The great American desert.(John Ashbery's poetry analysis)

John Ashbery was born when Pola Negri was box office, yet his poems are more in touch with the American demotic--the tongue most of us speak and few of us write--than any near-octogenarian has a right to be. He has published more than a thousand pages in the last fifteen years, almost twice as many as Wallace Stevens wrote in half a century, and Stevens was no slouch. Ashbery's poems are like widgets manufactured to the most peculiar specifications and in such great numbers the whole world widget market has collapsed.

Where Shall I Wander (a title lifted from the nursery rhyme "Goosey, goosey, gander") begins with a typical piece of Ashberyian folderol: (1)

 
   We were warned about spiders, and the 
      occasional famine. 
   We drove downtown to see our neighbors. 
      None of them were home. 
   We nestled in yards the municipality had 
      created, 
   reminisced about other, different places 
   but were they? Hadn't we known it all before? 

Ashbery's poems revel in such intimations of disaster (they're a tease without a strip), a disaster curiously similar to the nameless wars and borders and betrayals of Auden's early poems. In the middle of these Egypt like plagues, punctuated by small touches of absurdity and big doses of nonsense, the reader may wake wondering if he hasn't read this poem before. Almost all Ashbery's poems, those dead-ends of deja vu, offer the dream of meaning endlessly deferred--the deception finally becomes the expectation. "There's a sucker born every minute," said a banker involved in the hoax of the Cardiff giant, and in Ashbery there's a sucker born every line.

When the contract between writer and reader is so fragile, the poet can pretend to fulfill it with no more than the chaff and loose ends of sentences, fragments that never grow up to be wholes. In general, the more of Ashbery there is, the less there is (the worst poems here are prosy and interminable). Much of the book, despite its local fireworks, is the exhausted repetition of his old vaudeville routines:

 
   Attention, shoppers. From within the inverted 
   commas of a strambotto, seditious whispering 
   watermarks this time of day. Time to get out 
   and, as they say, about. Becalmed on a sea 
   of inner stress, sheltered from cold northern 
      breezes, 
   idly we groove: Must have 
   been the time before this, when we all moved 
   in schools, a finny tribe, and this way 
   and that the caucus raised its din. 

And so on and on. Here we have the embrace of American idiom, whether high-stepping or lowbrowed (Ashbery's range is as broad as Whitman's), the steep descent of tone, the enjambment almost as flirtatious as Milton's. Ashbery offers some things few other poets do (including the patented double take and stop-on-a-dime volte-face) while being incapable of offering what most think absolutely necessary. This makes him not just a slapstick artist for our fallen times--no, it means that when you read Ashbery you have to forget much of what you know about reading poetry. You have to take satisfaction where pleasures are rarely given and never let yourself wish for what isn't there. (There's so much that isn't there.) Ashbery undermines many of the axioms on which poetry rests--he's smiling, not like Carroll's cat, but like Schrodinger's, neither dead nor alive but always already both.