Ashbery, John - Dana Yeaton (review date 1981)

Dana Yeaton (review date 1981)

SOURCE: A review of As We Know, in The American Poetry Review, Vol. X, No. 1, January-February, 1981, pp. 34-6.

[In the following positive review, Yeaton praises linguistic aspects of "Litany."]

Imagine, a sixty-five page poem written in two columns to be read simultaneously. That means you can't read it—alone, anyway. You'll need two readers, male and female for the difference in pitch, but even then, as my friends and I found after taping "Litany," you can't really say you've heard the poem. Concentrating on one of the readers means ignoring the other; listening for the interplay between voices means missing the sense of each. At times they seem to overhear each other, to respond by echoing or by shifting to an aspect of the other's topic. Or one voice stops and the other, filling the silence left, assumes the power of both. Inevitably, they compete for attention, and this is nothing new for...

[The entire page is 3054 words long]

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