Situating Ashbery’s Entropic Poetics

Ashbery’s poetics may at first glance seem antithetical to eco- and energy-critical approaches. “There is very little of what we might call nature content in Ashbery’s poems,” Stephen J. Ross remarks. “Nature, for Ashbery, is an aesthetic resource” (29), which he draws on consistently to produce “bad” nature poems that amount to a “camping of nature poetics” that brings out its “essentially kitsch quality” (31). Despite its complicated relationship with mimesis and natural phenomena, Ashbery’s work has begun to generate ecologically minded readings by recent critics including Ross, Ronda, and Christopher Schmidt.Footnote ³ This article builds on their work to show how reading Ashbery’s long poem through the lens of entropy opens the poem to fresh interpretations and also gestures toward a broader understanding of the impact of contemporary theories of energy and information on late-twentieth-century aesthetics in general. In reading Ashbery’s poem through the lens of entropy, then, this article aims to contribute to research on the concept’s aesthetic appropriation during the postwar period. The poem offers a compelling thematic and formal equivalent to accounts of entropy in the period, a concept that was itself undergoing a shift at the time of the poem’s writing. “The Skaters” effectively becomes a textual exercise in producing excess, waste, and leakage, engaging an antiproductive aesthetics that amounts to a period style for the cultural moment that witnessed what Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson describe as a “historical and cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity,” which took place materially “in terms of the conceptual crossover from energy to information” (1). In her account of the shifting cultural meaning of entropy, N. Katherine Hayles suggests that during the postwar period, when “proliferating information is associated with the production of entropy,” “[w]hat we fear most immediately is not that the universe will run down,” as in entropy’s thermodynamic meaning, “but that the information will pile up until it overwhelms our ability to understand it,” as in its newfound informational register (49). This realignment in the concept of entropy was indicative of a broader cultural process by which change and flux came to be valued over order and stability. As Clarke puts the matter:

In its cultural application, entropy suggests the irreversibility of time, ever-increasing complexity, and systemic instability as preconditions for the emergence of the new. Ashbery’s poem sits on the cusp of the conceptual transposition from energy to information, remaining implicitly aware of both the energetic and the informational registers of entropy, for, as the poem strongly suggests, the emergence of the new within a given system is predicated on the presence of randomness and undecidability. Understood as a poetic exercise in the entropic, “The Skaters” becomes a thematic and rhetorical inscription of the anxieties generated by a postwar culture of runaway accumulation. The poem snowballs to incorporate a disorienting mass of images, descriptions, lists of objects, invocations of the ekphrastic, shifting points of view, intertextual references, snippets lifted from other texts, faux-poetic meditations, and language bordering on pure abstraction. Envisioned as a system in its own right, “The Skaters” initiates an entropic long-form poetics that predicates its novelty not on its marshaling of a coherent network of symbolism and referentiality, as in earlier modernist long poems, but on its accretive tendency to generate novel connections through its startling stylistic shifts, unanticipated juxtapositions, and leaps back and forth between the concrete and the abstract.

Written in late 1963 and early 1964, “The Skaters” marked a transition in Ashbery’s writing from his early surrealist experiments in collage and parataxis such as “Europe” and “The New Realism” (both in The Tennis Court Oath, published in 1962), toward the more fluid, syntactically regular but no less jarring aesthetic of his critically acclaimed long poems of the 1970s, including Three Poems, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” and “Litany.” Like these later poems, “The Skaters” constantly flirts with—but finally refuses to deliver—penetrating lyric insight and an underlying narrative coherence as its frequent shifts in point of view and subject matter make it highly resistant to summary. The poem is a signal instance of the “simultaneous disclosure and concealment” that Marjorie Perloff’s influential 1981 account of the “poetics of indeterminacy” identifies as “the structural principle of the Ashbery poem” (262), in which “[t]oo much disclosure produces contrivance; too much concealment, unintelligibility and boredom” (263). In the decades that have followed, this confounding tendency to simultaneously disclose and conceal, to furnish the reader with both too much and too little, has been a mainstay of critical commentators. Ross, for instance, describes the “cumulative effect” of Ashbery’s poetics as one of “constant narrative interruption, as if part of the text were missing or had been torn away,” a self-conscious strategy of “purposeful fragmentation” (54). Critics of “The Skaters” have thus remained justifiably wary of arriving at conclusions concerning what the poem is “about.” Brian McHale notes that “‘The Skaters’ often appears to make sense locally, inducing in readers the unwarranted expectation that the poem’s global sense should be within relatively easy reach. Instead, what they encounter is an all but intractable flux” (564). This caution concerning the pitfalls of reading “The Skaters” thematically has led its critics to focus on the surface effects of the poem, suggesting that it can best be apprehended through descriptions not of what it means but of how it works. The poem’s tendency toward what McHale describes as “intractable flux” has also been described in terms of “the movement or rhythm between poles” (John Shoptaw), “the drift of language” (David Herd), and a frequent deployment of “irreferents” (Mary Kinzie).Footnote ⁴

Keeping the pitfalls of reading the poem thematically in mind, yet shifting away from the more strictly formalist analysis of the poem these critics undertake, I approach energy and entropy as organizing structural motifs that link the poem to broader cultural preoccupations. Reframed as an entropic force that the poem tries—and necessarily fails—to apprehend, the movement, drift, and flux these critics identify become legible within a mid-twentieth-century popular understanding of entropy as the linking concern in a cultural shift from energy to information as the material substratum of social reproduction. “The Skaters” very often produces not a lack of meaning but a superabundance of meaning, meaning in excess. Such a proliferation relates the poem to what Ronda identifies in her reading of Ashbery’s period poetics as a “larger, underlying dynamics of transience and accumulation. Throughout Ashbery’s work of this period,” she observes, “he describes phenomena piling up, undergoing transformation, lingering, decaying in what he calls the ‘endless garbage chute of the present’” (54). This aesthetic of pileup and decay can best be apprehended as an entropic phenomenon; indicative of the runaway proliferation of information Hayles identifies with the postwar period’s notion of informational entropy, the poem’s aesthetic is also broadly suggestive of a range of cultural metaphors in the 1960s, when entropy came to signify excessive consumption and a loss of cultural cohesion.

A latent concern with energy and entropy furnishes the context for much writing on poetry in the period immediately following the Second World War. Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Olson, for instance, use images evocative of energy conversion to describe the poem as a kind of apparatus enabling a transfer of energy from poet to reader. Although Ashbery is less explicit than Rukeyser or Olson in his framing of the poem in relation to energy, his writing during a slightly later period is clearly informed by the cultural context of what Peter Middleton describes as a “shared problematic” (124).Footnote ⁵ Ashbery’s 1957 review of Gertrude Stein’s posthumously published Stanzas in Meditation deploys a suggestive energy metaphor to account for the poem’s tendency to induce boredom: “There is certainly plenty of monotony in the 150-page title poem which forms the first half of this volume,” he avers, “but it is the fertile kind, which generates excitement as water monotonously flowing over a dam generates electrical power” (“Impossible” 11). Ashbery attributes to the poem’s trance-inducing repetitiveness a generative ability that he likens to the steady (but admittedly monotonous) movement of water that generates hydroelectric power. Thus, the poem’s transfer of energy (or meaning) occurs not as a sudden, epiphanic illumination but gradually and in the aggregate, through a process that is always subject to loss and drift; its language is best conceived as a steadily moving effluvium whose potential lies implicit, not so much created as discovered and harnessed. The effect of such a flow on the reader is “excitement,” as opposed to comprehension. For its entropic poetics to take shape, the poem must constantly risk unintelligibility and the boredom it generates, while it simultaneously remains anchored, however tenuously, in the realm of narrative possibility. Even though “The Skaters” was still several years off in Ashbery’s writing career at this point, he was already clearly imagining—based on Stein’s example—a long-form style of poetry that would skirt the limits of referentiality without departing from it altogether, its language a kind of self-sustaining flow, albeit one subject to loss and dispersal.

Critics would eventually use similar language to describe Ashbery’s own writing; in a 1970 review of The Double Dream of Spring, Ashbery’s follow-up to Rivers and Mountains, Richard Howard observed that “[t]he lines run on, or peter out, they do not shore up the poem’s energy by any kind of rhythmic or musical constant: the poem is endlessly obliging, but under no obligations” (52). Thus, Howard’s reading of Ashbery, like Ashbery’s own reading of Stein, envisions the poem not as a shoring up of energy but as a petering out, a gradual but steady running down that fails to deliver cohesion and consistency. As Ashbery and Howard both suggest, a poem’s formal dynamics has an energy of its own, which tends to dissipate in space and time. This formal tendency toward dissipation—in which poetic novelty becomes an entropic phenomenon—mirrored contemporary notions of entropy as a heuristic model in which both energy and information become subjected to dispersal and randomization in time.

From Energy to Information in the Postwar Period

Throughout the history of modernity, energy has been a quintessentially elusive phenomenon that commentators have often struggled to measure, quantify, and describe. Energy—understood as a latent capacity to drive movement and fuel work—becomes associated with (re)productive forces that are as much ideological as they are mechanical, as modernity becomes synonymous with an ever-increasing capacity for converting energy into mechanical force, as well as with the forms of economic and political power and individual freedoms and mobilities this conversion fuels. In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s now-familiar formulation, “[t]he mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive” (208). In her exploration of the history of energy as a cultural category, Daggett shows the historical development of a thoroughly naturalized “energy epistemology” underwriting Western notions of progress, in which “[e]nergy provided the grammar for a preference for the transformation of fuel, for putting it to use to do work and make change, and for stamping teleological activity as a virtuous achievement” (19). Like energy, entropy is a multivalent concept with a range of technical and cultural associations that assumes varying, sometimes even contradictory meanings. The conceptual framework for later understandings of energy and entropy emerged out of a nineteenth-century science project collectively undertaken by figures such as Sadi Carnot, Rudolf Clausius, and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) that put forth the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Vaclav Smil describes these two laws:

Thus the first law of thermodynamics claimed that the amount of energy in the universe remained at a constant while the second law claimed that entropy was a universal factor in energy conversion, resulting in a steady decline in the amount of energy available for productive purposes. Applied on a universal level, the idea of entropy implies heat death, a final state of equilibrium in which the temperature within a given system reaches absolute zero (about negative 273 degrees Celsius) and there is no longer any heat differential capable of doing work or maintaining life.

As scholars of energy have argued, the postulation of entropy unsettled firmly held assumptions concerning the stability of the universe; the principle of the conservation of energy seemed to confirm earlier religious beliefs regarding the presence of a divine order, but entropy suggested the opposite: a universal tendency toward chaos and disorder. As Clarke puts the matter, “[e]nergy had no sooner been delivered to the world of science as a primary physical concept on a par with matter than it was shadowed by its evil twin entropy, the demonic underside of energy’s divine potency. As these florid metaphors may indicate, the twinned physical concepts of energy and entropy immediately began to generate both conceptual and analogical surpluses” (20–21). Entropy was employed in a wide range of discourses in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when it seemed to imply that any system—thermodynamic, economic, or social—was prone to inevitable decay, assuming what Clarke describes as “a negative valence” in offering “a proof of the inevitable degradation of energies, of the exhaustion of material and vital resources, as a synonym for melancholy reflections on the devolution of biological and human achievements, on the arrival of a world ‘unfit for the habitation of man as at present constituted,’ and ultimately, on the ‘heat death’ of the universe itself” (21).Footnote ⁶ In a broadened sense, then, entropy becomes a suggestive metaphor, lending itself to a variety of usages in an emerging modernity in which the cultural directive toward ever-increasing productivity, driven materially by steady improvements in the means of converting ever-greater amounts of stored energy into power and motion, remained dogged by a culture-wide fear of loss, dissipation, and nonproductive expenditure arriving at a final and complete point of depletion.

The scientific understanding of entropy entered a new stage in the late nineteenth century, when the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, building on a conceptual model first suggested by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, used statistical analysis to model energetic relations of order and disorder.Footnote ⁷ Boltzmann suggested that in a closed system, a random, or entropic, distribution of particles was vastly more statistically likely than an ordered one given the greater number of ways of achieving it, and that likewise the higher the order in a particular configuration of particles the greater its statistical unlikelihood.Footnote ⁸ A convergence of fields occurred following the Second World War, and Boltzmann’s model was enlisted by early theorists of information such as Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, Norbert Wiener, and Léon Brillouin. Shannon, an engineer at Bell Laboratories, first applied the concept of entropy to information in 1948, when he adapted Boltzmann’s logarithmic expression of entropy to suggest a conception of information that equated it with the unpredictability, or “surprisal,” of a given message in its transmission from sender to receiver.Footnote ⁹ Applying the equation Boltzmann had derived from his statistical model for entropy, Shannon chose to assign the same sign to entropy and information so that the greater the unlikelihood of a particular element occurring within a sequence the more information it carried. This decision—which Hayles calls “Shannon’s choice”—was crucial; for, as Hayles makes clear, divorcing information from “meaning” and associating it instead with “novelty” allowed for a “metaphoric joining” of entropy and information in which complex systems could be understood as “rich in information rather than deficient in order” (51). Of course, in decoupling information and meaning, Shannon’s model introduces a situation in which pure noise or meaningless gibberish becomes the ultimate horizon of information as entropy. Yet Weaver, Shannon’s collaborator at Bell, anticipated this problem. In his commentary on Shannon’s model, Weaver suggested that while noise could indeed be measured in the same units as information, this unintended information became interference or “equivocation” and had to be distinguished from the information intended by a message’s sender.Footnote ¹⁰ Shannon and Weaver thus define information through what Hayles describes as “a curve that reaches its maximum precisely at the midpoint between certainty and uncertainty,” with a scenario in which one of two variables will be chosen, as in the tossing of a coin, carrying the highest possible amount of information, so that “the maximum amount of information is conveyed by a message that is partly surprising and partly anticipated” (55).

An alternative understanding of the relationship between entropy and information emerged around the same time. Wiener, the polymath founder of the discourse of cybernetics, and Brillouin, a physicist working in quantum mechanics, independently arrived at models in which information took on an inverse relationship with entropy, so that rising entropy corresponded directly to decreasing information. Wiener credited his statistical model not to Boltzmann but to the nineteenth-century US mathematician Willard Gibbs, but he came to a similar understanding of entropy as a rising degree of randomness in the distribution of particles that corresponded to an increasing level of statistical probability: “As entropy increases,” Wiener wrote in 1954, “the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness” (12). While Wiener’s statistical model was much the same as Shannon’s, Wiener assigned entropy and information opposite signs in his system: “Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization,” he writes. “Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact,” he continues, “it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems” (21; emphasis mine). Thus, while both models assume the statistical likelihood of a rising state of entropy in a given system, Wiener’s understanding of informational entropy becomes a mirror image of Shannon and Weaver’s; at great risk of overgeneralizing, it might be said that while Shannon and Weaver’s positive correlation between entropy and information puts its stock in the emergent and the unpredictable, Wiener’s negative correlation between entropy and information doubles down on order.

Jasper Bernes offers an illuminating commentary on this passage in its application to poetry: “That this discussion takes the poem as its limit case is not surprising,” he writes, “especially considering the way that poetic novelty … increasingly became a function of processes of randomization, disordering and fragmentation over the course of the twentieth century.” While “Wiener might accord with a more conservative, Horatian view of poetry that sees its value in its ability to delight and inform,” an opposite tendency, which Bernes characterizes as “Shannon poetry” following Shannon’s valorization of the novel, leverages “the capacity of poetic language to surprise and perhaps even confuse.” At the same time, this maximization of the new resists the tendency to become pure noise or unintelligible verbal flow, since it “requires a mixture of the predictable and unpredictable (absolute gibberish becomes, as we know, monotonous)” (99). Following Shannon and Weaver’s positive correlation of entropy and information, then, an entropic aesthetics—such as Ashbery associates with Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation—straddles the line between intelligibility and noise as it embraces a mode of expression that maximizes surprise, novelty, and internal disjunction while remaining in the realm of communicability. It is this entropic aesthetics that Ashbery’s “The Skaters” helps initiate.

Borrowed from information theory (which had in turn borrowed it from thermodynamics), the concept of entropy assumed a renewed cultural prominence in the 1960s as it was enlisted to describe a range of divergent—yet ultimately related—phenomena. Shannon, who had himself co-opted the concept, ironically warned in 1956 that information theory could become “something of a scientific bandwagon,” leading to a lax “use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy.” In a process that tacitly legitimated Shannon’s wariness, the term assumed broad cultural currency, playing a central thematic role in the fiction of Philip K. Dick, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon, among many others, and was invoked to describe a range of phenomena including emerging architectural styles, the stochastic compositions of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the minimalist visual works of Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt, developments Ashbery was certainly familiar with given his deep ties to the art world.Footnote ¹¹ Writing in the pages of Artforum in 1966—the same year in which “The Skaters” appeared—the artist Robert Smithson equated entropy with a salutary flattening out, an “anti-Newtonian” evacuation of the classical concepts of space and time that had dominated the arts since the Renaissance, which arose in response to the aesthetic and cultural barrenness of postwar society.Footnote ¹² In an influential 1968 essay, the critics Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler announced a “dematerialization of art” that had occurred as process- and performance-based practices, which they saw as related to a “current international obsession with entropy,” steadily took hold (48). Writing in 1971, the art historian Rudolf Arnheim summed up the vogue for entropy in noting that when the concept “began to enter the public consciousness a century or so ago, it suggested an apocalyptic vision of the course of events on earth. The Second Law stated that the entropy of the world strives towards a maximum, which amounted to saying that the energy in the universe, although constant in amount, was subject to more and more dissipation and degradation” (9). Yet, in surveying contemporary usages such as those suggested by Smithson, Lippard, and Chandler, Arnheim was drawn to conclude that “the popular use of the notion of entropy has changed. If during the last century it served to diagnose, explain, and deplore the degradation of culture, it now provides a positive rationale for ‘minimal’ art and the pleasures of chaos” (11–12). As a rejection of a Western notion of art centered on the perspective of a Cartesian observer, artistic entropy likewise decentered notions of individual expression and creativity that had held for centuries, and instead embraced the random and the chaotic as sources of artistic novelty.

At this point it becomes important to acknowledge an admitted lack of conceptual clarity surrounding entropy in the postwar decades. The concept went from suggesting a systemic tendency toward exhaustion and depletion in theoretical understandings of energy, to implying an undecidability in the transmission of information from a sender to a receiver in information theory, to indicating a tendency toward the aleatory, the flattened out, and the aperspectival in the arts. Entropy is useful precisely as a fuzzy concept; its application in certain specific discourses reveals as much about the preoccupations of the discourses themselves as it does about any quantifiable external phenomenon. Yet there is a certain family relationship among these usages, in which previous certainties concerning what gets conserved and what gets lost in processes animated by a transfer or exchange of force are upended or called into question. The shift from energy to information as the force in question—subjected to loss, dispersal, or misdirection—reflects a corresponding realignment in cultural assumptions about the basis of social and material life. Within such a context, the arts’ embrace of entropy, as a name for the transformations that occur when seemingly stable forms of value become steadily obliterated in space and time, suggests a critical stance in which the excessive, the random, and the negative can be recuperated as aspects of processes that are as natural as they are inevitable—a critical stance that also animates Ashbery’s poem.

Toward an Entropic Poetics in “The Skaters”

In a 1962 essay titled “The New Realists,” written for an art exhibition catalog, Ashbery contrasts the aesthetic agenda of the 1920s—for which T. S. Eliot is his representative—with that of his own moment: “whereas in the 1920s a poet such as Eliot couldn’t evoke a gasworks without feeling obliged to call the whole history of human thought into play,” Ashbery suggests that “[i]n today’s violent reaction to threadbare intellectualism the artist has brought the gasworks into the home” (82). In the essay, which Ross describes as “a laboratory for techniques that would be perfected in ‘The Skaters’” (57–58), the “new realism” in the arts that Ashbery champions is distinguished by its “continuing effort to come to grips with the emptiness of industrialized modern life” by “accord[ing] it its due” (Ashbery, “New Realists” 81). The gasworks, instead of becoming an Eliotic objective correlative and thereby assuming broad symbolic significance, is one of the many details a poem might evoke to index mundane elements of collective social experience as its starting point.Footnote ¹³ For Ashbery, then, the gasworks evokes modern industrialized life (and the fuel sources driving it) as a common ground without assuming any specific symbolic dimensions. Early in “The Skaters,” readers encounter a similarly offhand evocation of fossil-fuel-driven modernity in a seemingly tossed-off simile: “waves of morning harshness / Float away like coal gas into the sky” (147). This fleeting—yet central—image of coal gas refers to a fuel source produced when solid coal is converted to burnable gas by being crushed and combined with steam at high pressure and temperature. Still common in the mid-twentieth-century United States, coal gas was eventually eclipsed as a domestic fuel source by natural gas, but it is still in use today in areas with abundant coal supplies (Smil 231). The poem’s image of coal gas thus invokes what would still, in the mid-1960s, have been a familiar energy source. Instead of being put to work productively, though, the gas is merely allowed to escape as it is dispersed and ultimately written off as unrecoverable. This lost energy functions as one of many forms of nonproductive transfer the poem suggests as thematic equivalents to its own frequent and unaccountable discharges of semantic energy. Ashbery’s poem engages a thematics of energy expenditure as profligate and extravagant waste, powerfully suggested by such images as the escaping coal gas, that mirrors its scattershot structure.

As an exercise in the entropic dispersal of systemic elements toward a random distribution, “The Skaters” flirts with the impossible project of trying to include everything, a tendency cautioned against at one point early in the poem as a “death trap,” a “wanting to put too much in / So the floor sags, as under the weight of a piano” (152). Ashbery’s poetics during the period draws its animus from the tension famously identified on the opening page of his Three Poems: the need to “put it all down” and the desire “to leave all out” (247), a tendency on the one hand to overexplain—or, as “The Skaters” puts it, “To line phrases with the costly stuff of explanation” (152)—and on the other hand toward what the poem describes as “This leaving-out business,” on which “hinges the very importance of what’s novel / Or autocratic, or dense or silly” (152). Here the poem’s overall effect—what is novel, or else autocratic, dense, or silly about it—is accomplished not so much by what it includes as by what it manages to exclude, yet in his eagerness to show his reader how clever and cool his poem is, Ashbery’s chatty poet-persona explains away its novelty. At the same time he admits the inefficacy of his own explanations: “Who, actually, is going to be fooled one instant by these phony explanations, / Think them important?” (153). Finally, the poet is haunted by the possibility that his effort at communication will drift into incoherence, or be drowned out by noise, or be obliterated in time, hence his “madness to explain” (153).

Against this fervent need to communicate—even at the risk of overexplaining—the poem frequently counterposes images suggestive of loss and forgetting as inevitable by-products of passing time: “Forgotten as the words fly briskly across, each time / Bringing down meaning as snow from a low sky, or rabbits flushed from a wood,” read lines that appear early in the poem (149). Illumination arrives in impossible-to-capture flurries as the poem likens its own process to a snowstorm, then proceeds to comment on the likeness:

These lines—which figure prominently in critical interpretations of the poem—furnish a case in point of the motormouth poet’s tendency to overexplain by preempting the critic’s interpretive moves with an interpretation of his own.Footnote ¹⁴ With its extended snowstorm analogy, the poem even seems, however locally and provisionally, to embrace the Eliotic notion of symbol from which Ashbery was so eager to distance himself in “The New Realists.” Yet the poem undercuts this emerging symbolic network by offering its own interpretation of the snowstorm, only to further upend its symbolic game with the declaration—isolated in its own line—that “[m]ild effects are the result,” suggesting that only the most trivial kind of poetry engages in such exercises. The poem’s sustained effort to find and maintain the middle ground between restating truisms and risking incomprehensibility may in fact be a more elusive project than it seems. At any rate, if one takes the poem’s own explanation at face value (and there is no reason not to), this project accounts for the poem’s “repeated jumps,” its tendency to leap “from abstract into positive and back to a slightly less diluted abstract.” In the poem’s snowstorm approach to its own meaning, then, the storm and the individual snowflake do not exist in a metonymic relationship in which the part would somehow prefigure the whole. Instead, the flakes gradually add up to a kind of uniform dispersal whose structure cannot be specified in advance of this accretive process.

Ashbery’s poem suggests multiple possible metaphors for this tendency toward dissipation in time. Perhaps the clearest of these (apart from the snowstorm) is the poem’s titular skaters:

In her reading of these lines, Bonnie Costello writes that “Ashbery, impatient with the snowfall of memory and association, and the entropic dartings of the skaters—thoughts driven by the need for novelty—invokes the orderly landscapes of art” (64). While Costello’s reading of the poem foregrounds the presence of such “orderly landscapes” in its broad network of reference, I am more interested in the “entropic dartings” of the poem’s skaters, especially in their relation to “novelty.” The skaters move erratically and unpredictably as they extend the arc of their glide over the frozen surface of the ice before rejoining the cluster, a gesture that finds its formal equivalent in the tendency of the poem’s lines to spill over the margins of the pages. The mass of skaters thus becomes a metaphoric instantiation of the progressive disorder to which any system becomes subjected in time. As a demonstration of this entropic principle, the poem’s skaters figure a loss of productive energy paralleling the one suggested by the image of the escaping coal gas readers encounter in the poem’s opening lines, as finally both the gas and the skaters connote the poem’s tendency toward dispersal.

Early in the poem, following the image of the skaters that gives it its title, who recede almost as soon as they are introduced, the following lines appear:

It is tempting to assume that the poem’s opening image of people skating refers to a particular scene, perhaps from the poet’s own experience, but the poem refuses to confirm this assumption; in place of the exercise in autobiographical recollection readers are led to expect, these lines thematize loss in the form of an inability to retain anything but the most trivial and sentimental. Driven by “novelty,” the skaters gliding over the ice engage in a form of movement paralleling the act of writing that “[p]rojects into a finer expression . . . the profile I cannot remember”: symbol is divorced from content as the mnemonic of writing founders in its capacity to transfer meaning, blocking the retrieval of significant content. If the skaters’ movement does indeed represent a kind of writing, this is writing as an empty gesture that fails to transmit or produce anything lasting or meaningful; the flowing cursive lines traced by the skaters’ blades are only surface-deep and disappear as winter gives way to spring, when “the water surface ripples” and “the whole light changes”—images suggestive of time’s inevitable melt. The “answer” these lines propose to this steady leakage is that “novelty” itself—the accrual of new information, as opposed to the illusion of depth and significance associated with lyric’s traditional guise as a mode of personal expression, à la Wordsworth—becomes the driving force of the poem. Here the poem’s parenthetical is crucial: the fact that the process the poem invokes occurs “at the expense / Of energy” is strongly suggestive of collateral waste and entropic dispersal. Equating “novelty” with “the expense of energy,” “The Skaters” self-reflexively suggests that whatever else it may be, the poem will become an exercise in entropy in both its energetic and its informational meanings. If the negative valence ascribed to entropy as pure expenditure in energy discourse accounts for the poem’s many moments of semantic discharge, then imagining such moments in terms of the meaning ascribed to entropy in information theory enables them to be recuperated as maximally generative expressions of the new.

In a related vein, “The Skaters” enacts a wholesale rejection of unitary perspective that closely aligns the poem with an embrace of entropy as a structural metaphor among the period’s artists, who employed the concept to reject humanist notions of depth and perspective in favor of surface effects and decentered or multiple points of view. The dismissal of the unifying lyric self as an ordering principle, together with the poem’s superabundance of granular detail that fails to add up to anything significant, aligns “The Skaters” with the entropic style in the arts current in the 1960s. If there is no unitary self that forms the basis for the poem’s observations, who is doing the speaking? Early in the poem readers encounter the lines, “And I have a dim intuition that I am that other ‘I’ with which we began” (149), while at another early point, the speaker announces his intention to quit the poem altogether: “But am afraid I’ll / Be of no help to you. Good-bye” (153). The poem’s rejection of a single speakerly vantage and its resulting polyvocality may signal yet another instance of Eliotic “doing the police in different voices.”Footnote ¹⁵ But unlike Eliot’s modernist exploration of perspective, in which, as Kinzie has pointed out, “there is still homage paid to the dramatic location of a speaker in place” (268), one finds in Ashbery a “stubborn refusal of sentimentality and life study”: “In an Ashbery poem, the increase in pressure toward a climax is present only as a promissory note, seldom redeemed by dramatization” (274). The poem’s speaker, then, can be described as the disembodied Ashbery voice, which issues from everywhere and nowhere, an unlocalizable (and entropic) effect created by the poem itself. Ashbery’s poem decenters the prevailing model of lyric expression still detectable in modernist poetics, built around a unified consciousness and the limited perspective it affords. And as it does so, the poem demonstrates—both in terms of its form and in terms of its content—an entropic unraveling of the self in time. “But how much survives? How much of any one of us survives?” the poem asks early on (147), insinuating that the things we amass—“The articles we’d collect”—may outlive us. But without a unitary consciousness to imbue such assemblages with meaning, our collections become mere proliferations of lifeless objects: “Subtracted from our collections, though, these go a little while, collecting aimlessly. We still support them. / But so little energy they have!” (148; emphasis mine). Energy, the poem strongly suggests, is a binding force; its progressive dissipation in time leads to sheer proliferation, a piling up in the absence of any unifying perspective or ordering principle.

The theme of energy expenditure is forcefully repeated toward the end of the poem’s second part in a kind of subsection organized around the image of a “flame fountain” (163). This subsection begins with language lifted from a recipe for a home chemistry experiment included in Three Hundred Things a Bright Boy Can Do (1911), from which Ashbery appropriated several of the poem’s passages.Footnote ¹⁶ The poem reproduces verbatim the language of this experiment in Ashbery’s source text, adding only line breaks. The effect of this amateur science experiment is a release of excess gas: “A multitude of gas bubbles will be produced, which will fire on the surface of the effervescing liquid. / The whole surface of the liquid will become luminous, and fire balls, with jets of fire, / Will dart from the bottom, through the fluid with great rapidity and a hissing noise” (Ashbery, “Skaters” 163). This image of rapidly released gas becomes a corollary to the image of coal gas released into the sky in the poem’s opening lines, establishing a thematic link with this earlier image of a counterproductive systemic tendency toward leakage. Here the experiment produces the momentary excitement of fireworks—in the form of light and noise—but little else. This expenditure assumes the status of a kind of sacrificial aesthetic: “But how luminous the fountain! Its sparks seem to aspire to reach the sky! / And so much energy in those bubbles” (164). The extravagant display becomes an end in its own right as this gratuitous burning of fuel releases gases that can be neither contained nor turned to a productive purpose, suggesting what Buell calls a “modern catastrophic-exuberant energetics,” a tendency to remain wary of—yet simultaneously revel in—new magnitudes of force (289). Unable to constrain his own effervescent excitement at this imagined display (“Great balls of fire!” [Ashbery, “Skaters” 164]), the poem’s speaker proposes another experiment with fire, presumably from his own experience: “In my day we used to make ‘fire designs,’ using a saturated solution of nitrate of potash. / Then we used to take a smooth stick, and using the solution as ink, draw with it on sheets of white tissue paper” (164). Once dry, the designs were exposed to an open flame, which would burn the parts of the paper to which the solution had been applied, constituting a writing that literally consumed itself as the flame traced the line left by the solution on the paper. This self-consuming fire writing functions as one of the poem’s many analogies for the writing process, paralleling the movement of the skaters’ blades over the ice earlier in the poem. Given the poem’s latent interest in thermodynamics and heat transfer, it is no accident that such analogies are attended by images of extreme heat and cold, fire and ice; against the tendency toward entropy as a final point of stasis defined by a total absence of heat, the poem proposes its self-generated heat as a final assertion of its own creative-destructive force. The poem once again invokes the figure of the poet to account for such acts of creative destruction: “It is a scene worthy of the poet’s pen,” the poem reads, “yet it is the fire demon / Who has created it, throwing it up on the dubious surface of a phosphorescent fountain / For all the world like a poet” (165). The poem conjures the impish presence of the fire demon to account for its pyrotechnics, suggesting that its phantasmagorias are the ephemeral stock-in-trade of such would-be illusionists. As an analogy for the poem and its entropic gestation, this superfluous play with potentially dangerous substances becomes an extravagantly wasteful display that fails to produce anything beyond the experiment of its own production. Put differently, the poem is all light and noise, flashy effects with no substance; it is literally playing with fire.

“The Skaters” also implies that entropic forces are at work on a social level. Late in the poem, the speaker is forced to admit, “I feel cut off from the life in the streets,” suggesting his isolation from the social tumult of the mid-1960s, when the poem was written (171). Scanning the headlines in the comfort of a café, he reads of “[a] revolution in Argentina! Think of it! Bullets flying through the air, men on the move; / Great passions inciting to massive expenditures of energy, changing the lives of many individuals” (171; emphasis mine). Like the fire experiments readers witness earlier in the poem, such revolutionary moments are collective expenditures of so much pent-up energy. The speaker greets news of what is presumably the June 1966 coup d’état that brought General Juan Carlos Onganía to power in ArgentinaFootnote ¹⁷ by romanticizing it as a spectacularized public release, the social equivalent of the useless conflagrations the poem describes elsewhere. Readers are left in doubt whether such moments are indeed “changing the lives of many individuals”—the phrase itself rings hollow and clichéd as the poem seems to hold out little hope in the efficacy of revolutionary moments as anything other than “massive expenditures of energy.” By contrast with the forms of sociality and spontaneous community associated with the period’s social movements—its civil rights and antiwar organizing—“The Skaters” can imagine such movements only as collective libidinal discharges, instances of entropy on a society-wide scale. If the events taking place in Argentina remain remote from the speaker in this section, then events closer to home are conspicuous because of their very absence in a poem whose range of reference is so broad. Such a gap notwithstanding, Ashbery’s poetics does inscribe a politics; in a cultural moment saturated with excess, “The Skaters” becomes a kind of structural and thematic analogue for the many forms of runaway proliferation that confounded the individual subject’s need for order and coherence.Footnote ¹⁸

Ashbery’s poetry is not interested in standing on the barricades shaking its fists; its investigations of late modern epistemologies go deeper, exposing assumptions concerning the inevitability of economic growth, the expanding capacity for energy conversion, and the dematerialization promised by new information technologies in the second half of the twentieth century. Beginning with information theory’s importation of entropy from thermodynamics, a range of discourses made use of the concept to suggest (and even at times to celebrate) progressive systemic dissolution toward chaos and disorder. In a postwar culture of abundance, in which the reigning fear was not so much that the world would run down until it reached a point of maximum stasis, but that ever-increasing accumulation, fragmentation, and complexity would lead to a complete lack of cohesion, entropy becomes reframed as an expression of the excessive, too much rather than too little.

While “The Skaters” is not “about” the entropic as a hinge point between energy and information as the basis for social life in the 1960s, the poem both thematizes this shift and enacts it on a rhetorical level. Understood in such terms, the latent energy poetics of “The Skaters” links the poem with the social and infrastructural changes of its period, when fears concerning runaway growth resulting in endless and empty accumulation fed the emergence of cultural metaphors related to entropy. As research in the energy humanities has shown, the postwar period can best be conceptualized in terms of a “great acceleration” marked by explosive economic and population expansion, rapidly intensifying energy consumption, massive public investments in the highway system, mass suburbanization, and accelerated cycles of obsolescence affecting consumer goods (McNeill and Engelke). During this period, the consumption of abundant energy became something like a national directive linked with Cold War US triumphalism, a culture-wide prerogative that underwent an abrupt shift as narratives of energy abundance gave way to narratives of energy scarcity in the 1970s. Read from the context of the present, when large-scale energy transition has become both vitally necessary to the perpetuation of life on earth and socially and politically difficult to imagine, let alone enact on anything like the scale necessary, the poem can be read as both a time capsule of its own postwar moment and a commentary on our own. In this context, the poem’s images of energy expenditure assume the status of urgent critique, lending poetic form to a deep-seated, culture-wide sense of unease underlying late modernity. “The Skaters” simultaneously revels in, and expresses a deep fear of, the creative-destructive capacities it represents, a version of Buell’s “catastrophic-exuberant energetics.” Instead of rejecting excess in favor of a doomed search for order and cohesion, Ashbery’s poem leans in to it, both parodying and embracing the endless proliferation of its own moment.

As a rhetorical enactment of entropy in its shifting valences, Ashbery’s entropic poetics implicitly challenges the current limitations of energy humanities scholarship, which, in its attention to literature, has tended to prioritize readily consumable narratives with overt messaging, the phenomenon Jennifer Wenzel describes as “the hook of the thematic” (11). “The Skaters” asks readers to look deeper as it both thematizes and enacts energy expenditure in a variety of registers—material, libidinal, and social, positing a relationship with energy based on outlay, consumption, and waste. In “The Skaters,” the proliferation suggested by the entropy metaphor flouts (re)productivity in any economic (or sexual) sense, yet entropy assumes a capacity—indeed, becomes the only way—to predicate the emergence of novelty in terms of new artistic forms and new social configurations. Moreover, understanding “The Skaters” as a meditation on energy and information, with entropy linking the two, reveals the many ways in which poetry and discourse on poetics have offered up commentaries on Americans’ ever-shifting relationship with energy as both a material substrate and a conceptual apparatus enabling the ever-expanding freedoms (and consumption habits) attending modernity over its long duration. As a discourse capable of commenting on, as well as rhetorically enacting, ideas concerning our relationship with energy, poetry forces readers to admit and engage with the often-unacknowledged assumptions concerning the flows and materialities that enable life as it is currently lived.