Hotel Lautreamont. - book reviews

President Clinton's decision to ask the poet Maya Angelou to read at his inauguration is significant to those who care for the life of American culture. Here as elsewhere, he means to follow the example of John Kennedy, who asked the aged Robert Frost to read, and also of Jimmy Carter, who chose macho man James Dickey. Lyndon Johnson didn't have a pet poet, but then he probably never opened a book in his adult life. Obviously the Republicans didn't have one, first because no real poet would be caught dead at a GOP event, and then because, as we all know, Democrats are inherently more "cultural."

Maya Angelou was a brilliant choice, however. She is black and female, and thus more in touch with her emotions (which are also more abundant) than any white male could be. So what if her poetry makes Hallmark cards seem profound: the smarm and good vibrations on Capitol Hill will last clear through 1996, and we can expect that, now that it is officially okay to read poetry again, publishers will soon be announcing a run on Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath.

A glance at John Ashbery's latest collection of poems, Hotel Lautreamont, will make it abundantly clear why he was not chosen. Though he is generally conceded to be one of the best living American poets, surely it is a bad idea to address the nation when what you have to say will be meaningless to all but a handful of people on the East and West Coasts. This is not to say that he has a limited number of admirers, since many have found it easier to praise this enigmatic poet than to read him.

Of those who profess an interest in contemporary poetry, Ashbery is clearly the man to steal from, the one you want to sound just like, the one whose thoughts and syllables commingle insensibly with your own. But understanding what he is trying to say is rather more difficult. For example, in "Hotel Lautreamont," from which this collection takes its title, you would be naive to expect anything about a hotel or about the French poet Lautreamont or indeed about much of anything else. "The world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passe. /In any case the ruling was long overdue. /Not to worry, many hands are making light work again,/so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure." What has narrative to do with worldwide dementia? What ruling is he talking about, since it has not been mentioned previously in the poem? And why do we stay indoors because others are once again making light work, and what quest is Mr. Ashbery talking about? These and suchlike questions are what you are not supposed to ask.

If Coleridge was the poet of opiated slumber and Allen Ginsberg the poet of pot and LSD, Ashbery seems to be the poet of the sedative. There is no anger detectable in these poems, nor strong feelings of any sort. Life is an unending afternoon spent beside a pool in Malibu, the sort that David Hockney has elevated to the status of a cultural icon. A few echoes of the outer world filter through his dizzy consciousness, but most of his thoughts and feelings are quite general. There is a particularly postmodern laziness in all of this, a love of comfort and consumer appliances. Amid allusions to Peoria, elements of a broader European culture pass through the poet's mind - references to Dvorak, foreign capitals, French poets, and obscure operas. But all of these are merely window dressing for the mind in semi-somnolent repose. They are never intended to make a point. They are merely circumstantial. They are merely there.

The language is willfully anemic and blank, though occasionally, in one of Ashbery's favorite strategies for confusing the reader, he will say something entirely unanticipated: "I shall become a secret gourd/fit only for haruspication." This final word is taken from Eliot's Four Quartets, where it was used with slightly more meaning. In fact, Ashbery seems not quite to know what the word means, but it may be that he is being metaphorical. We can't be sure. Elsewhere in the same poem, "Central Air," he is disconcertingly casual in his diction. "Once that gets realized we can turn/into our parents." "Diamonds get turned into tears." "But that is all right that gets told about you."

The appreciation of a poem by John Ashbery requires an act of faith, a surrender of the ordinary faculties of judgment. What you are to admire is a certain deposit of psychic life in each of these poems, a shifting, disengaged record of the poet's spiritual state at the moment of setting the words down on paper. Whether he edits his work is unclear, nor is it clear whether the work could be made better by a thorough revision. You are to go with the flow, to enter into the very rhythms of the poet's mind. There is little sense of structure within these poems, of movement from a beginning through a middle to an inevitable and satisfying end. Indeed, it is often difficult to distinguish one poem from another, so consistently do they seem to melt into one another. Indeed, through 15 books of poetry, the career of John Ashbery coalesces into a single massive and amorphous poem, like that fungus discovered in Michigan a few years ago, which turns out to be a single massive and ancient organism.