Style

Style is never acheived supra-consciously; it can't be, though many try. The moment the effort becomes self-conscious is the moment any thought of style is lost. Style can't be found if searched for; once searched for, any possible semblance of style is forfeited, though a poem might be found in the searching as in the Found Poem movement of the early-to-mid 20th c. 

Style is made of the stuff we think about without thinking. Thinking about the poet Ashbery yesterday, the first thought I had is, he's dead. That thought influenced the style in which I wrote about Ashbery, a poet who is confounding to me and remains so. Not only could I not understand his poetry--which I took to be his style, a poet of whom Harold Bloom wrote, "he is joining the American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane"--I had no real wish to. The confusion Ashbery creates in me toward his poems is half the confusion he'd created in the poems themselves, and half the confusion created by the laudatory reception accorded his poems by other well-known contemporary poets and by critics like Bloom, those people upon which many other thoughtful people depend for their own critical evaluations of style.

Style is ultimately the way in which the artist approaches his or her subject matter. If and when obfuscation is the approach, and obfuscation has been a legitimate literary tactic since the early 20th c, something to rise toward as the trout rises to the fly, then that style must surely embody obfuscation; therefore, Ashbery most certainly must be considered a stylist, though whether as major as Bloom makes him out to be or as minor as many others think he is is another matter (as is the matter of whether his poems are any good or really bad), as Ashbery's poems for better or worse, do seem to be made of stuff thought about without thinking.

Style has nothing to do with popularity or acceptance or recognition, and nearly everything to do with the intensity of the writer's engagement with subject matter; how closely that engagement aligns with the intention of creating a clear music all his or her own. Oppen had a yardstick, 'if a poem is really a poem it could only have been that poem," which one could apply also to prose. I don't feel that kind of rigor in anything I've read of Ashbery; quite the opposite: an Ashbery poem could have been any number of poems.

I once told a poet that I "liked" her poems, though I hadn't understood any of them. I still wonder why I told her what I told her. I suppose it was just my style.