Customer Reviews

Selected Poems (Poets, Penguin)

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It is insulting (and it must be disheartening)for a poet of John Ashbery's stature to be told, again and again, that his poems don't make any sense. Ashbery is artificial superficially. It is his critics who generally seem cold and clever to me. I have laughed and wept over his books! And I am hoping that others my age (I'm 30) will NOT fall into the same trap, which seems toplague older readers, of being smug and vague about their approval of his work (i.e. imitating what they think he's like rather than what he is as a poet.) Like Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath, in different ways, I suppose, we need to establish a new critical basis for discussing his work, which falls outside the conventional opinions and prejudices of the day. This may be only to say, that Ashbery has become a part of the canon of American poetry (this can hardly be denied)--and that raises him to a higher plateau than those poets we see simply as contemporaries; it doesn't make him boring and stiff. Can we enjoy unconventional ideas about this most surprising of poets? For example, as much as I admire Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror as a book and individual poem; I acknowledge it as a masterpiece...I nonetheless don't find it as entertaining and touching, ultimately, as books included in Selected Poems such as Some Trees and Houseboat Days and A Wave. The Tennis Court Oath, which represented a breakthrough both for Ashbery and for poetry, contains some of his most beautiful,rapturous work, like "How Long Will I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine Sepulcher..." I don't think he wrote that freely again, and with such a musical emotional pull, until the later Flow Chart, which is sometimes similar even in extact detail. Bees, for instance: "Will probably always be haunted by a bee" and "polluted in any case by bees." Love is the main theme, after all, of Ashbery entire oeuvre. Somebody once said to me that his poems are like a whiff of perfume. And it's true, in the best sense. Because they are lovely and contain that sort of romanticism and eroticism and one remembers them fondly. He may have, as I believe Pauline Kael wrote about the filmmaker Max Ophuls, "a nostalgia for the present." Although he sometimes risks becoming an objectionable purist himself--he can appear too fussy and argumentative for it's own sake, or even rude, at times--he is mostly kind, fair and balanced, funny though he undeniably is. Who doesn't like a poet like that, or understand him? Even if one has a very different aesthetic, it can be an intoxicating or even comforting voice to listen to. The Selected Poems are a good place to start, but then, if you have a chance, read the whole volumes, and what's come after. You'll have a chance, because they ought to be around forever.

John Ashbery once again takes me on a fantastic ride with his four dimentional poetry. Highly recommended for the poet with writer's block because Ashbery teaches us that bounderies are only limited in the mind. I call him tangential because his imagry shoots one into as many directions as one has.

I don't like to misquote other writers and artists...so, it was, naturally, Bernardo Bertolucci who said about himself that he has "a nostalgia for the present". Ophuls certainly had a nostalgia for the past. My admiration and appreciation for Ashbery's work grows stronger all of the time!