I selected John Ashbery’s poem “Blueprints and Others” for this assignment because the content of the piece is extremely random and complex. It was difficult for me to understand because I simply could not grasp what Ashbery meant to tell his audience with this poem. The biggest challenges that his poem posed were its seemingly unrelated title, conflicting metaphors, lack of subject, and use of unknown words. 

When I first read the title, I went into the poem with architecture in mind, only to find that the poem doesn’t once mention anything remotely related to blueprints. In fact, Ashbery seems to be talking about anything and everything besides blueprints within this piece. In order to understand this choice, I had to look at the whole of the poem after reading it several times in order to try to discover some correlation between the two. 

The second challenge that I had to overcome was the figurative language used in the first stanza. Ashbery starts off strong with his use of metaphors while describing a man across the street. He states that the man seems happy, but then follows up this explicit description with one this substantially more complex, stating, “Sometimes a porter evades the grounds.” To dissect this, I used a dictionary to refresh my memory on the definition of a porter – a person employed to carry luggage. In the context of this metaphor, the porter is escaping his place of work. This led me to believe that if the man is the porter, he is happy only because he is temporarily avoiding something. Ashbery follows this up with another metaphor, stating that “After you play a lot with the military you are my own best customer.” This statement was complex because of the words “play” and “military” – usually the military is composed of order and command, and “play” is the last adjective one would use to describe such a thing. The only connection between these two metaphors that I could make is that luggage is sometimes referred to as “baggage.” Ashbery may be using a play on words to use “baggage” to refer to one’s past trauma. Therefore, someone who endures a trauma like the military would be a good customer of a porter, who is employed to carry baggage. Ashbery establishes a first person point of view in this sentence, which led me to wonder if he was addressing the man across the street, or the reader of the poem. Although he doesn’t specify in this sentence, I backtracked to the previous one. In the sentences before, the subject is the man, so I applied this to the next sentence to conclude that Ashbery is referring to the man with this figurative language.

The next stanza posed more difficulty because the subjects of the sentences are unclear. In the first sentence, as Ashbery begins by stating “I’ve done five of that”, although it is unclear what he has done five of. He follows one random sentence with another, writing, “Make my Halloween.” To decipher this, I thought about what Halloween is usually associated with – children (innocence), candy (simple pleasures), and costumes (deception). Ashbery also states, “Ask me to not to say it,” which in my mind implies that he has a possibly traumatic story that he is hiding, if we are still applying the context of the first stanza. An old man is mentioned, which I connected to the man in the first stanza as Ashhbery refers to him as “the old man” rather than “a old man,” suggesting that this character has been mentioned before. The subject of the next two sentences is still unclear, as Ashbery writes, “That’s all right, but find your own. Do you want to stop using these?” Find what? Stop using what? Although never revealed, this mysterious nature of Ashbery’s sentences contribute to a chaotic and somewhat disorienting tone that at this point in the poem, I concluded, must be intentional and could possibly contribute to the meaning. 

The third stanza finally provided a bit of clarity. After examining the first few sentences, I was led to believe that the author was describing the confusion of living in a city setting. This hypothesis was mostly based off of the italicized and therefore purposefully emphasized sentence, “How to be in the city my loved one.” The discussion of “urinals” and “men in underwear,” things that can be found in city settings (public bathrooms and clothing advertisements), further supported this idea. However, the last section of this stanza completely invalidated this prediction, as Ashbery writes, “A biography field like where we live in the mountains, / a falling.” This was a big difficulty because it explicitly states that the narrator lives in the mountains, which are not at all “like” a city. Additionally, who is “we”? The narrator is now referring to someone else besides themself, but is still unknown. I backtracked to look at this stanza as a whole, and realized that the most recent subject was “my loved one,” which must be the other individual that is included in the “we.” 

The final stanza also seemed to be a bit more explicit, as it described the “boomer buzz” and materialism of a city. I did notice that this was the one transition between stanzas that was connected by a fluid sentence, rather than broken up by two separate sentences. However, the very last sentence in parenthesis tripped me up; “They won’t see anybody.” I reread the stanza to determine that “they” refers to the “hillbilly sculptures of the outside.” I used my previous knowledge of the meaning of “hillbilly” to remember that it means a usually unsophisticated country person, sometimes associated with remote regions. This made me think back to the mention of mountains in the previous stanza. This led me to predict that Ashbery is contrasting those who live in remote environments to those who live in cities. 

Overall, the biggest difficulty in reading this poem was the apparent randomness. The content of each sentence consistently failed to connect with the next. At certain points, it seemed like Ashbery was just stringing random words together. In order to overcome the challenge of a lack of specified subject in many sentences, I reread the sentences around the confusing parts in order to remind myself of the context and apply the subject of past sentences. At other points in the poem, I had to use a dictionary or recall my knowledge of unfamiliar vocabulary words that were critical to the meaning of a sentence. Additionally, looking at the poem as a whole helped me overcome my struggle with understanding the content. Taking all of the little parts that I deciphered and looking at them together allowed me to see that perhaps Ashbery intended for their piece to be disorienting in order to reflect the chaos and confusion of the modern world.