On Two Sodus Poems: “Syringa” and “Iphigenia in Sodus”

On January 26, 2012, John Ashbery concluded his reading of “Syringa” at the Wadsworth Athaneum by sharing that those last few lines—which conclude in “some small town, one indifferent summer”—invoke his childhood unhappiness growing up on an isolated farm in Sodus, a small rural village about thirty miles from Rochester, New York.  “Sodus” is never mentioned in the poem, but Ashbery’s experience in that place looms.

From its first line, the poem suggests a dissatisfaction not only with the past but with the stories poets tell to make sense of the past.  Even the exquisite myth of the singer Orpheus fails to reflect accurately on time.  The Orpheus story is tragic, the poem explains, not because Orpheus journeys to the underworld and loses his love Eurydice for a second time, but because the singer repeatedly ignores the fact that the past always disappears no matter what.

So many Ashbery poems grapple with this subject of the irrecoverable past and the ways memories, as a form of imagination, can conjure a renewed connection to it.  In his recent, “Iphigenia in Sodus,” the title invokes the tragic sacrifice of Iphigenia, whose death powerfully reverberates in the minds of those who know of her story.  Like the myth of Orpheus’s life and death at the hands of the Bacchantes, Iphigenia’s innocence and vicious end leave open the possibility that those who did not help to save her (which is everyone) are guilty of something themselves. 

Although written more than thirty years after “Syringa,” the latter poem’s connections to the earlier one are unmistakable.  In both, the past is mythological and personal, the story of all time and Ashbery’s own childhood in Sodus.  As he explains in “Syringa,” the past is always myth—always an imagined time and space—just by virtue of the fact that it will never happen again, except through memory, imagination and (ideally) in poetry.   Ashbery begins “Iphigenia in Sodus” by making a similar point, though expressed whimsically as déjà vu—“Why does that name sound so familiar?”—the speaker asks.  Is the “name” the speaker gropes to remember “Iphigenia” or “Sodus”?  The ambiguity helps drive home the point that both are myths now.

But how does one access the past—and recall that name—for poetry if the past is always already gone?  In “Syringa,” Orpheus has a sense that “things” matter.  These material objects spark imagination and inspire memory and poetry.  Orpheus likes “the glad personal quality / Of the things beneath the sky,” seeking to see and be near these things so he can keep singing.  Although in the act of rediscovery he always also loses them, this cycle of finding and losing becomes the space through which creativity most flourishes.