To truly commit a poem to memory is to commit your life to that poem. Out of all the many verses I’ve memorized over the last year, no other has so fully enveloped my days than John Ashbery’s “Poem at the New Year.” So much so that its evocative and elegiac images mark all my mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions, romances. There is no escaping ambivalences, ambiguities, and this lilting lyric is drenched in multitudes, which makes reading our life into it all the easier. But it’s Ashbery’s bittersweet quality that I most readily identify with: “Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight,/you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs that would be my wish for you, my darling, my angel.” I want to capture the sublime moments—meet-cutes, particular parties nocturnal conversations—and relive them over and over again or extend them as long as possible, yet the loss, the fading away never lets up. Still, as Ashbery knows all too well, we long for the transcendent.
The impressions we have of ourselves are so often so off from what others see in us that we wonder if we can perceive anything clearly at all—and again Ashbery captures this cognizant dilemma with a stunning rhetorical range. At once “I come all/packaged and serene, yet I keep losing things.” I carry these words around with me, and everywhere I go their weight increases.
Several months ago I met a woman and proceeded to spend the whole weekend with her enraptured in laziness, food, movies and sex. At the time it was a blossoming, but she disappeared from my life as quickly as she appeared, and now I see this love affair as dried flower pressed in a book I will one day open up in surprised elation. As Ashbery reminds me constantly, “O I was so bright about you,/my song bird once.” Ashbery has taught me that even though these attachments often flutter away, it is better to recall them in whimsy when I can, in their original spirit, than to dote on them with resentment.
“Poem at the New Year” is so ingrained in me that I cannot outrun its wisdoms, no matter their melancholic tinge. It is a maze I am lost in; I am happy to never find my way out, for it warns me against complacency (“you stood in line for things, and the soiled light was/ impenitent”) and fearfulness (“for all its raised or lowered levels I approach this canal”). The piece furthers Asbhery’s pursuit of joy against the terrible odds of contemporary society, as spelled out in his equally enchanting “The Skaters”: “But once more, office desks, radiators–No! That is behind me. No more dullness, only movies and love and laughter, sex and fun!” Don’t be afraid of the New Year, it says, of striking out for that which begets sobs. Many chances await me still.
You can read John Ashbery’s “Poem to the New Year” at The New Yorker’s website if you’re a subscriber.
