Flow Chart: A Poem

When I first started to read Flow Chart, or even as the intimidating book was in the waiting room of "to read" books, I thought the epic was going to be striped with doldrums but also accompanied with the great Ashbery I have come to know in reading all the previous poetry of Flow Chart and his latest Chinese Whispers and Your Name Here. Well, the poem (divided in six digestable sections) was virtually void of rambling while being inclusive of most voices that Ashbery has mastered. I have read Flow Chart only one time through, (although with a pink highlighter) and I would describe this poem with a knee-jerk reaction as something like a nervous host of a party that flits from one guest to another. Ashbery doesn't stay on one exact "subject" for long (even though Ashbery says he has no subject). This poem is very tangential. He will introduce in a semi-confessional mode some of his fears about writing and the creative processes and droughts that a poet will ultimately go through, but he will run off the track for an enjoyable detour about a favorable memory.This book is to be enjoyed for its melancholic closeness that it allows us as readers and as a kind of handbook for writers. In handbook I mean that there are "writer" topics to be enjoyed: critics, past, sexuality, the end, precursors, disciples, and even shallow things like being recognized for achievements whether political or well-deserved. The one negative about Flow Chart is that one should be a seasoned reader of poetry and more so John Ashbery to thoroughly enjoy it. Flow Chart is the closest thing we have in literature that allows a reader inside the mind of a great thinker and poet while shielding off melodrama and boredom. There is a looseness in life's conversation that this book contains while keeping a thoughtful and philosophical centrality to it. Every large and small division has a subconscious apprehension or exuberance about life and more importantly art. On page 147 Ashbery says, "The same things happen over and over again under such different guises[.]" And in the closing lines Ashbery again reflects his thoughts of his recyclability of poetry by saying, "I still think I shall be the same person/ when I get up/ to leave, and then repeat the formulas that have come to us so many times/ in the past[.]" I find this book much like a couch discussion or "free association." There are moments of released repression and healthy enlightenment juxtaposed with casual but interesting life "things."Ashbery in Flow Chart uses all the leg room available to display his poetic powers. This is his finest achievement through 1992 ,and perhaps in the long poem format still his best to date.

There is a great deal of humor in this work. Ashbery is a very droll writer.

Let's assume you're browsing this page because you have at least some familiarity with John Ashbery's poetry. Let's assume you're familiar with the classic short poems represented well in the Selected Poems (you should be), perhaps the long poems like "the Skaters" or "A Wave" or "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (read them too). Once that reading is behind you, and especially if you've read the three long pieces in Three Poems, Flow Chart is a necessary next adventure.Before I read Flow Chart, I think I carried a prejudice against long poems, and given Ashbery's tendency to difficulty, the prospect of reading Flow Chart was exactly my idea of laborious reading. But once I began my fears and prejudices disappeared. Though I was already a fan of Ashbery, and had read and reread most of his work, Flow Chart was soon tops on my list of satisfying reading experiences. And exactly that term, "experience", is what distinguishes this Book above mere books, separates this Poem from American poetry. This is a book one reads to experience oneself reading, to participate, so to speak, as a reader inside what must be called a work of art.By my measure, this is Ashbery at his very finest, freest, most exuberant, and most melancholy. Don't let the length dissuade you from reading this poem. Give yourself some time, allow yourself to take it in slowly, over the course of a week or two. You might find yourself, as I did, finishing a first reading and immediately scheduling the next weekend to enjoy it again in a single sitting.