Where Mark's brain has been, pt 1: The mooring of starting out

Jacobs has talked about the blog form as an opportunity for writing essays in installments.  I want to try something along those lines:

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When my mom died, around a year and a half ago, I started reading a lot of poetry.  I hadn't done much of that for some time.  But I expected poetry to be a source of solace, and it was, and still is.  Maybe, initially, it had something to do with the fact that many poems are short, and thus look suspiciously like Easy Answers.  But the exact source of solace I ended up locating, or at least a home for the confusion and anxiety of grief, was a surprise: I started reading a lot of what you’d maybe call difficult poetry.  By which I mean poems of seeming anti-meaning that don’t yield their secrets easily if at all.  Not the bleeding experimental edge, mind you.  No, the stuff I'm dipping into is relatively tame; stuff that's always threatening to coalesce into meaning or melody—Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham, Kenneth Koch, and most of all John Ashbery.

One would expect the mourner to look for poems rife with clear Truths, gentle cycle-of-life meditations about the Body Of The World and the Overwhelming Splendor Of It All.  Poems of comfort.  Things like this, or this, or this (all picked, I swear, at random from last few months of WA archives¹).  So much of the language my family heard from friends and cards seems to hustle us in that direction, to offer alchemical formulae to transmute loss into meaning, and pronto.  But the poems I read and listened to (courtesy of the magnificent Penn Sound Archives) don’t seem particularly interested in catharsis, or even legibility—they don’t give a fig about my personal grief.  Their starting point here is—well, I don't know.  Sounds, yes; arresting juxtapositions in the surrealist tradition, sure; certain ideas about the act of artistic creation, probably.  But there's no embarking from any spontaneous overflows of powerful emotion, and if something is being recollected, it is difficult to discern whether from a state of tranquility or what. Still, like the creation myth where the world is made of scraps idly swept from the gods' table, these guys write such dense stuff that certain lines and half-lines can't help but cloak my own rejected thoughts in alienated majesty.

For example, take the delightful moment in Ashbery's very, very long poem "The Skaters" where he announces, "It is time now for a general understanding  / of the meaning of all this."  In a 1964 recording of the poem, this line is received with laughter.  It is hilariously straightforward, but perhaps the laughter contains a little relief as well—if he's making a joke about meaning, he must know that this poem is difficult.  Up to this point, we were worried that maybe, just maybe, we were missing some point that was obvious to everyone else.²    Of course what follows is only an explanation of why he won't explain anything, and it's not easy even to get that out of it.  But then there's a startling sort of aside:

...Except to say that the carnivorous
Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving
Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still.
Nevertheless these are fundamental absences, struggling to get up and be off themselves.

I do not believe Ashbery intended to evoke the feeling of grief's tapering off, the guilt at sliding back into normal life.  Nor was he trying to describe the anxiety that I'd forget my mom's face and voice.  But when I hear these lines, I can't not feel those things, rendered as crisp and perfect as if Raymond Carver had done it.

Which sounds a lot like I've snuck the sympathy cards’ grubby scramble for Meaning into the avant garde, doesn't it? What a hermeneutical faux pas, especially in a poem that, if it's about anything, is about 'skating' blithely across the surface of meaning.  Hypocrite lecteur! Surely this is a shallow and limited way to read a poem, just naked projection, right?

If there's a defense of this method, it's that the fractured and dense nature of the poems I'm talking about keep these moments from coming too easy or too often.  Any measure of comfort is found, paradoxically, because the poet isn't generally offering any comfort.  There's some scrounging on my part to find it, there's no takeaway in big pastel script.  And in that it seems so much more like messy real life than any tidy, epiphany-driven 'grief' poem.  What I wanted in the months after mom died wasn't kindly sages to illuminate my path—that feels (to me, which may reveal more about my attitudes that the poets') patronizing and facile.  Instead I found myself looking for fellow-travelers, other voices in the dark to articulate and give texture to its darkness, as Brecht describes:

In the dark times,
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times. 

¹While the Keilloriana of Good Poems has been kind of a drag, some of the hoariest bits of the canon have come crawling out of high school anthologies to make new sense: Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins; even musty old "Dover Beach" and its midnight anti-epiphany turned out to be kind of profoundly moving when I read it after mom's funeral while my wife slept beside me.
²If we do miss the point, we're in good company: Auden awarded Ashbery the Yale Younger Poet's Prize, then later claimed not to have understood a word of the manuscript.