Invisible Terrain

In his debut collection, Some Trees (1956), John Ashbery poses a question that resonates across his oeuvre and much modern art: “How could he explain to them his prayer / that nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?” When Ashbery asks this strange question, he joins a host of transatlantic avant-gardists—from the Dadaists to the 1960s neo-avant-gardists and beyond—who have dreamed the paradoxical dream of turning art into nature. Invisible Terrain examines Ashbery’s poetic mediation of this fantasy, reading his work alongside an array of practitioners, from Wordsworth to Warhol, as an exemplary case study of avant-garde transvaluation of Western nature aesthetics. Ashbery takes his coordinates from a constellation of British, American, and continental European poetic and visual art practices—from romantic nature poet John Clare’s presentational immediacy to the French “New Realism” movement’s “direct appropriation of the real” in the early 1960s—that share an emphasis on somehow transforming the material of art into a “second nature.” Nature, as Ashbery and his company understand it, is a vanguard horizon, a metaphor for art, that which lies beyond “art as we know it.” The fact that the artist can never realize this aesthetic fiction—which overturns what we generally mean by “art” and “nature”—makes it all the more powerful as a tool for staking out the limits of art. In chronicling Ashbery’s articulation of “a completely new kind of realism,” Invisible Terrain tells the larger story of nature’s transformation into a resolutely unnatural aesthetic resource in twentieth-century art and literature. But in documenting Ashbery’s eventual turn against this avant-garde tradition—most conspicuously in his archive of campy, intentionally “bad” nature poems—the project also registers queer resistance to the normative concept of nature itself as a governing conceit for art. The story begins in the late 1940s with the Abstract Expressionist valorization of process, surface, and immediacy—summed up by Jackson Pollock’s famous quip, “I am Nature”—that so influenced Ashbery’s early quest for transparent, anti-mimetic modes of composition. It ends with “Breezeway,” a poem about Hurricane Sandy and climate change. Along the way, Invisible Terrain documents Ashbery’s strategic literalization of the stream-of-consciousness metaphor, his pastoral dispersal of the lyric subject during the politically fraught Vietnam era, and his investment in “bad” nature poetry.