“As You Came from the Holy Land,” by John Ashbery

I’ve been thinking about the role of temporality in poetry. How time might appear in a poem. And the surprising ways that time might be made to matter. Its conspicuousness. To my mind, it always feels natural to think of time in, say, a Frank O’Hara poem. Lunch Poems even by its title, signaling a shortage of time, a realization that any given time will end, and a poem that can capture how time can feel dear so the reader also feels it an understands. Of course, I’m not sure I would read every poem in that book thinking about the temporal, as I think many of O’Hara’s poems don’t point as insistently at time or the day. However, considering the lineage of reading for temporality in a poem, and the significant position O’Hara represents, foregrounding O’Hara’s poetic positioning of time, their conscious of time, it’s a helpful starting point.

Especially for thinking about the other ways time can appear. O’Hara’s time is poignant. Ashbery’s poems, on the other hand, lay time flat, or they insist on what it feels like when you consider the flattest times. Which has its own kind of poignancy. But why? Or why, “reader” (Ashbery might implicitly inquire), wouldn’t you think that that time would be poignant? So often, I read Ashbery for his account of a given day, or what feels like it could have all happened in a day, the potential that that day might give, the special way someone can occupy the morning of that day. It can feel like a mountain. Like optimism for whatever optimism is thinking about. Like when Michael Snediker turns his focus to optimism in the introduction to Queer Optimism, and there’s not a clear definition for optimism, but it is clear optimism exists past the easy cynical takedown of it. I like how Snediker frames optimism as a feeling, a stance towards the present. And in an Ashbery poem, I would say he strikes a tonal balance bewteen this kind of genuine optimism set directly against a reasonable cynicism. Because however promising the morning might feel, there are many ways Ashbery’s poems never do anything with it. It is a state of mind. It is an is for the poet’s morning. And then, later in the poem, when evening comes on, it is the is they could have done something with but they didn’t.

Like in “Grand Galop,” which I would describe as a series of moments that are so content with their uneventfulness. And their factness. It’s a fact they are facts. And they happen every moment. In Oregon. Outside a house anywhere in the United States. In the Arizona desert. And we can continue this list of location types, Ashbery says. That sustained performance of listing is assuredly part of the poem. The temporal for “Grand Galop,” is in making a list, pausing for each item in the list, observing that the list item could only be included because it took time to be observed, and the poet wants to occupy all those times, and all the times when he did nothing to “advance” past them.

It is interesting, then, to contrast the ambiguous point-of-view account in “Grand Galop” (where there’s a “we” and a generalized “you” and a set of observations that could be heard in the first-person singular or third-person), with the clear interrogative in “As You Came from the Holy Land.” As in, the “you” of “Holy Land” feels like someone the poet is directing his commentary to.

how could this be
the magic solution to what you are in now
whatever has held you motionless
like this so long through the dark season

lines 8-11, “As You Came From the Holy Land”

Ashbery’s “As You Came from the Holy Land” has an interest in “you,” like the poet can see a difference in “you” since they came from Western New York. And whatever mood they’re seeing in “you,” it’s like all the notes that could be felt in a day’s mild sadnesses, with the “late-August air” and a “turning away from the late afternoon glare / as though it too could be wished away.” And the poet’s attitude towards the “you” registers as a tone on its own. But, then, the “you” feels like an actual figure. They’re a someone, but more the sense they are someone specific to the poet not the poem, because they lack an identity. I read waiting to learn something more about this person, but it doesn’t come up. Instead, it’s these pools of mild sadnesses the poet is sharing with that someone without that someone being entirely present for the poem. The result is a mood the poet can impose upon what feels like a specific, other person.

it is the end of any season

you reading there so accurately
sitting not wanting to be disturbed
as you came from that holy land
what other signs of earth’s dependency were upon you
what fixed sign at the crossroads
what lethargy in the avenues
where all is said in a whisper

lines 15-22, “As You Came From the Holy Land”

In these lines, it would seem the poem’s addressee is more substantively present, as “you are reading there so accurately, / sitting not wanting to be disturbed.” And I think, then, I can see the “you” withdrawn from conversation but within sight of the poet, so where is this space shared between poet and “you”? How does the space define the rhetorical situation that would include these two? And what I’m really interested in is how this poem stages an incremental expansion on what makes “Holy Land” complicated in contrast to “Grand Galop.” Just having a more figurally realized “you” can define a space, and imply an interpersonal tension in that space. And even as “Holy Land,” in its second half, moves into a similarly ambiguous point of view as “Grand Galop,” there is this difference in the opening.

And I guess I just like sinking into the finer grain of a book like Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Which I often read in this single poetic mode, especially given that this mode is part of the book’s longer poems. “As You Came From the Holy Land” frames this “you” and the poet through the poet’s interest in what might have happened to this person in western New York. And it’s this interest felt at a certain time of day in a certain domestic space that makes a temporal reading so helpful. Where an O’Hara daily poem might position a moment like this for some surprising quality to it, Ashbery’s is more how moments like this could be something more, and then the day goes on and points the poet to other things that could be something more. What “you” might be thinking doesn’t need to be clarified, though it would be interesting if it was. But the same could be said of “that thing of monstrous interest / … happening in the sky” that appears in the penultimate stanza. Maybe whatever that thing was would be so interesting it would take over the poem’s focus. But Ashbery denies any further clarity for it. That, I would argue, is what the interpersonal is with this “you.” And it’s what marks the rhythms of any day. These moments of interest arising, then falling away.

Some Notes

Just for further consideration of the poem, I’m including the inline comments I made for thinking further into the work.