Why I Am Not an Ashbery
By now many of you have likely seen—thanks to the small world that is social media—the fun and silly application known as Poetweet, which scans your tweets and creates from them a sonnet (or other formal poem of your choosing). I was trapped in New York, alone in my friend’s Brooklyn apartment, when I discovered it, and was completely delighted by the resulting poem. (Rob Horning has written compellingly about the ways that algorithms, such as Buzzfeed quizzes, repackage our online personas and sell them back to us, allowing us to consume ourselves like ironic ourobouros.)
Here is the sonnet I “wrote”:
On cars
by Elisa Gabbert
Is True Love the one to read?
Your granddad saying “sick” please
Dying of the light when I’m dead.
To be avoided in any caseBecause their tongue has less reach
FAIL of a neg I wasn’t even amused.
The Sia videos to be my life coach.
Wait, what? I’m so confused.& Joan Didion’s travel uniform:
Half the point. OBJECTIFIER
Like watching VH1 but in book formLovable, Furry Old Knausgaard
Kitsch from art from kitsch. LOVE
Moment with the word “cupboard”
Truth be told, I find much to admire in this poem; the language is all mine, but I never would have arranged it in this manner. It’s more insouciant and less coherent than I usually dare to be—very New York School (down to the title!) and about halfway between O’Hara and Ashbery. It teaches me things: more of my tweets would make good lines of poetry than I realize (in particular “Moment with the word ‘cupboard’” and “Dying of the light when I’m dead”—the full tweet was “I’ll rage against the dying of the light when I’m dead,” FYI); further all-caps should be a more utilized tool in my toolbox.
A recurring question in my life for the past several years has been: Why can’t/don’t I write more like Ashbery? It’s no small distinction between the verbs can and do – am I unable to write like Ashbery, whose poems I love, or do I not really want to? I want to write like him when I’m reading him, but not when I’m writing. In the aftermath of writing, I may vaguely wish the poem read more like Ashbery, but it does not seem a viable possibility for the poem.
There are people whose style we admire but never emulate. I always look wistfully at women with pixie haircuts and bleach-blond hair. It would be fabulous, I imagine, to be a woman with a pixie cut and/or bleached hair, but I cannot imagine doing the work to become such a woman.
The flip-side of this stylistic inertia is the frisson you feel when you learn some element of your own style is believed unattainable by others. In the mid- to late aughts, I developed a reputation among my girlfriends for “pulling things off,” as in: “Only you could pull that off” or “You actually kind of pulled that off.” The implication, of course, was that there was something inherently ridiculous about what I was wearing, that I was just getting away with some minor crime.
But I didn’t, and don’t, take those comments as backhanded. Getting away with something, whether a bit of successful trickery or grand scheme, is often how I want art to feel—all the marvel of putting down a book and thinking “how did they do that?”
Elisa Gabbert is the author of The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013) and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). She lives in Denver.
Latest posts by Elisa Gabbert (see all)
- Beauty Is Youth, Youth Beauty - March 25, 2015
- The Bravery of “Basic” - March 11, 2015
- On Popular Girls and Money as Style - February 24, 2015
