The Queer Nature of Waste in John Ashbery’s The Vermont Notebook

Abstract

In 1957, soon after the release of his first volume of poems, John Ashbery was asked by Poetry magazine to review Gertrude Stein’s posthumously published Stanzas in Meditation. The title of Ashbery’s review, “The Impossible: Gertrude Stein,” was not intended to dissuade the reader from approaching what is arguably the least accessible of Stein’s works. Rather, “The Impossible” identifies the ambitious compass of Stein’s poem, which Ashbery would praise as “the most successful of her attempts to do what can’t be done, to create a counterfeit of reality more real than reality” (Selected Prose 15). The difficult task Ashbery imagines Stein setting herself in Stanzas, however, is not so impossible that the young poet himself was not able to accomplish it within the scope of his own review. Ashbery writes, “There is certainly plenty of monotony in the 150-page title poem… but it is the fertile kind, which generates excitement as water monotonously flowing over a dam generates electrical power” (11). This is a beautiful metaphor, slyly convincing and totally unreal—for dammed water passes through turbines housed within the dam or adjacent to it, not over the dam, as Ashbery suggests. Yet with this impossible hybrid of landscape and artifact, this dream dam, Ashbery not only “creates a counterfeit of reality more real than reality,” he also expresses in offhand form what would become a career preoccupation: to misrepresent the line between the natural and the artificial, and to recuperate what is normally deemed waste (here, monotonous writing) as a source of poetic strength.

“Nature is not natural, and that is natural enough.”

—Gertrude Stein, Ida (141)