Charles Legere 7/9/13 Miltons Satan in Daffy Duck in Hollywood Im listening through The Listening Booth on the Woodberry

y Poetry Rooms website to a 1976 recording of John Ashbery reading Daffy Duck in Hollywood. Its a stellar recording, of one of my favorite poems, and its about 9:40 longI recommend it. Before reading his poem, Ashbery offers a preface, where he says, among other things, that, I went to a program of animated cartoons at a museum in New York, a year or so ago, and, at the same time I was reading Paradise Lost, and there was a Daffy Duck cartoon in which the you see the pencil of the cartoonist sort of adding extra limbs and erasing his head and various extra parts while he keeps complaining about this, and I somehow subconsciously associated this with the idea of god in the first book of Paradise Lost who has always seemed to me rather comically conspicuous by his absence while all the debating is going on all down there and, uh, I, in fact I put in a couple of lines from paradise lost. Uh So I seem to have somehow associated Satan with Daffy Duck, although I had no idea I was doing this at the time. They are somewhat alike. Even though he goes on to say, I dont believe in really explaining very much, theres a lot here to start talking about, especially since the poems so impenetrable. For one, I should say here that Ashberys referring to Chuck Jones 1953 Merrie Melodie cartoon Duck Amuck, Vernon Shetleys written about the connection between the animated short and the poem in his 1993 book After the Death of Poetry. I wrote about the animated short and Ashberys poem in the first chapter of my dissertation, and Ill just cut-and-paste a description with an image here: In Jones cartoon, Daffy arrives on-stage (so to speak) dressed as a musketeer, only to find the scenery around him ill-suited to his costume. When Daffy protests, the backdrop gets switched out, but he finds himself equally out of place. Throughout the cartoon, Daffy grows increasingly infuriated as he finds himself plunked down over and over in a series of settingsa barnyard, an arctic igloo setting, a Hawaiian island, and so onfor which he is never properly suited. The more loudly he complains, the more absurd his costumes and backdrop become. At his most discombobulated, Daffy finds himself in front of a childishly drawn cityscape with a flower-petal head, a flag for a tail, and flipper feet:

From Duck Amuck, 1953 At the end of the cartoon, as Daffy rages behind a door that has been drawn in front of him and then slammed shut, the viewers perspective pans back to reveal that Bugs Bunny has been animating the cartoon all along. Aint I a stinker? Bugs confides. In my chapter, I wrote about Ashberys poem as a poem about readingabout its own reading. The poet Ben Lerner, in a great article/review on Ashbery for Boundary2 called The Future Continuous: Ashberys Lyric Mediacy, dubs this particular quality of Ashberys poetry mediacy. I connected the dots between Ashberys poetry and Lerners; I also wrote a bit about Ariel Dorfman and Arman Mattelarts 1972 book How to Read Donald Duck. So, along with this daily writing, if I can, Im going to post (1) the audio file of Ashberys 1972 reading from the WPR Listening Booth, (2) video of Duck Amuck, (3) a link to Lerners Future Continuous, (4) Dorfman and Mattelarts How to Read Donald Duck. But, also, I want to flag something here: what Ashbery says, in his remarks, about how he subconsciously associated Bugs, who is the wicked cartoonist of Duck Amuck, with God, and Daffy with Satan. In that light, Im going to go back what I wrote about yesterday, the 1946 English Institute Essays, and Douglas Bushs effort to stake out a compromise between literary biography and criticism, between our attention for the integrity of the man and that of the artist, between life and poetry.

Ashberys poem stages a wicked game that draws a parallel between god and man, author and reader: in Duck Amuck, Daffys subject to Bugs whims, just as in reading Daffy Duck in Hollywood, we the readers find ourselves subject to the authors whims. Lets say that I think I could read Ashberys poem into the debate between Douglas Bush and Cleanth Brooks about poetry and life, in which Bush is trying to say theres a double-checking reciprocity, and Brooks is coming down on evasive ambiguity. Ashbery, it seems, puts superfluities in play: that Daffy couldnt change his situation, even if he wanted to. Ill say more on this later, after I track down which quotes are from Milton.