Flow Chart: A Poem [Paperback]

John Ashbery (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 1998

"Reticent, shy, unfailingly modern, Ashbery is as unorthodox [as] any of the great twentieth-century creators: Breton, Stravinsky, Picasso," observed Jeremy Reed in Britain's Poetry Review. "We are privileged to be around at a time when he is writing." Flow Chart, a book-length poem that first appeared in 1991, might be Ashbery's greatest creation: a staggering and exuberant "torrent of invention [that] comes as close to an epic poem as our postmodern, nonlinear, deconstructed sensibilities will allow. . . . "

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ashbery invents and reinvents his self in this book-length stream-of-consciousness poem. In manically articulate free verse of long, supple lines, he conjures a secular landscape dotted with shadows of ancient gods, wherein he ferrets out "signs of life in the land of waiting." Bathos sets the mood: Alvin and the Chipmunks, Osiris, Mercury and Argus share common ground. Everyday reality is transmuted by imagination, wish, memory, and by the poet's romantic dialogues with an unnamed significant other. Is the universe a big joke, or is there meaning, perhaps even an organizing principle, behind it? Are free will and predestination reconcilable? How does one move beyond "a lifetime of self-loathing and shallow interests"? Ashbery ( Some Trees ) weaves a haunted, haunting music around these and other big questions, squeezing joy, ennui, despair, hope and a thirst for belonging out of ordinary experience.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Ashbery's latest torrent of invention--a book-length meditation-cum-narrative whose true subject may be the process of its own unfolding--comes as close to an epic poem as our postmodern, nonlinear, deconstructed sensibilities will allow. Smoothly and deceptively cast in the syntax of discourse and persuasion, the poem forges on in hot pursuit of the unknowable, challenging us to keep up while simultaneously forcing us to reexamine what we've just read. "We are both part of a living thing now," the poet writes, and to read is to become implicated in the living process of the poem. "The force/ of meaning never extrudes," and Ashbery's sense of play and illusion confounds the scrawny powers of logic. Antecedents are untraceable, created and lost at the moment we are aware of their departures. Flow Chart gives us Ashbery at his most robust and determined.
- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 18, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374525498
• ISBN-13: 978-0374525491
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 7.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #872,405 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must-read Ashbery, April 2, 2000

By 

Reader 6 (Las Vegas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flow Chart: A Poem (Paperback)

Let's assume you're browsing this page because you have at least some familiarity with John Ashbery's poetry. Let's assume you're familiar with the classic short poems represented well in the Selected Poems (you should be), perhaps the long poems like "the Skaters" or "A Wave" or "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (read them too). Once that reading is behind you, and especially if you've read the three long pieces in Three Poems, Flow Chart is a necessary next adventure.Before I read Flow Chart, I think I carried a prejudice against long poems, and given Ashbery's tendency to difficulty, the prospect of reading Flow Chart was exactly my idea of laborious reading. But once I began my fears and prejudices disappeared. Though I was already a fan of Ashbery, and had read and reread most of his work, Flow Chart was soon tops on my list of satisfying reading experiences. And exactly that term, "experience", is what distinguishes this Book above mere books, separates this Poem from American poetry. This is a book one reads to experience oneself reading, to participate, so to speak, as a reader inside what must be called a work of art.By my measure, this is Ashbery at his very finest, freest, most exuberant, and most melancholy. Don't let the length dissuade you from reading this poem. Give yourself some time, allow yourself to take it in slowly, over the course of a week or two. You might find yourself, as I did, finishing a first reading and immediately scheduling the next weekend to enjoy it again in a single sitting.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best "Interview" of Ashbery, December 20, 2003

By 

volodya88 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flow Chart: A Poem (Paperback)

When I first started to read Flow Chart, or even as the intimidating book was in the waiting room of "to read" books, I thought the epic was going to be striped with doldrums but also accompanied with the great Ashbery I have come to know in reading all the previous poetry of Flow Chart and his latest Chinese Whispers and Your Name Here. Well, the poem (divided in six digestable sections) was virtually void of rambling while being inclusive of most voices that Ashbery has mastered.
I have read Flow Chart only one time through, (although with a pink highlighter) and I would describe this poem with a knee-jerk reaction as something like a nervous host of a party that flits from one guest to another. Ashbery doesn't stay on one exact "subject" for long (even though Ashbery says he has no subject). This poem is very tangential. He will introduce in a semi-confessional mode some of his fears about writing and the creative processes and droughts that a poet will ultimately go through, but he will run off the track for an enjoyable detour about a favorable memory.
This book is to be enjoyed for its melancholic closeness that it allows us as readers and as a kind of handbook for writers. In handbook I mean that there are "writer" topics to be enjoyed: critics, past, sexuality, the end, precursors, disciples, and even shallow things like being recognized for achievements whether political or well-deserved.
The one negative about Flow Chart is that one should be a seasoned reader of poetry and more so John Ashbery to thoroughly enjoy it. Flow Chart is the closest thing we have in literature that allows a reader inside the mind of a great thinker and poet while shielding off melodrama and boredom. There is a looseness in life's conversation that this book contains while keeping a thoughtful and philosophical centrality to it. Every large and small division has a subconscious apprehension or exuberance about life and more importantly art. On page 147 Ashbery says, "The same things happen over and over again under such different guises[.]" And in the closing lines Ashbery again reflects his thoughts of his recyclability of poetry by saying, "I still think I shall be the same person/ when I get up/ to leave, and then repeat the formulas that have come to us so many times/ in the past[.]"
I find this book much like a couch discussion or "free association." There are moments of released repression and healthy enlightenment juxtaposed with casual but interesting life "things."
Ashbery in Flow Chart uses all the leg room available to display his poetic powers. This is his finest achievement through 1992 ,and perhaps in the long poem format still his best to date.

0 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars HORRIBLE!!!! HOW CAN ANYONE CALL THIS "GOOD POETRY", February 10, 2011

By 

Aaron James Todd (New Boston, NH - Putney, VT) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Flow Chart: A Poem (Paperback)

First off, I am not a poetry hater. I realize there is GREAT poetry and of course bad poetry. Unfortunately, John Ashbery's epic poem falls under the "bad" category. I don't understand how anyone can read this poem and be "inspired" the only thing I felt "inspired" to do after reading this steaming pile of garbage was to give up on poetry. Obviously I won't but I've come close. I had to buy this book for a poetry class I am doing and I have to write an 8 page paper on a single passage, I don't know how I'm gonna get even 2 pages of any sense out of this non-sense. Every passage is just sentence after sentence of nonsense, abstract, random imagery which never amounts to anything more than confusing it's reader. Obviously not all poetry has to make sense or be understandable but COME ON! Do NOT buy this book if you are like me and realize that we read way to much into things that aren't there. Do not be fooled by hipsters and poetry aficionados! THERE IS NOTHING HERE OF VALUE, except a good fire starter.