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Flow Chart: A Poem Paperback – March 18, 1998

by John Ashbery (Author)

5 customer reviews

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"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. . . . "

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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: The Noonday Press; First Edition Thus edition (March 18, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374525498
ISBN-13: 978-0374525491
Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
Average Customer Review: 5 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,072,634 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #10828 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Regional & Cultural > United States
- #172600 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States

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Daniel

An amazing collection so long as you're unable to decentralize your ...

June 11, 2015

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

An amazing collection so long as you're unable to decentralize your individual perspective and read its logic without trying to tether it to reason. Best digested if you appreciate it as if you were an artifact of your own culture being expressed upon by Ashbery's utterance-driven vision.

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Thomas E. DeFreitas

Bewildering, enervating, dizzying, disorienting ...

July 16, 2012

Format: Paperback

... but undeniably a work of immense intelligence, even perhaps of genius. Ashbery's epic sprawl sustains the salutary startlement of newness that is characteristic of his best work. The verbal inventiveness, the collision of idioms and dialects, the highfalutin and the lowfalutin (if you will), the omnium-gatherum aspect of this mammoth poem: all exert a considerable appeal.

We understand the impatience of those who complain of Ashbery's unclarity; however, we reserve the right to be enchanted by the way in which Ashbery continues to surprise us. This is not automatic writing, nor is it cliché. It is perhaps "surreal," to reuse a much-overused word; but Ashbery never surrenders conscious control of his material. This is a verbal orchestration that will delight anyone who is open to the possibility that words can do more than denote, describe, tell a conventional story.

Marianne Moore once spoke of Gertrude Stein's "perspicuous opacity," and the phrase comes to mind as we ponder Flow Chart: a bewildering achievement, sometimes exhausting, but further evidence that John Ashbery is among our cleverest and least predictable of poets.

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volodya88

The Best "Interview" of Ashbery

December 20, 2003

Format: 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.

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Aaron James Todd

HORRIBLE!!!! HOW CAN ANYONE CALL THIS "GOOD POETRY"

February 10, 2011

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

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.

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