Breezeway Homage No. 10, “We have to live out our precise experimentation.”

“We have to live out our precise experimentation.” Susan Scheid (2015)

This collage, the last in the series, pays homage to the title poem “Breezeway” in John Ashbery’s newest collection. One is always guided, if not controlled, by one’s materials. I had no red shutters, no Batman, and no whipped cream; there were scores of other things I did not have—but what I do have is the spirit of the poem to guide me. As I chose images and cut and pasted, it struck me that Ashbery is, at bottom, an optimistic man, with a head full of wonder, wit, and whimsy and a limitless capacity to create.

Breezeway Homage No. 9, The Pie District

The Pie District, Susan Scheid (2015)

The collage takes its name from the poem “The Pie District” in John Ashbery’s collection Breezeway. Many of Ashbery’s lifelong preoccupations and motifs are present in this poem, or so it seems to me. Just as one glimpse, in reading the second stanza, I think of What Is Poetry: “In school/All the thought got combed out,” and from Soonest Mended, this:

Breezeway Homage No. 8, “Own the blankness.”

“Own the blankness.” Susan Scheid (2015)

The collage pays homage to John Ashbery’s poem “Heading Out” in the volume Breezeway. John Ashbery’s poem “Auburn-Tinted Fences,” in his volume Quick Question, includes the word “glacis.” After reading the poem at an Interview hosted by Al Filreis, February 12, 2013, [item 3 at ~4:10], Ashbery quipped, “I wonder if what I was really trying to do was to fit the word glacis into a poem. I’m not entirely sure what it means.” [listen to the audio here]  I suspect the same might be true for “sockdolager,” which Ashbery uses in “Heading Out.” “Heading Out” is, itself, a sockdolager of a poem, about which this collage offers but a glancing glimpse.

Breezeway Homage No. 7, Forget Where I Heard It

Forget Where I Heard It, Susan Scheid (2015)

The collage pays homage to John Ashbery’s poem “Forget Where I Heard It” in the volume Breezeway. Ashbery had me at the title of this poem, yet there is so much more. I searched for peas and beans to shape a coma, as might be suggested by the poem’s middle stanza, but I couldn’t find them, which is probably just as well. (What is in his head that arrives at such lines?) Then, in the final stanza, he makes utter sense, reminding me, in ways that may seem oblique to anyone else, of Alice Goodman’s text for Chou En-Lai’s plaintive aria at the close of John Adams’s Nixon in China: “How much of what we did was good/Everything seems to move beyond our remedy.” [citation]

Breezeway Homage No. 6, The Enthusiasts

The Enthusiasts, Susan Scheid (2015)

The collage pays homage to John Ashbery’s poem “The Enthusiasts” in the volume Breezeway. Ashbery has an uncanny ability to interleaf the elegiac with wistful humor. Perhaps it’s nothing more than understanding life and living for what it is, a series of unaccountable moments that may add up to something or may not, but just the same combine to limn a life.