Over a long and fruitful career John Ashbery has proven what many wouldn't have dared suggest: it is possible for a poet to work in abstractions and also maintain a distinct and resonant voice. Just as an art aficionado knows a Pollock or a Rothko without being told, so does a reader of poetry know an Ashbery without needing to see the name on the cover - or, for that matter, understanding what the poem is about.
"About" is the wrong word anyway. This volume of selected poems (and prose poems) from the nine books Ashbery has published over the past two decades shows that age certainly hasn't slowed this octogenarian's pen; rather, time has broadened his palette, expanding the acreage of his peculiar subject matter. "Of" is a better word than "about" - "of" as in "made of."
What is a poem like "Finnish Rhapsody" made of? In this instance the answer is easy - it's made of two-phrased lines in which the second phrase restates the first.
Don't fix it if it works, tinker not with that which runs apace,
Otherwise the wind might get it, the breeze waft it away.
There is no time for anything like chance, no spare moment for the aleatory,
Because the closing of our day is business, the bottom line already here.
Another "easy" one is "Hotel Lautréamont," which is written in an obscure form called a pantoum, where lines repeat at specific intervals from stanza to stanza. These exceptions still go to prove the rule of Ashberian uniqueness. Their playful tricks suggest the fecund phraseology of ancient epic poetry without taking any specific epic form. We scent a dialogue with Shakespeare, a reflection of e.e. cummings, a Yeatsian echo, but each poem is never anything less than an Ashbery, though some may be said to be more distinguished than others.
"Offshore Breeze" demonstrates the poet's method succinctly. The first and second stanzas talk of an "I" and a "you" and some things, but no "he." Yet here is the third and final stanza:
What happens is you get the unreconstructed story,
An offshore breeze pushing one gently away,
Not far away. And the leggings of those meeting to
See about it are a sunset,
Brilliant and disordered, and sharp
As a word held in the mouth too long.
And he spat out the pit.
In that sharp last line, and not until then, perspective and metaphor are twisted into a completely new direction. It's startling and moving, without being "about." As Alan Brown put it in the Sunday Times, "Ashbery is still exuberantly dedicated to the truthful rendering of experience as a flow of sensations that defy interpretation."
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