Review by New York Times Review
John Ashbery's meandering, open-ended recent poems. NO figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery. Yet he has never been easy to place. Each of his first 12 books, from "Some Trees" in 1956 to "A Wave" in 1984, was in some way different from what other poets were doing and from whatever Ashbery himself had just done. Critics celebrated him. But they all celebrated a different poet. Was he a romantic in the tradition of John Keats and Wallace Stevens, or an experimentalist like Gertrude Stein? A distinctively gay poet, or a writer who avoids autobiographical reference? A connoisseur of moods, or an abstract thinker concerned with identity and the nature of art? There was evidence for all these views (and others) in the first half of Ashbery's career, put on view in his "Selected Poems" in 1985. Since that time Ashbery has published the massive book-length poem "Flow Chart" (1991), another book-length poem called "Girls on the Run" (1999) and many new volumes of shorter poems, each coming fast on the heels of the last and posing its particular challenges to the reader. Now "Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems" gives us a chance to stand back and see what Ashbery has been up to for the past 20 years. "Notes From the Air" will not settle the debates about Ashbery or make the later Ashbery suddenly accessible. The poems, always difficult, got more difficult in the mid-1980s and have remained so: disjunctive and unpredictable, often zany. Sometimes a poem casts up a few lines that seem like useful instructions for reading Ashbery, but the meta-perspective falls back into the wayward, teasing discourse from which it stood out. "Something has been said," Ashbery reflects in "Flow Chart." "You're right about that. But no two people / can agree on what it means, as though we were sounding boards / for each childish attempt at wireless communication the gods can invent." Ashbery does write poems that are "about" specific subjects in a more or less conventional way. "How to Continue" is an elegy for gay men and the gay male culture destroyed by AIDS; it is as clear-eyed and moving, as honorably sentimental, as any poem written in response to the epidemic. There are several hilarious satirical set pieces. "Interesting People of Newfoundland" is a sendup of folksy good feelings. ("Doc Hanks, the sawbones, was a real good surgeon / when he wasn't completely drunk, which was most of the time. / When he was only half drunk he could perform decent cranial surgery.") "Sleepers Awake" makes fun of our interest in writers' lives and their writing habits by taking seriously the maxim that even Homer nodded. In fact, the deadpan Ashbery informs us, Homer "occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey. / Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him," and so on with Melville, Agatha Christie and other sleepyheads. Yet as even these cases suggest, Ashbery's writing, whatever else it is about, is usually about other writing, which it alludes to, borrows from or comments on. The title "Notes From the Air" calls up free-floating words, language as a part of the atmosphere and seized on for its sound as much as its sense, like notes of music. The poems in this book are full of quotations - not specific quotations for which the poet might have provided sources, as Eliot did in "The Waste Land," but untraceable borrowings from the wild variety of ordinary speech, filled out with fleeting parodies of humble written forms: the family Christmas circular, the letter from a consumer, the office memo. The first-person in these poems is elusive because it has that generic quality too, and because the "I" is constantly being interrupted by - so much so that it is really made up of - many voices and many ways of speaking. Ashbery's poetic speaker is a collective, shifting entity. "Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society / working as a team," Ashbery starts out in "Hotel Lautréamont," describing this kind of collective poetic voice while parodying what academic literary critics might say about it. "They didn't just happen," he says of those popular ballads. "There was no guesswork." But Ashbery poems do just happen (or appear to). Take "Hotel Lautréamont" itself. The reader quickly discovers that it is composed as a pantoum: a verse form in which the second and fourth lines of one quatrain become the first and third lines of the next; lines that are part of one sentence loop back in another context, creating a carousel of accidental-seeming conjunctions. The implication is that words and phrases circulate among us in a similar way, half in our control and half not. "Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside," the poem continues. There is no way out of the ways we talk, it seems. They are what consciousness is made of. Even so, Ashbery's phrases always feel newly minted; his poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us. This sense of freedom is produced by Ashbery's diction (no American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound) as well as his formal choices. Although he occasionally makes use of a strict form like the pantoum (the excerpt from "Flow Chart" includes a double sestina), his later poems are usually composed in free verse, often in very long lines, or in prose. These forms are suited to his moods of languor and meandering, open-ended speculation. ("But I digress," Ashbery apologizes at one point, as if he ever did anything else!) Yet his work is permeated by a sense of urgency. He writes to outpace his last thought, refusing to rest in it, proceeding at a rate that is not hurried but dogged, in it for the long haul. What keeps him going? "Nothing is required of you," he observes, "yet all must render an accounting." The idea links the combination of languor and urgency in his work to a moral situation we all know. There are no rules to be followed (either in writing or in life), but we must make what we do and say, and therefore how we live, count. Ashbery's willingness to go on confronting this simple, central problem makes him an important poet. Again and again he sets out to determine freshly what matters, knowing that there can be no rules for finding it, including those he has invented. This is why his work is so demanding and various, and why there are many different accounts of it. "The afternoon lasts forever," Ashbery declares in "The Ice Storm," expressing his faith that, although it is getting late, time is ample, and there will be a chance for that "accounting." Amplitude is the fundamental feeling "Notes From the Air" conveys. Behind this feeling is the conviction that, because language (including the languages of expressive gesture and tone) is something everyone shares, everything is possible in it. It is all we have, but it is all we need. The book's title poem starts with the type of slapstick first line Ashbery deals us from time to time, as if to mock the impulse, both his and the reader's, to look to poetry for meaning: "A yak is a prehistoric cabbage: of that, at least, we may be sure." Before the poem concludes, however, it climbs from the ridiculous to the sublime: Young at heart, wondering where to go next, Ashbery is constantly pushing toward - and then slipping past - gorgeous, electric passages like this one, in search of what counts. Someday we may catch up with him. Langdon Hammer is chairman of the English department at Yale. He is writing a biography of the poet James Merrill.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
I'll tell you what it was like, the opening line in The Driftwood Altar, can serve as Ashbery's raison d'être as a poet. In poem after poem, book after book, the much-lauded Ashbery has lifted readers out of themselves and into a whirling realm of images, scents, music, crazy juxtapositions, magical vistas, and a cast of lovers, strangers, friends, ghosts, and icons. A lyric poet with a love of wordplay, a painterly eye, and a storyteller's pleasure in the unexpected and the inevitable, Ashbery is intricate, conversational, mystic, down-to-earth, and surreal. Now in his eightieth year and with a ravishing new collection, A Worldly Country (2007), published not long ago, prolific and pondering Ashbery has selected his favorites from 10 collections that span two decades. Here, then, are dazzling and heart-gripping poems from, to name a few standouts, April Galleons (1987), Hotel Lautréamont (1992), Can You Hear, Bird? (1995), Your Name Here (2000), and Where Shall I Wander? (2005), forming an invaluable selected volume by an American master.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ashbery's original, seminal Selected Poems crowned the first half of a career that has largely defined American poetry since the middle of the 20th century. One could think of that first Selected, published in 1985, as the summation of Ashbery's philosophical period, in which the poet self-consciously interrogated the grip-or lack of one-language exerts on the world at large, most notably in poems like "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." This new volume-beginning with poems from April Galleons (1987) and ending with Where Shall I Wander (2005)-presents the first panoramic view of Ashbery's second phase, in which he explores, celebrates, sends up and revels in the American vernacular. Encompassing the surreal ("You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns"), the tender ("Everything was spotless in the little house of our desire"), the self-deprecating ("There was I: a stinking adult") and the quietly, utterly haunting ("Those who came closest did not come close"), Ashbery seems to hit every possible note in his scattershot manner. Of particular interest are extended selections from the book-length works Flow Chart (1991) and Girls on the Run (1999). This is an essential book. Along with the original Selected (Penguin), we can now see the full impact of the most representative poet of the last 50 years. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
