Last I checked, human faculties include the ability to follow a thought, a story, or a description. The author of a poem without a subject withholds engagement with these faculties—withholds engagement, that is to say, with whole tracts of a reader’s humanity. Why a poet would want to do that? Because a poem without a subject is something new? (I’ll grant that it’s as new as Dada….) Because it reflects the randomness of experience? (But how much randomness survives our parsing of experience into the bins of a mental Dewey Decimal System?) Because it reflects the chaotic blizzard of bytes with which modern man is bombarded? (Here we have a descendant of the idea, which goes back to Eliot, that a difficult world demands difficult poetry. This idea might make sense to someone who believes, say, that a poem about boredom should be boring, but if you believe that, I suppose you'll be telling me next that there's such a thing as an objective correlative.) One can even imagine what might be called an evolutionary rationale for the subjectless poem: that subjects are something our mentality has gotten beyond—or at least ought to get beyond if we know our trans-human future when we envision it. I’m not saying this future will never come—I’d even be willing to say “how couldn’t it?”—but how are poets to occupy themselves in the billion-year interim? It’s not clear that even Ashbery, an emissary from the future if there ever was one, has gotten beyond subjects. If he has, why is “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a poem that circles a subject par exellence, widely considered his signal achievement?
Whatever a poet’s reason for writing poems without a subject, such poems are a deprivation not only for their reader but for their author. A subject requires decisions as to its treatment, and these decisions are among the most absorbing a poet can face. Should the poem show, or should it tell? Should it ornament? Digress? Without a subject, there’s nothing to show, or tell about, or ornament, or digress from. (You’d think writers of poems without subjects would have bored themselves to death long before they’ve killed off their readers.) And I haven’t even mentioned the most authorially rewarding decision of all regarding the subject of a poem: what that subject should be. Which will be my subject tomorrow.