John Ashbery a poet for our times
March 28th, 2008, 4:12 pm Hobbies Ideas
The great inventor of a style fluid enough to reflect our uncertain times, a
helpless symbol of those times, an incomprehensible hoax, a clear-as-glass
poet of loneliness and dejection, the greatest living Surrealist, the last
Romantic, a frequent influence on poets much younger than he: since 1975,
when his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won almost all the awards a book
of American poems could win, readers and reviewers have bestowed on John
Ashbery all these labels. Meanwhile Ashbery %26ndash; born in 1927 %26ndash; has gone on
writing his poems, and writing them faster than most of us can read them. A
Worldly Country is his eleventh book of new verse in twenty years; Notes
from the Air selects from the previous ten, from April Galleons (1987) to
Where Shall I Wander (2005), beginning where his last Selected Poems
stopped. Together, the new books portray a sad decline %26ndash; but not, by any
means, a decline in Ashbery%26rsquo;s imaginative powers. Rather, their wealth of
poems portrays the decline to which all of us are subject, the fact %26ndash;
realized over and over in any life %26ndash; that we will lose all the people and
things we love, that they must, as we must, grow old and die.
The verbal bounty in Ashbery%26rsquo;s recent work reflects the treasure of memory and
the bodily impoverishments of late life. Ashbery%26rsquo;s may be the best poems of
old age since Wallace Stevens%26rsquo;s, and if they do not even seek the kinds of
formal completion we find in Stevens, they make up for it in their range of
tones %26ndash; befuddled, affectionate, bubbly, chastened, sombre, alarmed, and
then befuddled again. In one fifteen-line poem from A Worldly Country,
Ashbery imagines himself dying, and then dead, enclosed in a coffin from
which his spirit has departed:
Oh quiet noumenon
of my soul, this is it, right?
You lost the key and the answer is inside
somewhere, and where are you going to
breathe?
The box is shut that knew you
and all your friends,
voices that could have spoken in your behalf . . .
Why, what did you want me to do with them?
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