Ashbery's 'Daffy Duck In Hollywood'

Daffy Duck in Hollywood is one of the most important poems of the volume Houseboat Days, which was published in the year 1977. This poem is one of Ashbery's most stylistically innovative poems. A multitude of images and voices are incorporated into the texture of the poem in a surrealistic manner. There can be found in this poem the alignment of the most incongruous of images and experiences. The entire poem revolves around analogies, resemblances, resonances, and allusions. In this poem Ashbery doesn't differentiate between the traditional high art and the mediocre aesthetic of popular culture, throughout the poem popular colloquial diction alternates with literary diction, exotic locales, references from an eclectic eclectic eclectic melting

It was written in 1499. La Celestina is the name of the procuress who facilitates the meeting of the lovers Calisto and Melbea. Amadigi di Gaula is an opera by Handel, Speedy Gonzales is a cartoon character in the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons, Helen Topping Miller is a popular writer of pulp fiction while Pistachio Avenue and Fling Terrace are street names in Hollywood. In the following lines Daffy Duck expresses that the cartoonist who has promised to get him out of his creations has gone back on his words and he finds his rather tepid reproduction of his picture done on covers etc, all the same it could be deemed funny when hung in the congested waiting room of a quack but it could scarcely be called friendly. In the succeeding lines, Daffy feels claustrophobic and finds everything choked to the point of silence. He says that a magnetic storm hung above the Fudds' garage, which has given it the look of the diminutive blue cabin found on the commemorative cover of a Gadsden Flag. The Fudds are also cartoon characters, while the Gadsden Flag is a historical American flag associated with libertarianism. In the next lines, Daffy makes the sudden announcement that he finds everything detestable on the island of Hollywood and that although he meets many people on the emerald traffic island, none of them results in actual interaction, he comes across

Throughout the poem, the grand and the extraordinary images are subordinated and aligned with the trivial. In this highly allusive poem, Ashbery suggests new insights at every shift and divergence taken by the lines. Toward the conclusion of the poem the protagonist adopts the tone of a visionary who speaks for all those who feel excluded from the cultural mainstream which is defined by its sense of tradition, he accepts that deception is an undeniable aspect of the human condition. He speaks for those artists who defy the mainstream cultural ethos. Daffy Duck seeks wholeness and continuity from a discourse that's far from reassuring, for him life is placed somewhere between maybe before the beginning of the movie or at its intermission. Toward the conclusion all the fragmented voices, parallel stances and non-sequiturs are reconciled and subordinated to a closure of resignation and acceptance. The poet suggests that the structural continuity of the poetic rhetoric can be perceived in all art forms, be it in the unreal Hollywood cartoon flicks or in canonical literary texts. This poem also embodies the quest for a unified response to the varied facets of the human experience. And the poet seems to suggest the predicament concerning a unified consciousness in the face of impeding fragmentation of both the self and that of others. Daffy Duck