Customer Reviews

Your Name Here

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ashbery's writing with the crackle of someone just starting out. It's like now that he knows he's in the canon (thanks, Bloom), he can really go looby and make English swing. The autumn leaves fall a little lighter in these poems; reverie (always present) takes a back seat to inspired goofiness. I've admired other Ashbery books--this one I loved. It's made my own elite canon of bathroom reading and not a poem's let me down. I hope I grow old just like this.

Aw nerts this guy is too much for me. I feel like one of the girls with names like Linda, Ruth, and Pat from the 1940s who stand next to an airplane when this poet comes along from the next century. "Your Name Here", the very title, suggests his "negative capability" is acting up again, with results typically mind-blowing, keeping everyone guessing. I rank this almost on the level of the great "Can You Hear, Bird."

'Candace, was it you?' (p91, UK ed)

Ashbery ain't telling - but the joke's gone on for far too long. Reading him is like looking at a succession of brightly coloured plastic bathtoys - all different, but all the same. Sterile simulacra. Poetry lives by its inevitability - le mot juste. Ashbery only does arbitrary - poetry by numbers.

The old New York Schoolers were actually funny. And vital, passionate, hungry. Sexist too, maybe, but at least sexy. Ashbery never seemed quite of their number; aloof, urbane, etiolated - what the French call an intello (egghead), his shtick is deadpan, arid, precious - there's something unnervingly buttoned-up about him. Alicia Ostriker, in Stealing the Language, refers to his coyness; I prefer to think of it as flirtation - po-faced, eyelid-fluttering come-hitherness -- and how the egghead critics love a tease! But the secret is there's no secret. The triumphant Zippy of Poetland, Ashbery's not exactly naked but does flash way too much suspender, so beyond absurd that he appears the only sane one in the room.

By the way, the British edition has indubitably the better cover. I think. (Is that a coffin or a conjurer in the US edition? Either would be apt..) And Ashbery surely knows (he does, of course he does) that Rimbaud's poem (p66 in my edition) is called simply Voyelles - while the fact that he allows French syntax to bleed into English on p117 betokens laziness bordering on contempt.

We've always been sleepily ardent in our admiration of John Ashbery, a boosterism which borders on a fanatical apathy: his perky atonality has a certain depressingly insistent gaiety about it. We value the kinky ecumenism between the patois and the mandarin, the somewhat dopey collision between the vernacular and the highfalutin. We can't wait until the biography comes out, along with its subject, so we can gain some insight into his methods.

We have here lyrics of a rehearsed suddenness, of a customary unpredictability: language whose smooth bumps and well-paved potholes inspire both fearer and farer, both reader and rider, to explore more deeply the simplistic intricacies of Ashbery's frabjously deadpan patois. The images collide in an amiable showdown, a triumphantly graceful slapstick, a dreadfully solemn opera bouffe, which we cannot readily forget. Herein we have the greeting and the greening of a life with all its happy calamities and soulshattering lucky breaks -- an ennui that is at least as jazzy as those halcyon ecstasies of yore, those drab celebrations of the past's disastrous victories.

I disagree with the review below.

Flow Chart was a bore.

His best work recently is in "Can You Here, Bird" and a few books around that time.

His last two, including this one, seem lacking (though this new one has a handful of very good ones).

But if you dig Ashbery, pick it up anyway and see if you disagree.