limitation at work at
the end of the poem, as well as to the mock tour-guide tone (artificially upbeat, matter-of-fact, curiously childlike) that pervades
most of it, one might get the impression that for the person behind
the persona this place would not be utopia:
11. Paul Breslin sees this poem as "absolutely characteristic in theme though not in
manner" of Ashbery's essential subject, which he describes as follows: "The Ashbery
speaker, caught in his flat though comfortable world where nothing happens, and where
all illusions have long since been investigated and unmasked, nonetheless cannot resist
the dim intimation that amid all this exhausted familiarity, some transcendent revelation
may flash upon him and change everything, if only he is attentive enough to receive it.
Again and again, the moment seems at hand, but when his abortive epiphanies trail off
into nonsense or banality, he keeps his balance and regards the puncturing of his latest
illusion with urbane detachment" (Psycho-PoliticalMuse 217).
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CONTEMPORARY
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How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of
Guadalajara!
We have seen young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother for
her son.
We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses.
What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.
(18)
The narrator's vision in "The Instruction Manual" is as determinedly "rose-colored" as J. Alfred Prufrock's is determinedly fragmented and fog-bound. (The poem mischievously alludes to its
predecessor at about the halfway point: "Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the side streets" [16].) But in describing this
excursion into the land of heterosexuality (can, after all, three representations, of young, married, and parental love, work as universal
stand-ins for other possible expressions of love?) as contradictorily
limited yet complete, and then rejecting it (one might invoke Ashbery's comments on the surrealists here), the poem exposes the
heterosexist assumption lurking behind a universal interpretation
of the speaker's gaze. It exposes it, that is, if one looks. What "The
Instruction Manual" teaches is not simply something about the limits of the romantic imagination, but something about the limits of
seeing from a universal perspective automatically defined from a
heterosexual norm. This also applies to the other poems in Some
Trees, but I might cite as a specific example the poem "And You
Know," which I read as a companion piece to "Illustration," since it
involves another escape from a "scene of instruction." The poem is
a sort of a mock "valediction eliciting mourning," but if read from a
perspective other than "heterosexual," the suffocating atmosphere
of the "humid classroom" (58) takes on many overtones of a closeted text. The gender references particularly become destabilized if
one recognizes that the poem could be drawing on a gay male practice of subverting gender codes for protection and/or parody (in
straight or gay contexts, respectively) by referring to other gay men
as female ("The girls, protected by gold wire from the gaze / Of the
onrushing students, live in an atmosphere of vacuum" [56]). In this
respect, the impulse to escape confinement multiplies the contradictions found in the poem's "rite of passage" motif; the poem prefig-
IMBRIGLIO
273
ures the "coming out" process evoked in one of Ashbery's most

important early poems, "How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher .. ." from The Tennis Court Oath. Ash-
bery, of course, is an expert at maintaining a destabilizing multiplicity of vision; consequently one misses much of the richness of his
poetry by not multiplying one's reading of it, in this case, by including a perspective in which homosexuality could become, if not the
norm which subsumes the heterosexual, the historically contingent
category which contests the primacy of heterosexuality as a fixed,
unproblematized, definitive term. One could go even further and
argue that in the world of the poems, especially the later ones, the
norm for representations of desire is homosexual.12At this point,
however, I need to return to my discussion of "Illustration."
One might begin (again) with a question: Why is the figure of the
nun in that poem described as "the somber vestment," "an effigy of
indifference," "a miracle not meant for us"? To answer such a question, one would do well to turn attention to the single question
posed in the poem: "But how could we tell / That of the truth we
know, she was // The somber vestment?" (49). Contradictions
abound. The exotic nun, who is "naked / As a roc's egg" (a roc is a
fabulous bird of prey), is also the "sombervestment." The question
"how could we tell" (know? explain?) sticks out because of its inclusion of the words "truth" and "somber" in the middle of textual
fireworks. The argument thus proceeds by inversion and oxymoron: the exotic nun is the "somber vestment"-the metaphor-for
12. In his review essay on ShadowTrain,"The Dandy at Play," Harold Beaver seems to
take this position: "For the nature of that desire, between that neutral 'you' and 'I,' is
"
absolutely reversible, absolutely homosexual, like the glyph '69' (60). For a controversial extension of the idea of a homosexual norm, see Richard D. Mohr, who wants to "try
to advance tentatively an idealization of gay male experience-to position beyond mere
tolerance, beyond acceptance, and even beyond aesthetic celebration. ... I suggest that
male homoerotic relations, if institutionalized in social ritual, provide themost distinctive
symbol for democratic values and one of their distinctive causes. They will help stabilize
the always teetering basic structures of democracy, by serving as a model for the ideal of
equality" (139-40). For a slightly different, more theoretical proposal, see Gregory
Bredbeck, who argues that a homosexual system of signification (such as that found in
Frank O'Hara's poetry) provides a means of deprivileging the phallus (269). This idea of a
homosexual ground or norm, whether in Ashbery's poetry or in a larger frame, is of
course problematic, but it is not my purpose to debate its merits here.
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CONTEMPORARY
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the version of "the truth we know." On the level of metaphor, the

text is not at all reticent about this truth that "we know": "Illustration" is about the desire for figuration ("I want to move // Figuratively, as waves caress / The thoughtless shore") and it means to
illustrate the logical, futile consequences of trying to follow through
with that desire. The text, however, makes its case by doing just
that-that is, moving figuratively-and it obviously takes pleasure
in, in fact, takes every opportunity to underscore, the contradictions such figurative movements provide. How then, is the nun
"only an effigy / Of indifference, a miracle // Not meant for us"? Of
the "many attitudes toward that flame," why choose this one? I am
going to suggest that one reason for the incoherence that appears at
this point in the text resides in the fact that representations of poetic
inspiration are conventionally gendered female. In Spenser, particularly in book 6, the muse figure, no matter how endlessly she is
(allegorically)displaced, is viewed by the poet (and the poet's surrogates) as an object of desire; it is through her role as both source and
object that she in fact "engenders" the poem. In Ashbery's text,
however, this female figure represents a double impossibility. It is
not only the desire for figuration that she represents that doesn't
work, but the specific, conventionally gendered representation of
desire that doesn't work. In this sense, the nun expresses what the
text is reticent about: she cloaks "the truth we know." (It should be
obvious at this point that the "we" here, as well as in many of Ashbery's other poems, is not necessarily a universal or all-inclusive
"we.") While the nun has been the occasion, this time, for poetic
inspiration, she can't be a true source or object for poetry. Like the
leaves which can't be possessed by winter "[just?]because it is the
end," as "a miracle // Not meant for us" she necessarily has to drift
out of "the minds of [some] men."
Unlike Eliot, who in early poems like "Prufrock,""Portraitof a
Lady," and "La Figlia Che Piange" has trouble separating his ambivalence about women from his ambivalence about his poetic vocation, Ashbery here establishes the female as both "an effigy of
indifference" and "a miracle not meant for us," thus escaping the
entrapping formulations of Eliot's misogyny. This is not to say that
it isn't possible to find disquieting muses in SomeTrees.The opening lines of "PopularSongs," for instance, read:
IMBRIGLIO
275
He continued to consult her for her beauty

(The host gone to a longing grave).
The story then resumed in day coaches
Both bravely eyed the finer dust on the blue. That summer
("The worst ever") she stayed in the car with the cur.
That was something between her legs.
(10)
Interpreting this poem, whose gestures toward "coherence" depend primarily on our recognitions of its minimal references to the
mechanisms of plot, is something of a comic magical-mystery ride.
That the poem's images of woman occur in the context of something
called "Popular Songs" should be a clue: the first section of the
poem mixes up discourses from several genres (elegies, popular
songs, children's stories, historical romances) as well as from everyday speech and strips them of their contexts in order to disrupt
conventional narratives of desire (and conventional desires for narrative), such as those one might find in the popular songs of the
fifties. Finding something or not finding something between a
woman's legs has different resonances depending upon the way an
individual experiences desire; that the poem is going after the conventions of compulsory heterosexuality and replacing them with its
own textual erotics seems clear when one considers that it is the
heterosexual male who is expected to find and take advantage of the
nothing between a woman's legs. (Shakespeare, of course, was an
expert recorder of the numerous confusions that could come from
associating sexuality with the word "nothing.")
It's not possible, of course, to settle the sexual orientation of
this particular speaker, but the passage is one of the few occasions in Ashbery's early poetry where the female is "used" as a
site from which to distinguish different configurations of male desire. Following the argument Eve Sedgwick puts forth in Between
Men, I would suggest that any misogyny that may be detected
here comes as a result of historical conditions which encode the
female as the proper ground through which articulations of male
homosocial bonding in the homophobic atmosphere of compulsory heterosexuality might appear. While it's not possible to recover "the plot" from this poem, most of the identifiable emotional resonances in the first section, with the exception of the
276
CONTEMPORARY
LI TERATURE
comic "metatextual" comment of the last line ("Some precision,

he fumed into his soup"), seem directed toward a presiding female figure: "He continued to consult her for her beauty"; "Alton
had been getting letters from his mother / About the payments";
"on the / Blue blue mountain-she never set foot"; "Meanwhile
the host / Mourned her quiet tenure" (10). The "solution" to this
text will always remain unattainable (based as it is on multiplying
notions of the lack alluded to in the beginning of the poem), but
it's possible to argue that some of its pleasures come at the expense of the female: she becomes recognizable primarily as a
mechanism of plot, and it is her presence (interference?) and not
her absence which seems to be the occasion for the extended
mourning ("The tears came and stopped, came and stopped")
that takes place at the end of the first part of the poem. Of
course, with a text this open and this reticent, it's important to
remember that whatever happens in this poem happens on a
complicated representational field; in terms of my reading, the
poem's apparent disenchantment with women should not be
seen as aimed at actual women but at the power of rhetorical and
discursive formulations whereby women are made to serve as figures for coercive cultural dynamics which regulate structures of
desire between and among genders.
While the textual disturbances in "PopularSongs" seem activated
by the figurative presence of women, generally the textual impetus
in SomeTreesseems geared toward eliminating the figure of the female as a source of textual anxiety. Relinquishing the figure of a
woman as an object of desire, a symbol of moral order, and a mediator between men would mean that women would not be part of the
misogynist/homophobic circuit of male homosocial desire; it might
also help clear the way for open expressions of homosexual desire.13
None of this occurs in the book, but at least two of the poems at the
end of Some Treesdo pose questions about what would happen if
this figure lost power or even disappeared:
13. For a more assertive reference to this motif, one with readily identifiable gay associations, specifically the Orpheus myth, see "Syringa" in HouseboatDays: "Of course
Eurydice vanished into the shade; / She would have even if he hadn't turned around"
(69).
IMBRIGLIO
277
What will his crimes become, now that her hands

Have gone to sleep?
("A Long Novel" 64)
The gods worship a line-drawing

Of a woman, in the shadow of the sea
Which goes on writing. Are there
Collisions, communications on the shore
Or did all secrets vanish when
The woman left? Is the bird mentioned
In the waves' minutes, or did the land advance?
("Lelivreest sur la table"75)
The first poem doesn't really answer the question but rather cryptically has the muse/authority figure and the poet/transgressor operate in parallel but contradictory spheres enacting a sort of nascent
"other tradition":
Except that, in a new
Humorous landscape, without music,
Written by music, he knew he was a saint,
While she touched all goodness
As golden hair, knowing its goodness
Impossible, and waking and waking
As it grew in the eyes of the beloved.
("A Long Novel" 65)
The second poem, "Le livre est sur la table," the last poem in the
volume, is interesting on several counts. It both imitates and rewrites Stevens; it begins with lines that could be read as indicating
a privately felt sense of personal as well as artistic relativity ("All
beauty, resonance, integrity, / Exist by deprivation or logic / Of
strange position" [74]); it is a poem about poetry that resonates
back to another poem about poetry, "The Mythological Poet,"
which also ends with a question ("Might not child and pervert /
Join hands, in the instant / Of their interest, in the shadow / Of a
million boats; their hunger / From loss grown merely a gesture?"
278
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
[36]).14The last stanza of "Lelivre,"the stanza on which SomeTrees

closes, is the most interesting, for its two rhetoricalquestions, one
about secrets ("Or did all secrets vanish when / The woman left?")
and one about the threat of erasure ("Is the bird mentioned / In the
waves' minutes, or did the land advance?"), underscore the thematic and textual reticence which lies at the heart of the book. Both
questions point back to a pattern of reticence which can be traced
thematically as well as rhetoricallyin many of the poems. Thematically this reticence often takes the form of brief allusions to information which could or should be given, or even which has been
given, but the allusions are usually embedded in texts whose
destabilizing rhetorical gestures suggest that such revelations are
unwarranted or unwelcome. Some of the key terms are "true,"
"know," "honesty," "secrets," "denial," and "lies": "We see us as
we truly behave" ("Two Scenes"); "This is perhaps a day of general honesty / Without example in the world's history" ("Two
Scenes"); "There is no way to prevent this / Or the expectation of
disappointment. / All are aware, some carry a secret / Better"
("Popular Songs"); "Slowly all your secret is had / In the empty
day" ("Eclogue");"Of who we and all they are / You all now know.
But you know / After they began to find us out we grew / Before
they died thinking us the causes // Of their acts" ("The Grapevine"); "I'll do what the raids suggest, Dad...
/ But the tide
pushes an awful lot of monsters / And I think it's my true fate" ("A
Boy"); "He I Couldn'tlie" ("A Boy"); "We were lying, / We do not
want to fly away" ("Grand Abacus"); "The screen of supreme
14. This poem about poetic vocation begins as a Stevensian meditation on the conflict
between ideas and "the world of things," but it turns into a not-quite-open manifesto
against inscriptions of homophobia such as those spoken by the "they" in the poem: "We
/ Are sick, they said. It is a warning / We were not meant to understand" (35). If the first
section of the poem seems somewhat distracted and out of touch in its staging of a conventional dialectic between a poetry of ideal forms and a poetry of sensory experience,
the second part turns against a rarefied way of thinking which would deny the
homoerotic body. According to the first stanza in the second section, for example, making the gay poet a bodiless receptacle for poetic inspiration is what actually renders him
perverse, in effect "merely / An ornament, a kind of lewd / Cloud placed on the horizon"
(35). The second stanza then provides a space which begins to take the homoerotic body
into account by defiantly imagining "the mythological poet" as "Close to the zoo, acquiescing / To dust, candy, perverts; inserted in / The panting forest, or openly / Walking in
the great and sullen square" (35).
IMBRIGLIO
279
good fortune curved his absolute smile into a celestial scream.

These things (the most arbitrarythat could exist) wakened denials,
thoughts of putrid reversals as he traced the green paths to and
fro" ("The Young Son"); "His heart is full of lies" ("The Thinnest
Shadow"); "From all things sucked / A glossy denial. But look,
pale day: / We fly hence. To return if sketched / In the prophet's
silence. Who doubts it is true?"("Errors");"Buthow could we tell /
That of the truth we know, she was // The somber vestment?" ("Illustration"); "My door is always open. I never lie, and the great
heat warms me" ("And You Know"); "He is the liar behind the
hedge / He grew one morning out of candor" ("He");"Are there /
Collisions, communications on the shore // Or did all secrets vanish when / The woman left?" ("Lelivreest sur la table").Once such
references are viewed cumulatively, a "pattern that may carry the
sense" ("Daffy Duck in Hollywood," HouseboatDays 34) begins to
emerge as subtext, one which records a specific textual struggle to
articulate a "secret" the speaker is not supposed to tell; the struggle for articulation necessarily forces a concomitant reevaluation of
culturally inherited concepts of "lies," "authority,"and "truth."
Some Trees,in fact, opens with such reconsiderations already in
progress. The first poem, "TwoScenes," presents us with what will
become a basic Ashbery premise: that abstractnotions like transcendence, truth, clarity,and coherence are highly problematic, though
seductive, concepts. The poem's first stanza offers a wry, pared
down version of the romantic visionary script, one that eliminates
the conventional narrative frame and focuses immediately on the
structural fragments of a primary, unlikely "scene" of romantic
epiphany: what we get is one totalizing visionary movement ("We
see us as we truly behave") moving to another ("'We see you [the
transcendent being?] in your hair, / Air resting around the tips of
mountains'" [9]), though the latter partakes of a more transparently
metaphoric, evanescent view. Despite the poem's authoritative
tone, brought to us by that almost immediately troublesome "we,"
the text ironically never provides us with the logic behind its multiple strategies of departure and arrival,that is, behind its move from
the opening perspective (with the world aiming at an arrivalin the
receptive mind) where "we see us" to the final one (with the mind
ordering its perceptions of the world) where an embedded speaker
280
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
says "We see you." In depriving us of an interpretive context, the

text instead forces us to evaluate the visionary experience in terms
of a generic encounter provided by structuralelements which ironically inflate the visionary claim. Whereas we have been trained to
expect as the aftereffects of the visionary experience a sense of letdown, disappointment, and loss, the first stanza doesn't follow
through with the conventional romantic trajectory.Ratherit stays at
the level of hyperbolic claims, giving us a freeze-frameof the romantic imagination in overdrive.
The poem is not simply a send-up of its own and others' impulses
toward visionary romanticism, however. In essence, the text parodies what it most wants: the second stanza rewrites its complicity
with the visionary script by imagining a "day of general honesty"
("Thisis perhaps a day of general honesty / Without example in the
world's history"). This hopeful assertion that truths can be told is
reinforced by the poem's essential qualification that "the fumes" of
honesty "are not of a singular authority / And indeed are dry as
poverty." The qualification may be read as a continuation or discontinuation of hope depending upon what one sees as at stake in an
alignment with or against "singular authorities" whose evocations
of truth claims would be directed toward maintaining their interests
or the interests of the status quo. The primary impulse up to this
point in the poem, however, has been to negate any singular authorities as limiting: "We see us as we truly behave: / From every
corner comes a distinctive offering" (emphasis added). The high
generic spirits initiated in the first stanza begin to shut down, however, with the reference to the fumes of honesty paradoxicallybeing
both multifaceted and as dry as poverty. (It's hard enough to conceive of a general rather than a specific honesty without factoring in
the abrupt diminishment and severity that the allusion to poverty
implies.) But the primarycontradictioncomes from the poem's competing recognition that, paradoxically, destiny is of a singular,
though mysterious, authority: "Everything has a schedule, if you
can find out what it is." Thus one of the key tensions in the poem
stems from its inability to keep truly separate the desire to eliminate
singular interpretiveauthorities and the impulse to find out the predetermined and hence authoritative "schedule" which puts such
interpretive systems into play.
IM BRIGLIO
281
But though the poem may see its evasion of particularity as essential for usurping singular authority, what this and the ensuing
poems in Some Trees record is more than just a transhistorical difficulty with reconciling conflicting concerns, in this case, a desire for
"general honesty" with a desire for finding out the terms (and the
meaning) of "the schedule." The poems in the volume also reflect
the specific conditions of their historical situation, one in which
truth-telling about one's homosexuality, given the oppressive political and social context of the period when most of the poems in
Some Trees first appeared (Kermani 71-74), would be not only
"problematic" but dangerous and damaging. During these early
years of the cold war, as John D'Emilio points out in Sexual Politics,
Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the
United States, 1940-1970, gay men and women, like those individuals suspected of being communists, were considered to be serious
threats to national security. Judged to be immoral in character (42)
and innately dangerous as potential traitors subject to blackmail
(43), homosexuals "became the targets of a verbal assault that
quickly escalated into policy and practice" (41). In 1950, for example, charges of homosexual "infiltration" by prominent Republican
leaders and a subsequent full Senate investigation provided unprecedented forums for widespread public vilification in the national press (41-42); in 1953 an Eisenhower executive order cited
"sexual perversion" as sufficient "loyalty-security" grounds for excluding gay men and women from positions in the federal government (44).15 State and municipal governments, the military, and
private industries with government contracts followed suit with
their own antigay investigations and dismissals (46). As D'Emilio
notes, the language-"perverts,
psychopaths, deviates, and the
like"-used
to condemn homosexuality "burdened homosexuals
and lesbians with a corrosive self-image," and "many gay men and
women internalized the negative descriptions" (53). Moreover,
such demeaning, inflammatory rhetoric gave brutal permission for
stigmatization at all levels, but especially to the police: "wide15. For excerpted newspaper accounts, see Jonathan Katz, "1950-55: Witch Hunt;
The United States Government versus Homosexuals," in Gay AmericanHistory (91-105).
Sample 1950 headlines from the New YorkTimes include "Perverts Called Government
Peril" (92) and "Inquiry by Senate on Perverts Asked" (93).
282
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
spread labeling of lesbians and homosexuals as moral perverts and

national security risks gave local police forces across the country a
free rein in harassment. Throughout the 1950s gays suffered from
unpredictable, brutal crackdowns" (49).
As D'Emilio indicates, the fifties also saw the beginnings of postwar efforts at gay community building and gay emancipation, most
notably with the founding of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles
in 1951 (58) and the West Coast publication of the first issue of the
gay magazine ONE in 1953 (72). Since the impact of these and other
gay organizations and publications was at first small (Savran 86),
it's not surprising that Ashbery's published recollections of the
early fifties would be directed toward the oppressive conditions of
cold war hegemony: "the period when we [the members of the socalled New York School] all moved to New York and found ourselves together coincided with McCarthy and the Korean war,
which was a very humiliating and cynical period, a low point"
("JohnAshbery" 22).16Nor is it surprising that the poems in Some
Trees,many of which are retrospectively concerned with childhood,
express negative, albeit oblique, reactions to the cultural double
bind that would be automatically imposed on gay pre-Stonewall
young adults and children. Brought up as any child might be to "tell
the truth," a gay child or an individual coming of age in the fifties
would have been even more forcefully enjoined by institutionalized
moral and legal sanctions against speaking the truth about his or
her homosexuality. Seen in light of this historical context, the poems should not be taken simply as "exquisite" intellectual poetic
exercises. (One might cite RichardKostelanetz's characterizationof
the poems as typical of what would become the criticallyaccepted
view that the collection is generally impenetrable: "Ashbery's po16. Ashbery has recently been much more specific about this period. Brad Gooch,
O'Hara's biographer, writes the following account of a 1988 interview with Ashbery: "'I
couldn't write anything from about the summer of 1950 to the end of 1951,' admits Ashbery. 'It was a terribly depressing period both in the world and in my life. I had no income
or prospects. The Korean War was on and I was afraid I might be drafted. There were
antihomosexual campaigns. I was called up for the draft and I pleaded that as a reason
not to be drafted. Of course this was recorded and I was afraid that we'd all be sent to
concentration camps if McCarthy had his own way. It was a very dangerous and scary
period"' (190).
IMBRIGLIO
283
etry at that time was rather exquisite in surface technique, intricate

in form, baffling in statement, indefinite in perspective, and disconnected as a reading experience" [20].) Rather, part of the impetus
behind the disjunctive rhetorical strategies in SomeTreesshould be
taken as coming from the need to represent the problems of articulating a personal sense of truth in the face of sanctions by a prevailing "singular" homophobic "authority."Though a majority of the
poems may initially seem to acquiesce to homophobic restrictions
by wrapping themselves in obscurity, they are neither as obscure
nor as acquiescent as they first appear. Instead, they engage with
personal, cultural, and poetic issues on terms commensurate with
Ashbery's literary aims and the conditions of his personal and historical experience. Homosexuality may well be the "secret"behind
many of the disturbances in these early texts, but its hiddenness
dissolves in Ashbery's fracturing of poetic discourse and reappears
in a language of protest and subversion which takes precedence
over the language of guilt or remorse.17That is, by rhetorically dispersing the references to "secrets" and "lies" throughout the poems, Ashbery begins to find ways of emptying these and similar
discursive structures of their overdetermined contents. In the case
of SomeTrees,the "secrets"and "lies"begin to be drained of culturally imposed homophobic prescriptions through a textual recognition of the inherently subversive nature of language.
This dispersal of the "secret" anticipates a process which will
become characteristic of Ashbery's later poetics, one in which he
repeatedly views social encounters, linguistic structures, cultural
artifacts, and cultural formulations in terms of their potential for
enclosure and disclosure. The process becomes a way of examining all forms of abstract and experiential structures, whose "secrets," like art and the soul in Ashbery's most famous poem, exist only because they are constructed by (and for) "our moment
of attention":
17. On this see Savran: "Like the official texts of the burgeoning homosexual rights
movement, most American plays of the 1940s and 1950s, even those considered at the
time sympathetic to the 'problem' of homosexuality, were written in the language of
remorse" (87). Savran characterizes this language as "eschewing revolutionary rhetoric
in favor of a guilty appeal for tolerance from the heterosexual majority and for the liberalization of oppressive restrictions" (86).
284
CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE
But there is in that [Parmigianino's] gaze a combination

Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
("Self-Portraitin a Convex Mirror,"Self-Portrait69)
In this passage the "double" dynamic between the portrait and the
viewer's appropriating gaze (which gives the soul a room in "our
moment of attention") typifies Ashbery's position that perspective
is always duplicitous. Enabling and disabling, it is never permanent
or definitive. Rather, it points to a "secret" located in an amorphous
zone which can't be accurately fixed or described (though it is human nature to try). The "secret" is, in fact, its location, a constructed
site whose time-based coordinates distort and destabilize it. As Ashbery says later in "Self-Portrait," "This nondescript, never-to-be defined daytime is / The secret of where it [the drama of life, or possibly of love] takes place / And we can no longer return to the various /
Conflicting statements gathered, lapses of memory / Of the principal witnesses" (78).
It is partly because of just such a conceptual fascination with
the "secret" as both there and not there, a "secret" whose existence is determined by linguistic structures and its appearance as
a place in time "never-to-be defined," that Ashbery's later poems
neither reify nor systematically dismantle the entrapping codifications which formulate the closet. Instead the poems displace immediate material ramifications and choose to interrogate the discursive systems by which meanings and structures like the closet
are made. In Ashbery's later poetry, particularly, such structures
multiply even as the texts underscore the precariousness of thinking in such terms. The initial quotation from "Self-Portrait" indicates, however, that the act of draining away or denying a content for a particular secret does not mean that the secret or the
structures formulated to maintain and/or disclose it are devoid of
material power or emotional resonances. As the passage from the
poem shows, "we" react to such "secrets," even if it is by means
of a doubly directed tone, half ironic, half serious: "The pity of it
IMBRIGLIO
285
smarts, / Makes hot tears spurt." "We" can even possibly deflect
some of these secrets' discursive power by attending to them as
constructions and, at least in the abstract, neutralizing them by
refusing to let a delimiting "content" settle in. The risk is, of
course, that in attending to the constructedness of "secrets," one
could appear to be also dismissing the everyday material damage
such structures impose. This is especially true in the case of the
closet imposed on gay men and women, which, as Eve Sedgwick
points out, "is the defining structure for gay oppression in this
century" (71). In the early texts which I have been considering,
however, especially those with the embedded references to "secrets," "lies," and so forth, the rhetorical strategies make it
"plain" that Ashbery is acutely aware of the damaging prohibitions which surround his poems.
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The Rhetoric of The Closet in John Ashbery's Some Trees

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The Rhetoric of The Closet in John Ashbery's Some Trees

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The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

"Our Days Puton Such Reticence":

Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,

ith few exceptions, notably in the work of Harold

somewhat misleading: Beaver's comments appear in a review of

Yingling, for example, attributes Hart Crane's troubled status

terms which are gender specific.) The following exchange between

calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to

Ashbery's use of "gay" in this poem is interesting on at least two

Besides the references supplied by Katz, I know of four other

be legitimately spoken of or publicly enacted. If one's natural sense

that I am not arguing for an essentialist reading which would limit

potential for being peculiarly revealing, in fact, about speech acts

These are amazing: each

from the beginning with the trees' projected "still performance."

In these lines reticence (in the form of an ellipsis) disrupts logical

"Illustration," like "Some Trees," is an attempt at "composition as

spondences, in particular, conventional correspondences (that is,

speaker paradoxically (and therefore ironically) rejects the allegory

trying to get at is a general, all-purpose experience-like those

ence's investment in maintaining and reproducing such structures,

"But to restrict something proclaimed as 'total' is to turn it into its

ity. The reactions of these individuals may be positive, negative,

ures the "coming out" process evoked in one of Ashbery's most

the version of "the truth we know." On the level of metaphor, the

He continued to consult her for her beauty

comic "metatextual" comment of the last line ("Some precision,

What will his crimes become, now that her hands

The gods worship a line-drawing

[36]).14The last stanza of "Lelivre,"the stanza on which SomeTrees

/ But the tide

good fortune curved his absolute smile into a celestial scream.

says "We see you." In depriving us of an interpretive context, the

spread labeling of lesbians and homosexuals as moral perverts and

etry at that time was rather exquisite in surface technique, intricate

But there is in that [Parmigianino's] gaze a combination

Altieri, Charles. "Ashbery as Love-Poet." Verse8.1 (1991): 8-15.

Beaver, Harold. "The Dandy at Play." Rev. of ShadowTrain,by John Ashbery.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction.Trans. Robert

Workof ArthurMiller and TennesseeWilliams.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,

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