Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Ashbery's "By Guess and By Gosh" navigates the dissonant terrain of casual conversations, intimate admissions, and societal discourse, channeling them into a tapestry of fragmented, yet oddly relatable, human experience. The poem opens with a call to "awaken with me / the inquiring goodbyes," suggesting a collective journey into the nebulous realm of life's myriad farewells-be it the end of relationships, projects, or even phases of understanding.

What follows is an acknowledgment of life's complexity, branded as a "messy business" that is nonetheless "quite interesting." The phrase captures the poem's oscillation between the personal and the social, the profound and the trivial. The poet lists disparate items-"leisure top," "a different ride home," "whispering"-as if ticking off a shopping list or a series of observations. Yet, each phrase carries a certain weight of lived experience, making them "so many of the things you have to share."

The middle stanza conveys the speaker's sense of aging and possibly the growing disconnect from others: "But I was getting on, / and that's what you don't need." Age here is not just a number but a chasm growing between the speaker and an unspecified "you," leading the speaker to a place where one might apologize for "scaring your king." This could be an allegory for how age or difference in perspectives may alienate us from mainstream norms or power structures.

"You get Peanuts and War and Peace" is a vivid line that encapsulates the vast range of human experience and interests-from the simple comic strip to Tolstoy's profound epic. It might also be a comment on the multifaceted nature of culture, where high and low brow coexist, often within the same person. This cultural multiplicity is also highlighted by the phrase "some in rags, some in jags, some in / velvet gown," echoing the diversity of human conditions and experiences.

Towards the end, the poem makes a turn toward public and social concerns, albeit in an irreverent tone. "Say hi to jock itch, leadership principles, / urinary incompetence" reads like a sarcastic acknowledgment of human frailty and societal preoccupations. And when the poem prompts us to "say a word for the president, / for the scholar magazines, papers, a streaming," it seems to question the value we attach to authority figures and academic discourses, contrasting them with our less lofty, day-to-day concerns.

"Then you are interested in poetry," concludes the poem, a line that could be read as a statement or a question, interrogating the reader's engagement with the text. After traversing such diverse terrains, the reader is left to ponder their own interest in poetry, in all its complexity and simplicity, and how this form of art fits into the chaotic tapestry of human life. "By Guess and By Gosh" thus serves as an intriguing microcosm of Ashbery's ability to blur the line between the mundane and the monumental, reminding us of the entangled and often contradictory threads that make up the fabric of existence.

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