Selected Poems

Whenever John Ashbery deals out his royal flush of persnickety syntax, tailspun twaddle, and eel-slippery lyric convolution, the mind is where it ought to be. Whipping up spun dimensions in a burning flux of calculated demonry, gossamer insights snookered away in back-closets of the soul, an encroaching blur of poetic hunger just beyond our knowing. We can *feel* the poet stenciling out his stanzas, sifting every event for its fine-grained visceral crunch, its lyrical *there-ness*, a mind designed to sound deep water with the halcyon light of Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, the great unassailable precursors of American verse (so difficult to rediscover and appreciate in the morass of "poetry-slams" and "performance-art" that currently glut our poetry venues). Imagine the type of mind that could respond to Crane and Stevens without flinching, over forty years and eighteen volumes of verse. Imagine the solitaire.Ashbery staggered me in my late teens with *Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror*(1975), lighting up my sinuses in a cocaine wash of zippety rhythms and studied inflection, peopling my sleep with deep Figurae and a lush library of maps, persuading the fool's heart in me to break from my covert and run wild with the night mind of the race, the structures and possibilities of my life overloaded by his cognitive dazzle. "The geek shall inherit the earth," this poet seemed to be telling me, and I, hamstrung by gynephobia and a crippling social-anxiety, took the old codger at his word.Ashbery taught me how to keep pace with the world, to saturate the atoms of life with an inward stare, yoking myself nakedly to the ebon flight of his lush written world. With Ashbery's deep intellect and dickety-slippity wit, his pretzelly stanzas and mind-torquing conceptual corkscrewing, I could go on forever relighting my own image, against steady palls of black pain. (But don't all great poets teach us precisely this?)Witness Ashbery at his most serpentine: "To create a work of art that the critic cannot even talk about ought to be the artist's chief concern." Ouch. Where does that leave the rest of us? Fumbling for categorical handholds on the cliff-face of so-called "language-poetry"? Shrugging off the old man's labyrinthian navel-picking as wastefully avant-garde academic verbiage? Most of these poems seem to erupt in an obfuscatory strain of muddled, stickjaw phonetics, then nip and flounder and twiddle and skip-rope through some half-fledged convolution of thought, reproducing the vagaries and blindsights of poetic composition itself, biting its tail in an Ouroboros vertigo of self-reference and studied awkwardness, an infinite regress short-circuiting each new wired fragment of stunted dramatic logic, of discontinued narrative transit, flip-flopped to articulate its crackerjacked, contradictory character, an uber-villain's squadron of twittering machines set a-flutter to tweak the night with the familiar Stevensian tragedies arising from epistemo

John Ashbery once again takes me on a fantastic ride with his four dimentional poetry. Highly recommended for the poet with writer's block because Ashbery teaches us that bounderies are only limited in the mind. I call him tangential because his imagry shoots one into as many directions as one has.

I don't like to misquote other writers and artists...so, it was, naturally, Bernardo Bertolucci who said about himself that he has "a nostalgia for the present". Ophuls certainly had a nostalgia for the past. My admiration and appreciation for Ashbery's work grows stronger all of the time!

It is insulting (and it must be disheartening)for a poet of John Ashbery's stature to be told, again and again, that his poems don't make any sense. Ashbery is artificial superficially. It is his critics who generally seem cold and clever to me. I have laughed and wept over his books! And I am hoping that others my age (I'm 30) will NOT fall into the same trap, which seems toplague older readers, of being smug and vague about their approval of his work (i.e. imitating what they think he's like rather than what he is as a poet.) Like Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath, in different ways, I suppose, we need to establish a new critical basis for discussing his work, which falls outside the conventional opinions and prejudices of the day. This may be only to say, that Ashbery has become a part of the canon of American poetry (this can hardly be denied)--and that raises him to a higher plateau than those poets we see simply as contemporaries; it doesn't make him boring and stiff. Can we enjoy unconventional ideas about this most surprising of poets? For example, as much as I admire Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror as a book and individual poem; I acknowledge it as a masterpiece...I nonetheless don't find it as entertaining and touching, ultimately, as books included in Selected Poems such as Some Trees and Houseboat Days and A Wave. The Tennis Court Oath, which represented a breakthrough both for Ashbery and for poetry, contains some of his most beautiful,rapturous work, like "How Long Will I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine Sepulcher..." I don't think he wrote that freely again, and with such a musical emotional pull, until the later Flow Chart, which is sometimes similar even in extact detail. Bees, for instance: "Will probably always be haunted by a bee" and "polluted in any case by bees." Love is the main theme, after all, of Ashbery entire oeuvre. Somebody once said to me that his poems are like a whiff of perfume. And it's true, in the best sense. Because they are lovely and contain that sort of romanticism and eroticism and one remembers them fondly. He may have, as I believe Pauline Kael wrote about the filmmaker Max Ophuls, "a nostalgia for the present." Although he sometimes risks becoming an objectionable purist himself--he can appear too fussy and argumentative for it's own sake, or even rude, at times--he is mostly kind, fair and balanced, funny though he undeniably is. Who doesn't like a poet like that, or understand him? Even if one has a very different aesthetic, it can be an intoxicating or even comforting voice to listen to. The Selected Poems are a good place to start, but then, if you have a chance, read the whole volumes, and what's come after. You'll have a chance, because they ought to be around forever.