Reyes 1

Reyes Shirai Midori Karina

Dra. Irene Artigas
Seminario de poesa norteamericana
June 01st, 2015
Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery: An Atlas on Tradition
An atlas is a collection of maps which can present geographic, social, economic, and religious
features. When thinking about poets like John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, this notion can be
related in their particular treatment of tradition. The literary career of these poets, although
significantly different, is marked by their revolutionary way of working with established forms.
These were not only from European heritage, but we can find among their poems conventions
from the Middle East to the East of Asia. Thus, the corpus of both poets can function, in a way,
as an atlas or map, for it alludes to faraway places and their culture. Even though they do borrow
structure and thematic elementsalong with other aspectsfrom these cultures, we will see in
this particular essay how these models allow them to redefine the classical conception of
tradition by their incorporation of factors which are signature from their own styles. On the one
hand, we will examine how Ashbery works the haiku by experimenting with language in order to
find what he can do with an established form; while on the other, how Rich approaches the
ghazal with a political, lyrical and multicultural agenda.
First, we will revise in general some of the essential characteristics of John Ashbery's
poetry in order to be able to identify them later in the poem in question. From his adolescence,
Ashbery was attracted to the arts, and specially painting, after seeing an exhibition on surrealist,
fantastic, and dadaist painters in 1973 (Alberola 187). Although he became a writer, his early
interest in this artistic movements remained in his work and can be seen in his use of techniques

Reyes 2
such as the collage and his very treatment of language and themes, as they involve him in that
mixing of the mysterious and the mundane, that transvaluation of value which is one of the major
heritages of surrealism (Molesworth 31). Furthermore, his poetry is permeated with the use of
fragments incorporated into the poems, rendering them as chaotic and sometimes nonsensical.
Similar to many of his fellow writers who belong to the New York School, like Frank O'Hara,
Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch, his style is distinguished by his wit, humor, and his
reluctance to academic conventionalisms (Alberola 22). Due to this contempt for orthodoxy, his
poetry is an attempt to break free from established rules, and so, experimentation and innovation
become an essential part of it. As a result, we can observe that he introduces in his poems any
kind of experiences and images, even if they contradict themselves, for what is important is to
question everything.
In an interview about his work, Ashbery said: I include humor just as I include
somberness and tragedy and sex and whatever else, just because it's something that crops up
every day and you should try to make your poem as representative as possible (Koethe and
Ashbery 183). His statement demonstrates that, for him, any subject can qualify to be in a poem,
no matter how trivial or serious it may be. Likewise, some other of his features are:
la actividad discontinua de la experiencia personal, la creencia en una poesa que no
refleje la realidad sino que la constituya, la oposicin a lo sistemtico, a la consistencia o
a la ilusin del significado, el azar, la sucesin de imgenes inconexas, dejar entrar todo
en el poema y la adopcin de la instantaneidad en la que se mezclan imgenes basadas en
la imaginacin y el sueo. (Alberola 70)

When reading a poet like Ashbery, all these elements must be remembered, for they are deeply
rooted in the heart of his aesthetics.

Reyes 3
Regarding the haiku, it is a form which appeared in Japan in the 19 th century, but its
origins go back as to the 8th and 10th century (Kizer). The structure from where it derives is called
tanka and is a longer poem consisting of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. Although waka (classical Japanese
poetry) was first practiced in a courtly environment, it later spread to the peasants in the 15 th
and 16th century where its elegance changed abruptly (Precise Art). Thus, the former chained
verses were known as haikai and enjoyed popularity, specially due to some of the greatest
Japanese poets: Basho, Buson and Issa. After the death of the latter, the form was relegated, until
Masaoka Shiki revived it in 1827, focusing on the 5-7-5 sequence and renaming it haiku (Precise
Art). Commonly known by its shortness and its signature syllable pattern, a traditional haiku
typically incorporates:

the juxtaposition of two images or ideas and a kireji ("cutting word") between them, a
kind of verbal punctuation mark which signals the moment of separation.

17 on (also known as morae), in three phrases of 5, 7 and 5 on respectively, without

breaking the sentence.

A kigo (seasonal reference), usually drawn from a saijiki, an extensive but defined list of
such words. (Haiku)

As a consequence of the modernist movement, more and more interest arose from the
Western audience on Oriental art. Writers like Ezra Pound began to translate Japanese literature
and introduced the haiku to the American and European public, but it was until the 1950s that
haiku was truly popular (Precise Art). As opposed to the Japanese, Western haiku is characterized
by breaking the poem into three lines in the usual syllable form, or in a variant which can be
shorter or longer. Moreover, the subjects are usually time, the seasons, and the rhetorical
presentation of a passively experienced objective moment, which reflects only one approach to
Japanese haiku, which reinforces a stereotyped vision of Oriental sensibility (Brink 157).

Reyes 4
Ashbery came in contact with this structure precisely through the anthologies and acquaintances
familiarized with this peculiar form (159), however, his treatment is rather peculiar, in that he
challenges both the American and Japanese styles.
In order to observe this, his notion of tradition is essential to understand how he uses and
changes it. In his early career, he felt that the poetry of the past was restricting and did not allow
him to express himself freely. Nevertheless, this feeling changed and he experimented with
structures such as the sestina, and even did a rewriting on Donne's A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning. He found that through fixed compositions and styles, he could experiment and
achieve a unique outcome. For him, format becomes ... something arbitrary, but something also
for form to react to, to enter into dialogue with. Form, on the other hand, becomes the shape of
history, from the personal to the cultural (Jackson 144). This exploration is also present in the
haiku, for he brought back the original form of a one-line poem by not breaking it and forcing
pauses and division, as the American haiku did. Besides, he inserted new images and did not
follow the classical themes, in order to provide fresh perspectives, thus defying the Oriental
tradition as well.
In his poem titled 37 haiku, Ashbery presents, just as the title indicates, a collection
of thirty seven haiku. Each line represents a complete poem, a whole idea, but the lack of
punctuation at the end of each can be deceptive. This is because some of them can be read
separately, but together too, since they might have some loose links. For example, the
consecutive lines: You have original artworks hanging on the walls oh I said edit / You nearly
undermined the brush I now place against the ball field arguing (Ashbery), have the key words
artworks and brush, which belong to a common semantic field. Additionally, some lines
begin with a coordinating conjunction like this one: And it is a dream sailing in a dark

Reyes 5
unprotected cove. But the next lines reads as follows: Pirates imitate the ways of ordinary
people myself for instance, so we can see that again, these two poems share semantic words:
sailing, cove, and pirates. Hence, there is actually no way of telling how to read the whole
poem, as independent blocks or as a unit. This may be because of Ashbery's own vision of the
world: "This best describes how I experience life, as a unity constantly separating" (Jackson
141), which reveals his constant necessity to include as many things as possible in his poems.
Another important feature is the poet's disregard for strict metric. As said before, he does
not adhere completely to tradition, so he takes liberties in the count of syllables. For instance in
the beginning of the poem there are three consecutive lines that exemplify this:
Some star or other went out, and you, thank you for your book and year
Something happened in the garage and I owe it for the blood traffic
Too low for nettles but it is exactly the way people think and feel (Ashbery)

The first of the three has sixteen on, or syllables; the one in the middle has 17 on exactly, as a
classical haiku; and the last one contains 18 on. Still, he can be related to Japanese philosophers
who wrote haiku, in the sense that a postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a
philosopher: the text he writes, the book he produces are no in principle governed by
preestablished rules, and he cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying
familiar categories to the text or the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art
itself is looking for (Alberola 192). We can recognize that in his poetry there is not complete
rigidity, in this case regarding meter, which is a reflection of his rebellious attitude against
academic conventions.
Finally, one significant feature of this poem is the usage of the assamblage or collage. The
influence of painting here is evident by this technique, for it presents multiple images with no
apparent connection. In one line he can be talking about seasons, as Japanese haiku does: In

Reyes 6
winter sometimes you see those things and also in summer, and in the next make a referent
about food: What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich? (Ashbery). Every line
seems as a brief fragment that can contain whatever thing is passing in the poet's mind, thus the
poem is like brushstrokes which, although they are clearly about the world, are unimpeachable
representatives of it, because they don't have to "look like" any one thing, they look like any
thing: they are absolved from the meanness of narrow reference (Holden 39). In this manner, it
is observed that Ashbery adopts a specific foreign tradition, but not with the intention to follow
its rules, bur rather to use it as an opening for his experimentation and his conception of reality.
Now focusing on Adrienne Rich, she is regarded as a highly political and controversial
poet. This notion has to do with her involvement as an activist in many fields, such as racism,
both the civil and women's rights movements, war, lesbianism, among others. The affirmation of
self and the search for a voice for those who do not possess one has always been present in her
writing, since her own position as a white Jewish lesbian woman has placed her many times as
the Other. Like Ashbery, she struggles with issues like language and poetry, but she encompasses
too sex roles, the role of the woman poet, the institution of motherhood and the nuclear family
(Harris 136). Another crucial characteristic of Rich's poetry is her ethos, and how Halloris
explains it is particularly accurate when trying to describe this element:
ethos is generated by the seriousness and passion with which the speaker articulates
his own world, the degree to which he is willing and able to make his world open
to the other, and thus to the possibility of rupture. Ethos is the measure of one's
willingness to risk one's self and world by a rigorous and open articulation of them
in the presence of the other (Harris 134).

Additionally, in her ambition as a poet of consciousness, her work is an effort to constantly

include the love poem in a political context, hence it is a high lyrical poetrycentered in

Reyes 7
subjective experience, yet confident in the transcendent presence of otherness to the selfbut a
poetry that also insists on a relational, not unitary, subjectivitysocial, gendered, historical: a
politicized lyric self (McGuirk 61). In her treatment of lyricism, she never neglects aspects such
as multiculturalism and a subject who is never detached from a specific location in history, one
who is always conscious of her identity. And in her attempt to portray all this in her poems, she
turned, precisely, to the other.
The poetic form of the ghazal has not reached yet an academic consensus regarding its
origin, some scholars claim it was first created in the pre-Islamic period, while others argue that
it comes from ancient Asian or Arabic tradition (Zadeh 47-48). Even if there is no certainty about
the origin, it is described as a lyric short poem with no specific length and with a simple rhyming
scheme. Also, other important features comprise couplets or beyts, and the refrain or radif, which
can be a suffix, a noun, a verb, and even a short phrase that is normally added to rhyme ( qfiye)
(49). Commonly, these poems treat the theme of love, for the very term ghazal means in Arabic
talk with women, which refers to the usual dialogue between the poetic voice and the beloved
(48). Other recurrent themes in the ghazal are the pain of loss or separation, and the beauty of
love in spite of the pain (Ghazal). There is one more fundamental trait of this particular form
which attracted the attention of Western poets: its divided or fragmentary nature. Zadeh explains
that the ghazals ambiguity ... stems from its disunity. In the ghazal, a couplet is considered a
unit by itself ... Each couplet, then, seems to be independent of the other. This feature has often
been interpreted as an absence of linear, thematic, or chronological order between the couplets
(52). Due to the political and social context that Americans were living in the 1960s and 1970s,
they found this attribute rather useful to talk about topics that concerned them.

Reyes 8
The Vietnam War, the Cold War, and other political conflicts caused that many American
writers no longer felt identified with the customary forms of their own traditions. In
consequence, they turned to translation in order to find new themes and images, and incorporate
them later as a way to transform their culture and politics (Zadeh 21). By accepting the other and
their literature, they rejected a set of domestic values which were in opposition to what they
believed. Poetry became, for those who were willing to do it, an act of revolution and resistance.
Of course, Adrienne Rich was among those poets and was first introduced to the form of the
ghazal in 1969, with the centennial anniversary of the death of Mirza Ghalib, a Persian and
Urdu poet and one of the forms masters (Caplan). As a homage to this poet, Aijaz Ahmad, a
Pakistani literary critic, asked some American poets to do translated versions. After the
publishing of the compilation, Rich took a step further by creating her own ghazals, because as
she stated in an interview:
Ghalibs ghazals provided techniques for expressing the particular fragmentation and
confusion she experienced at the time: I certainly had to find an equivalent for the
kinds of fragmentation I was feeling, and confusion ... There, I found a structure which
allowed for a highly associative field of images. And once I saw how that worked, I felt
instinctively, this is exactly what I need, there is no traditional Western order that I have
found that will contain all these materials. (Caplan)

Even though she drew upon a traditional male poetic, she exploited its conventions and adjusted
them to express some of her common themes: love between women and the problem of
language.
In account of formal aspects in the poem Late ghazal, Adrienne Rich only focuses on
some traits of this Arab poetic heritage, more specifically, in the aforementioned fragmentation
or disunity, the use of couplets, and the classical subject of the dialogue with the loved one.

Reyes 9
Moreover, regarding the structure, she does not employ a rhyme scheme nor refrains. However,
going back to the disjointness in her poem, it is significantly evident in two points. First, the
variations of subjects throughout the poem alludes to the autonomy of each couplet, for she talks
about desire, poetry itself, and individuality. Second, she highlights fragmentation even more by
inserting actual blank spaces, or gaps, within the second and third lines:
First rains of the winter

mornings smallest hour.

Go back to the ghazal then

what will you do there? (Rich)

Hence, we can see that she uses a variety of images and its ruptures as reflections of her own self
at that time, a time when she was involved in many social movements and was immerse in the
turbulence of those decades.
With respect to the dialogue of the poetic voice with the beloved one, it is not a factual
exchange between the two, for the technique used in some lines is the apostrophe. This figure of
speech is recurrent in her poems, as McGuirk notes: the trope of address comes to govern much
of her work, since in address the poet does not turn away from relation, as does the poet of the
inward meditative lyric, but sustains or creates relation as she shapes her poem. For Rich, forging
the poem is forging relation (70). An example in the poem is the next couplet:
Do you remember the strands that ran from eye to eye?
The tongue that reached everywhere, speaking all the parts? (Rich)

Likewise, these lines have a rather erotic connotation, hinting at the lyrical nature of the original
ghazal. It is even more evident in what is stated in the proceeding couplet:
Everything there was cast in an image of desire.
The imaginations cry is a sexual cry (Rich)

In this manner she transforms the notion of common love, the love imposed by a patriarchy in
which the presupposition of a love between man and woman is a given. She even says at the end

Reyes 10
of the poem the critics couldnt get it, for her poetry challenged in many ways society's
conventions. To imagine a love between women and an erotics of lesbianism is the way she finds
to affirm her identity.
Lastly, she also mentions the struggle which originates from the usage of language. The
poet writes: Life always pulsed harder than the lines (Rich), as if suggesting that there is a
breach between life or experience, and the lines or verbalization. She reinforces this thought
in another line: Life was always stronger... the critics couldn't get it (Rich), implying that she
cannot communicate and deliver effectively to others what she has gone through. Despite not
being explicitly stated, all this can be interpreted as a reference to one of the ghazal's themes: the
pain of loss or separation. On the one hand, it is the loss of meaning, the anxiety of not
conveying one's ideas, and actually this was one of Rich's central concerns: in the foreword
(1984) to her poetry collection The Fact of a Doorframe, she writes that her worst fear as a poet
has always been "that these words will fail to enter another soul" (Hedley 42). And on the other,
is the irrevocable separation between the speaker and the receiver.
Just like an atlas, the poems by John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich depict different cultures
and traditions from the world. By using these ancient Asian structures, they give the reader a
glimpse of the diversity that exists around the globe. Both poets were looking for fresh and new
perspectives which could revolutionize their art, but at the same time that could enhance their
personal voice. Likewise, both writers relied on experimentation in order to achieve their own
ends. Ashbery always tried to challenge influences and formalities by playing with forms, words,
and conventions, thus going beyond any labels. For him, the essence of any piece of writing is to
keep searching for techniques which can ensure the free expression of self. And for her part,
Rich's goal is oriented to encompass within her poetry political, social and multicultural issues.

Reyes 11
Hence, the assimilation of the other becomes relevant in her corpus, though without neglecting
her own sensibility. In the end, the work of both poets can be seen as a space open to multiplicity
and insight.

Works cited
Alberola Crespo, Nieves. La Escuela de Nueva York. John Ashbery y la nueva potica
americana. Castell de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I, 2000. Printed.
Ashbery, John. 37 haiku. Terebess Asia Online. N. p. n. d. Web. 23 May 2015.
Brink, Dean. John Ashberys 37 Haiku and the American Haiku Orthodoxy. Diss. Fo Guang
University and University of Manitoba, 2010. PDF.
Caplan, David. In That Thicket of Bitter Roots: The Ghazal in America. VQR. N. p. Fall 2004.
Web. 24 May 2015.
Ghazal. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 14 May 2015. Web. 24
May 2015.
Haiku. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.05 May 2015. Web. 23
May 2015.
Harris, Jeane. The Emergence of a Feminizing Ethos in Adrienne Rich's Poetry. Rhetoric
Society Quarterly. 18.2 (1988): 133-140. JSTOR. Web. 23 May 2015.
Holden, Jonathan. Syntax and the Poetry of John Ashbery. The American Poetry Review. 8.4
(1979): 37-40. JSTOR. Web. 23 May 2015.
Jackson, Richard. Many Happy Returns: The Poetry of John Ashbery. Ploughshares. 12.3
(1986): 136-145. JSTOR. Web. 23 May 2015.
Kizer, Kevin. A Brief History of Haiku. Literary Kicks. N.p. 03 May 2011. Web. 24 May 2015.

Reyes 12
Koethe and Ashbery. An Interview with John Ashbery. SubStance. 11.4 (1982): 178-186.
JSTOR. Web. 23 May 2015.
McGuirk, Kevin. Philoctetes Radicalized: "Twenty-One Love Poems" and the Lyric Career of
Adrienne Rich. Contemporary Literature. 34.1 (1993): 61-87. JSTOR. Web. 23 May
2015.
Molesworth, Charles. "This Leaving-Out Business": The Poetry of John Ashbery. Salmagundi.
38.39 (1977): 20-41. JSTOR. Web. 23 May 2015.
Precise Art in Three Lines. Poetry Through the Ages. WebExhibits. n.d. Web. 24 May 2015.
Rich, Adrienne. Late ghazal. Shenandoahliterary. N. p. n. d. Web. 24 May 2015.
Zadeh, Kashani, Neda Ali. Adrienne Richs Ghazals and the Persian Poetic Tradition: A Study of
Ambiguity and the Quest for a Common Language. Diss. Universit Degli Studi di
Macerata, 2014. PDF