Cloud pleaser

Walker, Matthew (2023) Cloud pleaser. Masters thesis, Northern Arizona University.

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Abstract

“Sometimes I think it’s all one big affectation.” — John Ashbery, “Involuntary Description” If I have anything like a fundamental theory about poetry, it might be that poetry is a dubious business. What is it, anyway? Where’s the line between poetry and prose? Between poetry and scuba diving, for that matter? Just what is the point of putting together a series of words like “orange buggy smoker blimp Aristotle soup”? I don’t really know, and not knowing is the state from which my poems proceed and return to in a constantly evolving flux. Bad poetry is very sure of itself. My poems are anything but sure of themselves. They’re always teetering on the edge of something, never settling down except temporarily, when the end of the poem and the white space that follows enforce a pause while the voice of the poem stops to collect itself before starting the next one. In my poems I take apart the English language and don’t quite put it together again. I’m trying to explore the nooks and crannies of consciousness that can’t be reached through the conventional meaning-making that language is generally used for. The best poets have always pushed the language into new areas of discovery, but Gertrude Stein really got the ball rolling when it came to dismantling English in a truly profound way. Tender Buttons is a book I return to frequently before I sit down to write poetry. The tumbling energy and brazenness of it feels newer and more refreshing than a lot of today’s poetry. It was surely the punk rock of its day. The pure pleasure of music is something else I aim for in poetry. Music (especially instrumental music) doesn’t have to worry about being about anything. The pleasures of sound and the bodily energy of music are qualities I try to keep close to me as I write, because I think there’s no reason a highly literary poem can’t be as thrilling as a Pixies song. And like a Pixies song, a poem of mine often contains phrases and images that delight in being weird for weirdness’s sake, and whose meanings are happily obscure. Indeed, it’s interesting how nonsense is accepted much more readily in pop music and pop culture than it is in contemporary American poetry. “Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna / Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe” John Lennon sings in a song beloved by millions. By contrast, the suspicion of nonsense in poetry, the view of it as sophomoric child’s play, means that the kind of poetry we could for lack of better terms call experimental or avant-garde—but which I just like to call weird—is still relegated to a tiny niche audience, even within the already niche realm of poetry. Weird poetry that does find a wider audience often consists of a tamed, watered-down weirdness that many readers find more digestible. John Ashbery is a rare exception to this rule. Ashbery, who should have won the Nobel Prize instead of Bob Dylan, found a way to reach mainstream (by poetry-world standards) success through the utter originality, depthless richness, and sheer genius of what he wrote. It’s supposed to be uncool to be an Ashbery imitator, since there are supposedly so many (though are there, really?), but to read him as deeply as I have and then not to want to at least try to do what he did is impossible for me to fathom. It’s a temptation that’s useless for me to resist, and no one ever achieved anything worthwhile in the arts by resisting temptation. (Is that true? I don’t know, but it sounds good, which is a key component of my poetics.) Ashbery’s poetry evolved considerably over his seven-decade career, so if you’re going to imitate him, at least there are a lot of different modes to imitate. In this collection, poems like “Lucky Lacunae,” “What Matters in College?” and “Works and Despair” are heavily influenced by the work he produced in his nineteen-seventies heyday. Poems like this feature longer sentences and more abstraction, where the appeal lies chiefly in the tingling complexities created by pile-ups of clauses that threaten to go on forever. The influence of his later, nineties-to-aughts period can be found in poems like “Code of Silence,” “Onward, Christian Golfers,” “Tourist Trap,” and the title poem, “Cloud Pleaser.” These poems are less philosophical, more jokey and colorful, often using shorter sentences and more images. My hope, in any case, is that my inevitable failure to write a poem with exactly the same sort of brilliance that Ashbery could bring to his work will result in poems that do after all sound like me rather than him. But Ashbery is by no means the only poet in whose work I find inspiration. Some of the poems in this collection are directly influenced by younger poets, some of whom are still with us. Poems with more of a narrative, like “Cake vs. Beer,” “Supine Trilogy,” and “Epiphany,” can be compared to the humorous surrealism of James Tate and Michael Earl Craig (who was also influenced by Tate). Poems like “On the Lookout,” “The Fever,” and “By the Way” show the influence of poets like Graham Foust and Julie Doxsee, whose work warps syntax with a playful precision that imbues the lines with a high degree of tension and torque. Some of the more extreme disruptions of language, in poems like “The Widening Gyre,” “Flashing Scents,” and “The Last Resort,” can be traced partly to Clark Coolidge, Michael Gizzi, and other poets affiliated directly or tangentially with the Language poets. Poems like these have an even more defiantly avant-garde “punk” spirit than the others in this collection. Still other poems like “Pittsburgh Haibun,” “Career Development,” and “Pop Quiz” owe something to the friendly and accessible but offbeat humor of Ron Padgett. Finally, “Barbie’s Alien Baby’s First Botox Debacle” is a straight-up homage to the reigning queen of Flarf, Sharon Mesmer. I could name other poets who have probably influenced my work in small ways, but it would be a very long list indeed. No doubt I’m influenced by anyone I happen to be reading at the moment. Poetry, more than life itself, is what inspires me to write poetry. Such a variety of influences makes for a highly eclectic collection, but I would defend this grab-bag approach on the grounds that the main thing I aim for in my poetry is surprise. I never know what the next line will be as I’m writing a poem, and I like the idea of taking this same unexpectedness to the overall structure of the book. The reader doesn’t know quite what to expect when they turn the page, and I wish more poetry books were written that way. Because to me, the appeal of surprise is its relation to curiosity, to looking outward. These poems are in a continual process of opening outward, away from the stale confines of my interior self. I’m barely present in these poems, even the ones with a first-person speaker, who isn’t even a persona so much as a multiplicity of shifting selves, bizarre imagined versions of my “self,” if there is such a thing. (OK, I really did piss on a building in Pittsburgh, but other than that….) A word on grammar: Above I said that my poetry takes apart the English language, but I admit that I work largely within the limits of standard grammar and punctuation, rarely using sentence fragments, and no typographic experimentation to speak of. Nevertheless, I still find endless room to explore within standard grammar restrictions. In fact I don’t think of them as restrictions at all. There are some examples of fragment-based poetry that I enjoy, but generally I’m drawn more to sentences, whether they’re conventionally punctuated or not. Some may find the kind of poetry I write to be forbiddingly opaque or “inaccessible.” Without letting this degenerate into a prolonged diatribe about my views on the accessibility debate, let me just say that I consider my poems to be just as readable as anything by Billy Collins (and a lot less cringeworthy). If you can read English, you can read my poems. They’re not hiding anything. They’re irreducible to any neat and definitive interpretation. This is good news for the reader, who can take from the poems whatever they choose to read into them. And if the poems succeed in sparking surprise and delight, they may cause certain reluctant readers to rethink the whole notion of accessibility. The last thing I want to do is pander to popular ideas of poetry that people are already comfortable with. What I want to do is to stand a little off to the side, like a furtive peddler of illicit goods on a city street, and beckon readers to come to me, saying, “Psst, come listen to this. I don’t know if you’re ready for it, but it’s the good stuff, trust me…”

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Publisher’s Statement:	© Copyright is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
Keywords:	Poetry, American
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PS American literature
NAU Depositing Author Academic Status:	Student
Department/Unit:	Graduate College > Theses and Dissertations College of Arts and Letters > English
Date Deposited:	22 Oct 2025 21:40
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2025 21:40
URI:	https://openknowledge.nau.edu/id/eprint/6230

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