The Skaters

“These decibles,” the poem itself, “Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound.” Ashbery slams the meaninglessness of language, of sound, right in the reader’s face in the first two lines of the poem. He makes the point that Spicer makes about language as only absolutely determinable by the individual and the inability to communicate any meaning by the use of language. Ashbery accomplishes this in two lines. Wow! He continues, “Into which being enters and is apart.” In other words the being, the perception enters into language but is ultimately separated from the meaning of the sounds issued by other individuals.
Ashbery says of this flagellation of sound that it is, “a new kind / Of demand that stumps the absolute because not new.” The poem is itself new but not new at the same time. Of course the image is new, the perception is new, but it is only possible to present these new perceptions by using old conventions, ie. Language, sound, cultural concepts.