Whispers of surrealism

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Summer Wildcat John Ashbery

The tendency is to call anything strange "surreal."

And several responses to the poetry of John Ashbery prove this tendency.

With some reservations, W. H. Auden awarded John Ashbery the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize in 1956 for his first volume Some Trees. Auden expressed doubts that Ashbery's "surrealistic style" comes dangerously close to confusing "authentic, non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise."

Ashbery's poetry isn't exactly surrealist anyway. But since Auden's original judgment, critics have called it by a variety of names close to Auden's misappraisal: "dreamscapes," having "metaphysical subjects," and around the gamut to "surreal poetry," Newsweek's term for Ashbery's most recent volume Girls on the Run.

Girls on the Run (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $20.00) is Ashbery's strangest poetry to date - a book-length poem condensing revelations from a reclusive artist's epic novel - but calling it "surreal" is like never reading past the book jacket.

There are objects that speak in Girls on the Run. There are similes that bring new meaning to the word "like." There are things that intrude into the perception with only hints about their real natures.

Shakespeare - who didn't do surrealism - wrote stuff like this. The only difference is that there are footnotes in Shakespeare to give meaning when we think "huh?"

On the surface, Girls on the Run is a story about a plucky band of girls who gather together to discuss the weather and fashion.

But themes like war, business and school converge with the surface tranquillity, such that isolating the surface narrative from the strange depths is a lesson in futility. An appreciation of Ashbery's poetry has to take into account the poetry's peculiarities.

The strangeness of Ashbery's poetry - and indeed its beauty - doesn't issue from the surrealist art of the first half of the 20th century but from the abstract art of the second half.

John Ashbery is an art critic by trade. His poetry confirms things he has written about his generation's art - that the best of it calls upon a spectator to perceive reality in alternative ways. Still, as he writes about expatriate artist Joan Mitchell, there are "elements of things seen even in the most abstracted impression."

This is true of Ashbery's poetry. Although its visions are strange and its meaning unconventional, there is everywhere, as poet Frank O'Hara writes, "the difficult attention to calling things and events by their true qualities."

In Girls on the Run's terms, attention to true qualities comes out while experiencing life's enigmatic first impressions. "Truth" washes up on a beach in all its "seething ambiguity."

Ashbery describes seeing truth for the first time and knowing only by intuition its importance, and that only momentarily. Ashbery's poetry of strange glimpses is akin to the "heure indicible" of Arthur Rimbaud's poetry, the moment of metamorphosis in which one object dissolves and another begins to take form.

So even when something seemingly important like truth washes ashore in Girls on the Run, "A stunning moment of certainty," it is soon "washed away in the rising flood / tortured, unambitious." And the girls of Girls on the Run look for other objects of stimulation.

While there is a degree of surrealism's "grand permission" -Êwhich opened the door for pretty much any artistic expression imaginable - inherent in Ashbery's ambitious book-length poem, there has to be another name for his specific strength.

Call it poetus interruptus, or even rhymes-with-shmurrealism. But whatever you call it, Girls on the Run is worth reading and studying; good the first time and even better the second - quality poetry that gets even better when you think about it.