Response

Ashbery's sestina does the easiest thing in the world — it fills a demanding form with trash. Popeye, Wimpy, spinach, the Sea Hag. The six end-words rotate through their obligatory positions like cartoon characters cycling through the same four backgrounds, and this is precisely the point: the sestina is already a machine for making arbitrary recurrence feel like fate. What Ashbery discovers is that the machine doesn't care what you feed it. Spinach recurs with the same structural gravity as thunder. The scratched geraniums carry the same formal weight as the scratched balls. The form dignifies nothing and everything equally, which is what makes the final tercet — "It was domestic thunder, / The color of spinach" — land as something close to pastoral. Not pastoral as Marvell understood it, where "willing Nature does to all dispence / A wild and fragrant Innocence" and the meadows are tilled "More by their presence then their skill." Marvell's pastoral requires the garden to be fallen and the field to be prelapsarian. Ashbery's requires neither. His country is the same as his apartment. His thunder is domestic. The pastoral distinction between corrupted and innocent space, which Marvell's Mower insists on with theological seriousness, has simply been dissolved — not argued against, not deconstructed, just ignored, the way a cartoon ignores gravity until someone looks down.

What the retrieved Wordsworth sees — and Ashbery doesn't bother to see — is the cost of the vision. Poor Susan's mountain and river and small cottage appear at Wood Street and then "the colours have all pass'd away from her eyes." The apparition of country inside city is, for Wordsworth, a wound. For Ashbery it is a gag. Olive hurls through a window and announces "immaculate darkness and thunder" like a soap-opera Cassandra, and nobody processes the information because the form won't let them — the next stanza must begin with "apartment" and the Sea Hag must think her cozy thoughts. The sestina's recurrence prevents grief from settling. This is not callousness. It is a formally precise observation about how mediated experience works: when the same words keep coming back in new configurations, the content drains out and the pattern becomes the meaning. Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse asks "How should we grow in other ground? / How should we flower in foreign air?" — genuinely afraid of transplantation, of the self that cannot survive outside its cloister. Ashbery's characters have no such fear because they have no such depth. They are already transplanted. They are cartoons, which is to say, images that were never anywhere in the first place.

The oblique strategy says *don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do*, and this sestina is the proof of that principle taken to its logical end. The easy thing — putting Popeye in a sestina — turns out to be the thing that reveals what the sestina is. A machine for generating the feeling of significance through recurrence alone. No content is required. The spinach comes back and back and each time it means less as spinach and more as structure, until by the envoi it has become pure color, the color of domestic thunder, which is the color of nothing because thunder has no color, which means the poem has arrived at an image that is entirely form and zero referent. Hardy's "Ah, are you digging on my grave" works the same operation from the other direction: who remembers? No one, not even the dog. Hardy makes this tragic. Ashbery makes it sitcom. But the formal mechanism is identical — the repeated question, the rotating answers, the discovery that the structure will keep cycling regardless of whether anyone inside it is paying attention. The dead in Hardy's poem and the cartoons in Ashbery's share a condition: they are figures whose significance is entirely assigned by the reader, never generated from within.