The Worldly Epitaphs of John Ashbery

The most remarkable thing about John Ashbery’s later poetry is its iron uniformity of style — a master’s style, highly polished and difficult to penetrate. In “A Wordly Country” (Ecco, 76 pages, $23.95), Mr. Ashbery’s latest book, his sly and discursive voice makes itself heard with unquestionable authority and a propulsive, off-kilter fluency once again. And once again it points out a central tension in his work — the clash between the elusive strangeness of his rhetoric and the conventionality of his philosophy.“A Worldly Country” opens with the title poem, an observation, in vaguely Audenesque couplets, of some tremendous but unspecified upheaval:… the great parade flooded avenue and byway And turnip fields became just another highway…that recedes into the familiar and becalmed:One minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness And the next, peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness…The slim book continues at this breathless pace in this elegiac vein. The specter of death, and the question of faith, have become quite pressing matters for Mr. Ashbery, now in his 80th year. Arresting images of entropy and finality abound in “A Worldly Country”:It will all be over in a minute, you said. We both Believed that, and the clock’s ticking: Flame on, flame on. (“Like a Photograph”)The box is shut that knew you and all your friends, voices that could have spoken in your behalf… (“The Inchcape Rock”)The book’s final poem,”Singalong,” appends a quietly magisterial picture of natural decay:… Looking back it will all seem good. The majestic verandah. All the ships numbered. The hedges grazed Like autumn, or a blight, Like fruit.All of this is not to say that Mr. Ashbery has suddenly abandoned the rigorously orchestrated raconteur’s tone of his later works that has secured him his place in American letters (and it is indeed hard to imagine the author of the formally harsh “The Tennis Court Oath” having become such a beloved and avuncular figure). But even in its numerous sunnier moments, in poems like “Litanies, ” “Old-Style Plentiful,” “Thrill of a Romance,” and “So Long, Santa,” this new collection is not free of shadows:And, yes, we were drunk on love.That sure was some summer.(“Old-Style Plentiful”)One of the great problems with stylists as gifted and as cryptic as Mr. Ashbery is the anticlimaxes that often arise from their confrontations with questions lying outside the limits of style, questions no style, no matter how powerful, can evade. Death, which haunts this book, presents one such question. And as intensely interesting as Mr. Ashbery’s elegant skirting of the issue is, his most direct engagement with it cannot but leave us a bit struck by its paucity.W.H. Auden, the 20th century’s unmatched virtuoso of English poetry, who launched Mr. Ashbery’s career with the selection in 1956 of “Some Trees” for the Yale Younger Poets series and as a rhetorician exerts a considerable and too-unnoticed influence on Mr. Ashbery, had the rare and happy ability to be blunt and endlessly subtle at the same time. His remark thatI’m afraid there’s many a spectacled sod Prefers the British Museum to God.remains one of the most perfect glancing criticisms of reason as the ultimate form of apprehension. Mr. Ashbery tries for similar heights in “Anticipated Stranger,”Anticipated Stranger, The bruise will stop by later. For now, pain pauses in its round, Notes the time of day, the patient’s temperature, Leaves a memo for the surrogate: What the hell Did you think you were doing? I mean… Oh well, the less said, the better, they all say. I’ll post this at the desk.God will find the pattern and break it.These lines convey both too little and far too much. That this poem is meant both as comment on the limits of human knowledge and as prospective epitaph, in the spirit of “Horseman, Pass By,” seems certain. But it leaves the reader with little more than a highly condensed, more-thansomewhat degraded vision of Christian eschatology, with God as the violent deliverer of humans from pain. Mr. Ashbery’s cosmology is oddly childish, particularly when phrased in language so adult and so masterfully controlled. But it could hardly be otherwise, one fears, with a poet who places the word “meaning” twice in scare quotes, in the “The Inchcape Rock” and “The Gallant Needful.”Marjore Perloff, a poet and professor, proposes in her book “21st-Century Modernism” that the truly valuable contributions modern poetry can make lie not in expression but in what she calls “constructivism,” a philosophy of composition in which “language, far from being a vehicle or conduit for thoughts or feelings outside and prior to it, is itself the site of meaning-making.” A provocative idea, and one that has gained much currency in contemporary thinking about poetry. John Ashbery is far too autonomous of an artist to place himself explicitly under the aegis of any theoretical approach, but his work demonstrates vividly the viability of Ms. Perloff’s idea — as vividly as it demonstrates the restrictions that the total internality she advocates must place on any work of art. “A Worldly Country” is a remarkable book, filled with fresh and vigorous language, assured and exquisitely paced. But it does not retrieve any lasting (even if ambiguous) meaning—whether bracketed by quotation marks or not — from the abysses it briefly gazes into. “A Worldly Country,” in other words, is fully worldly — and possessed of all the emptiness the word implies.Mr. Munson’s reviews have appeared in Commentary, the New York Times Book Review, and the New York Observer.

The Worldly Epitaphs of John Ashbery

The Worldly Epitaphs of John Ashbery

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