Where Shall I Wander

Where Shall I Wander by John Ashbery, Ecco Press, 2005, $22.95 cloth, ISBN 0060765291.

"The lot of the long-lived artist in this country is hazardous." Thus Whitney Balliett began a consideration of Duke Ellington in 1963, although he could have been discussing John Ashbery of late. Such staying power as Ashbery's presents, among other problems, that of volume; when a poet is as prolific as Peyps, Proust, or Oates, readers can hardly keep up. This leads to the hazard of few people having read what they nevertheless have an opinion about. The new book of poems, Where Shall I Wander, really is just more Ashbery, after all.

Because of his prolixity, but also because of his difficulty, Ashbery not only endures hazards but also inflicts them on his readers. This relationship between poet and reader has always been a close one, however vexed. From the reader's side you can see it in the work of such critics as Harold Bloom, Marjorie Perloff, John Shoptaw, and Helen Vendler; in the poems of most postmodern poets worth their salt; and in the intensely Oedipal remarks, spurred by cheap white wine, of young writers and readers made after poetry readings, some of which are probably going on as we speak. From Ashbery's side, the closeness of the relationship is obvious, largely because Ashbery in his poems, Whitmanic as ever, is the reader. He irritates, then aggravates, then consoles the reader, imagines the eyes of the reader as daily amanuensis, and, as he himself is so often taken for granted, so too does he take the reader for granted.

All the familiar aspects of "typical Ashbery" appear in Where Shall I Wander. One finds an inconsistency in pronouns, an intermixture of loose verse and prose, a deployment of rudimentary form for ironic effect ("It's really quite a thrill/when the moon rises above the hill"), and reported and found speech, including high-toned allusions and everyday junk. There are also features that were always in the poems but now occur more frequently: deliberately recherche vocabulary, shaggy dog stories, mock joviality. The poems even look familiar, except for "Holderlin Marginalia," which from a distance, seeing only the title, could be confused with a Susan Howe poem.

The soothing breeziness, however, is cut by a sharp poignancy. (One poem, titled "Novelty Love Trot," ends: "I must get back to my elegy.") It is a duality one sees in the relation of title to poem, of line to line; it is also one that takes structural form, as poems that begin as a melange of apparent nonsense end in a Romantic mode. "O Fortuna," for instance, begins in mock exclamatory excess ("Good luck! Best wishes! The best of luck!/The very best! Godspeed! God bless you!/Peace be with you!/May your shadow never be less!") and closes with a couple of over-arching "all's" that bracket a distancing double-simile:

    All hell didn't break loose, it was like a rising psalm
    materializing like snow on an unseen mountain.
    All that was underfoot was good, but lost.

Elsewhere, in "Lost Footage," Ashbery ends again with "all" before reporting a literal vision that is also mythological and ekphrastic:

    All was silent except the pedals
    of the loom, from which a tapestry streams
    in bits and pieces. "I don't care how you do it."

    I can see the subject: an eagle with Ganymede
    in his razor-clam claws, against a sky
    of mottled sun and storm clouds.

    From that, much vexation.

In many of the poems (as in these lines), "a tapestry streams in bits and pieces." Indeed, the form that dominates the spirit of the volume is arguably the cento, a patchwork poem made up of the unidentified scraps of other authors. The potential "authors" here are numerous and widely defined, potentially including anyone who ever said anything, and include Ashbery himself, using himself: "our pleated longevity mimics us."

And how is he used today, by his readers? Is it we who are being addressed at the end of "The Snow-Stained Petals Aren't Pretty Anymore"? That prose poem, one of several in the volume, closes thus: "No one had paid attention. Such, my friends, is the reward of study and laborious attempts to communicate with the dead. In the end it all falls to pieces."

Ashbery's recent poems cause consternation in many of his readers. These poems can seem especially incoherent and necessarily tossed-off. ("Let's drink to that,/and the tenacity of just seeming.") Yet they are and they aren't. A patchwork is finally coherent in a tossed-off way. And Ashbery, who gathered and assembled the scraps in the present case, can count--of course, as always--among his astonishing virtues: a gargantuan vocabulary deftly employed, a knowledge of and talent for a wide array of forms, a witty and generous nature, a wide-ranging and well-exercised capacity for critical judgement, a fine mind, a painter's eye, a singer's ear, and the ability to write amazing sentences of all sorts within the hard-to-see confines of loosey-goosey stanzas, most of them, ultimately, with some good, old-fashioned meaning attached or attachable. Rich as ever, as ever worth our attention--just more Ashbery, after all, and thank goodness.

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