It’s been seven months since I started Some Flowers Soon, and I’ve really enjoyed doing this thing that nobody asked me to do. As a believer in the weekend, I like the Friday feeling of writing a post before the school run. I like sharing something on Twitter that isn’t just grumbling/irony. And I like hearing from ‘the community of hundreds of Some Flowers Soon readers’ — as Substack proudly puts it — when somebody enjoys a post.
But I have other things to do this month, including packing up the books that are often the kindling for these posts. So I’m pausing for May with an extract from Matthew Bevis’s excellent essay ‘In Search of Distraction’ (2017), which I chanced upon in an old copy of Poetry magazine. Here he discusses the last line of John Ashbery’s poem ‘What Is Poetry’ (you might recognise it):
[Ashbery] decided to leave both his students and readers with another question: “It might give us — what? — some flowers soon?”
I overheard a boy saying that particular line to a girl in Brentano’s bookshop where I was browsing... I also like it that the couple who were talking seemed to be lovers, so the line... seemed to have special meaning for them.
So the poet was browsing for a book, presumably, but got distracted by a question, a desire, something that wasn’t quite his but was something he could use. At public readings of “What Is Poetry,” Ashbery often pointed out that the title doesn’t have a question mark. Perhaps the “what?” of the last line might therefore be read as constitutive of the what-ness of what poetry is. For what was the tone, exactly, with which the lover said “what?” — was it interrupted, distracted, or was it uttered with a certain fond, flirtatious panache? More of the latter, I guess, but with a little of the former too. It is, of course, a private joke, but like all good jokes — especially those shared between lovers — even the teller can’t be entirely sure what or just how much it signifies.
The impossibility of hearing the line precisely, of knowing its “special meaning,” is part of the pleasure of encountering it. (I’m not sure I want to know the meaning; I only know that I enjoy more meaning.) The line has something of “that distraction and intense desire” of which Wordsworth spoke in The Prelude — at once a digression and a new possibility, a dalliance and a gift.
So, thanks for reading so far. I’ll leave you with a link to my review of Bevis’s Wordsworth’s Fun (2019), the book that Ashbery distracted him from: https://romantic-circles.org/reviews-blog/matthew-bevis-wordsworth%E2%80%99s-fun-reviewed-jeremy-noel-tod