technique is no longer valuable to him (though the 1991Flow Chart evidences some return) but reveals a characteristic Ashbery, never arrogant, never pretentious, certainly rarely the romantic bard, always modest and clearly making no superior claims for poetry except expressing his devotion to it. Here are his remarks:

For instance, the poem "Europe," the long poem in that book, is no longer very close to me. At the time I wrote it I was baffled as to what to do in poetry; I wasn't satisfied with the way my work was going and I felt it was time to just clear my head by writing whatever came into it and that's very much the case with that poem; and I think it helped me along but I don't value it as much as ones I've written since.

It is interesting to see a characteristic example of what Ashbery has written since. Here is a quotation from Flow Chart:

      it looks like a nice day for all this, and I invite
      you to start
         revving up your VCR:
      who knows what may happen? In the meantime,
      look sharp, and
         sharply at what is around you; there is
      always the possibility something may come of
      something, and that
         is our
      fondest wish though it says here I'm supposed
      to say so, not now
         not
      in this place of wood and sunlight, this stable or
         retiring room
         or whatever you want to call it.

Here are the long lines of the later Ashbery with their characteristic colloquialisms, their imagery from popular culture, and their Cagean aesthetic, an aesthetic that he began with and is still adhering to. Cage always admonishes composers, artists, poets, listeners, everyone to be attentive. And here is John Ashbery saying: "look sharp, and sharply at what is around you; there is / always the possibility something may come of something."

Obviously, Ashbery himself soon realized that it was disastrous for him to use words as if they were mere sound containers without equivalents of meaning because he was not writing nonsense verse or concrete poetry or Steinian sound structures. He couldn't really transpose the complete Cagean method, only its aesthetic. That is, he couldn't pretend that verbal sound is equivalent to the sounds, let us say, of the digestive tract that Cage used in his composition tapping intestinal organs for his "music." When Ashbery, however, made his auditory imagination a tool of his own inner universe, sounds worked for him, as in such poems as "Fragment" from the 1970 volume The Double Dream of Spring (strange that he did not include in his Selected Poems of 1985 this mysterious poem that Ashbery calls a love poem,—like all his love poems it probes the imagination and the self). He achieves a similar success in the prose poems in the volume Three Poems (1972), a volume that to me is truly characteristic of his genius. Sounds then become seductive—siren songs, songs to the "beloved," the absolute, the void in a universe that is inner, that is Zen, that joins sound ultimately to ineffable sense.

Here is a passage from the poem "Fragment" that Charles Berger in his essay on the poet in Beyond Amazement (1980) describes as a "remarkable stanza of pure lyric energy" illuminating an inwardness in "a blazing candle of artifice." The stanza I should say is unusual for the poet—it is a ten-line stanza that Ashbery may have used, he tells us, because he was reading the sixteenth-century poet Maurice Scève, who wrote in dizaines. Again, here it is:

    Thus your only world is an inside one
    Ironically fashioned out of external phenomena
    Having no rhyme or reason, and yet neither
    An existence independent of foreboding and sly grief.
    Nothing anybody says can make a difference: inversely
    You are a victim of their lack of consequence
    Buffeted by invisible winds, or yet a flame yourself
    Without meaning, yet drawing satisfaction
    From the crevices of that wind, living
    In that flame's idealized shape and duration.

Ashbery's universe, his world, is "an inside one," a daytime that is "never to be defined." Ashbery's center is search, a hope of knowing that is down to zero. His words are "weightless," and time, one of the poet's major themes, is to the poet always ambiguous, particularized in a quotidian that is more like dream ("whispers out of time"). John Ashbery affirms in his work, yes, affirms, "an affirmation that doesn't affirm anything." Such a world in a poem can only be there, within the sounds of the poems. Sounds that are not aleatoric, collages, sound structures, but sounds that are equivalents of this Zen state—affirmative only as they do not reach definition—sounds that evoke a "quiet," absolute time, the void.

Ashbery, therefore, is not trying to name. He gives up on that traditional task of the poet. You cannot "name" what you are doing, he says. Here, he is saying, here it is today, rather perplexing of course, with "crucial" moments experienced but never understood, but somehow all is rather pleasant. Of course there's been a "hitch somewhere," but in a "half-baked kind of way" whatever is out there, all external phenomena, all activity released by and turning again to the self add up to a "cosmic welter of attractions" [my italics]. The essentiality of existence is a put-on, not for us to unmask. The "real thing" is "colorless and featureless," Ashbery says over and over again, a belief that accounts for the imprecision of his surfaces, the frequent lack of reference points, his offhand manner, his conscious use of the banal and the cliché. Yet the real thing comes from "primal energy." Still, as Peter Schjedahl once said to me (or did he write this somewhere?) what Ashbery is saying may not be understood but whatever it is it is about growth, spiritual matter, the Zen thing. And that's it. That it cannot be defined yet sensed (in the meaning of sense as that which is denied in the word nonsense) becomes the ineffable quality of the verse, the music of Ashbery's lines.

The publication of Three Poems (1972) was a culmination. Here his disquieting meditations discovered their own music. He had achieved a brilliant success. What he had to say, that is, what he was saying that he could not say, was snugly couched in the music of his prose. Consider the following passage:

Gazing out at the distraught but inanimate world you feel that you have lapsed back into the normal way things are, that what you were feeling just now was a novelty and hence destined to disappear quickly, its sole purpose if any being to light up the gloom around you sufficiently for you to become aware of its awesome extent, more than the eye and the mind can take in…. And you turn away from the window almost with a sense of relief, to bury yourself again in the task of sorting out the jumbled scrap basket of your recent days, without any hope of completing it or even caring whether it gets done or not…. At this point a drowsiness overtakes you as of total fatigue and indifference; in this unnatural, dreamy state the objects you have been contemplating take on a life of their own, in and of themselves. It seems to you that you are eavesdropping and can understand their private language. They are not talking about you at all, but are telling each other curious private stories about things you can only half comprehend, and other things that have a meaning only for themselves and are beyond any kind of understanding.

Obviously what Ashbery is saying here—or anywhere else for that matter—is not particularly deep or philosophically rewarding (philosophy is never the task of a poet). Ashbery could say, as John Cage did in Silence: "I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry." The very goal of Zen (but Ashbery's kind of Zen, I believe, is only momentarily assumed and is probably very unorthodox), is inarticulateness, a very special kind of inarticulateness. The world's body of the Zen poet is the animal in the forest. The poet looks up and it is just THERE. Nothing to write home about, but plenty to write poems about: "the major question that revolves around you, your being here." And if Ashbery's poems are about anything, they are about the "permanent now … in whatever shape seemed expedient for living the next few crucial moments into a Future without controls." Here is a poet, therefore, whose only controlling belief is in "the next few crucial moments into a Future without controls." Even when the poet uses astrological signs such as the Tarot card figures in "The New Spirit" in Three Poems he is not demonstrating an interest in the occult. With characteristic wit (and Ashbery is so frequently funny) he had explained to the New York Quarterly interviewer why he lacked such an interest. "The occult is not mysterious enough."

Ashbery is really very rational. This poet who seems so mysterious as he coolly admits to the unmitigating uncertainties that each moment in life presents (and it is such "crucial moments," whether in the poet's surroundings or in his own mind that provide the substance of the poems—the result of what the critic Marjorie Perloff would call a poetics of indeterminacy) is actually a declarer of the common. Moments can bring anything, after all. But quite simply, as Ashbery writes in Flow Chart:

      Other pleasures are folding the pillow and
      gazing mournfully into
        the face of the electric clock
      when everything springs apart quite naturally
      and scrawled
        forms of people are seen pacing the square in
      different
        directions….

It is all so common! But, of course, says Ashbery, with his usual dry humor: "everything springs apart quite naturally."

Is this cool and rational Ashbery the result of his being brought up on a farm? John Ashbery was born in Rochester. New York, on July 28, 1927, and lived in the small town of Sodus, near Lake Ontario, where his father was a fruit farmer. Dinitia Smith, who managed to have a long interview with the reserved poet, published in the New York Magazine of May 20, 1991, was able to elicit characteristic responses from the poet that bear repeating. She writes:

Ashbery was at first an extroverted child who loved to be with his father on the farm. Then, when Ashbery was four, his brother Richard was born, and Ashbery grew melancholy. Richard became the star of the family, sharing Chester Ashbery's love of the outdoors. "My father was disappointed in me. My father favored him, and I understood."

Ashbery's maternal grandfather, Henry Lawrence, was a distinguished physicist and professor at the University of Rochester. And the poet's mother, unlike many women of her generation, had a college degree. "She had a tremendous reverence for my grandfather," Ashbery says.

"He was a sort of patriarch. He was very cultivated. He knew Greek and Latin. My father was jealous of his ascendancy." From the beginning, Ashbery was caught in a tug-of-war between his father and grandfather, whom he adored.

It is significant that the poet went to live with his grandparents in Rochester when he was a young child and later spent weekends and holidays there. It was his grandfather's library that led to his discovery of literature, and even his interest in painting was encouraged. He was given art lessons. What a "crucial moment," for Ashbery later would become an important international art critic. He was the art critic of the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune, Paris, 1960–65, and of the Art International, Lugano, Switzerland. He was editor of Art and Literature, Paris, from 1963–66, and became executive editor of Art News from 1965 until 1972. Later, in 1978, Ashbery became the art critic at New York Magazine and later still at Newsweek. But Ashbery like his grandfather was also a distinguished professor (of English, of course) at Brooklyn College. Because of a $250,000 five-year grant from the MacArthur Foundation he was able to leave Brooklyn College and teach only once a week at Bard College.

Money early on was a problem. It was for the lack of it that he became an art critic in Paris in 1960, following in the steps of another American poet, Ezra Pound, who, when in London and needing funds, began to write art criticism. Pound, who was an advocate, a propagandist for the new British art, was more strident, more blatantly subjective. Ashbery, on the other hand, was cool, knowledgeable, and generous-minded. When he is unsympathetic to an artist, such as Andy Warhol or Toulouse Lautrec, he never snarls as Pound did but describes the work, considers what makes him "indifferent" to it, all in a very amiable way. This is not to say, by the way, that the art criticism of Pound was not significant. It certainly was. Ashbery had the advantage of writing at the time of such formidable critics as Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and the brilliant Meyer Schapiro. It took more than fifty years for Pound's art criticism to be collected, but John Ashbery's appeared in 1991 in a collection called Reported Sightings, published by Harvard University Press with fine colored reproductions and containing work that appeared as late as 1987.

Both Pound's and Ashbery's art criticism say a great deal about them as poets. Pound, who was the theorist for the Vorticists, the British Cubists, would never have belittled the art of the eccentric poet-painter William Blake as Ashbery does with this wonderful witty remark: Blake's painting, Ashbery said, "is one of the glories of English literature." Pound, who after all lived at a different time, saw parallels between the techniques in painting and poetry and wrote, "I would liken Guido's cadence to nothing less powerful than line in Blake's drawing." Yet clearly cadence is not line. Energy is a different matter. When Ashbery says of Braque's work that "its ambiguity is that of reality," he may be unconsciously explaining his own manipulation of ambiguity in his poetry, but he is not making a parallel of the techniques of the two arts. He is still considering Braque's perception as an artist of his vision of the world.

The more sophisticated relation between the arts that Ashbery observes can be seen in his comment on Jean Hélion (whom he considers "one of the finest painters of any kind today"—i.e., in 1961): "He is a poet's painter, as Ponge (who has written on Hélion) is a painter's writer. Both have invented a new kind of description, poetic without being rhapsodic, which treats the outside of things as though it were their soul, and in which the avoidance of all metaphysical temptations becomes itself a kind of religion." This last statement could be used to describe Ashbery's poetry as well as Hélion's painting. Ashbery looked closely at the objects around him. The "reported sightings" in his poetry were not decorated with the heavy musings of a metaphysician. The mystery lay in the objects just being THERE. What he says about the paintings of his friend and artist, Joan Mitchell, whom he greatly admires, could again be said to apply to the way he works, not with paint of course, but with language. As Ashbery has said in Reported Sightings, and all poets know: "Poets when they write about other artists always tend to write about themselves." What he says then about Mitchell says a lot about himself:

A persistent shape, like a helmet or a horse's skull, doesn't give any clue to what the painter intended, except in one painting where it suggests dark masses of trees at the edge of a river. Elsewhere there are antagonisms and sparrings between shapes whose true nature is left unstated, and sudden lashings of caked or viscous pigment whose inspiration is again no longer in nature but in something in the nature of paint, or of the feeling that takes hold of a painter when he attacks it. Yet there is never any sense of transition; we move in and out of these episodes, coherent or enigmatic ones, always with a sense of feeling at home with the painter's language, of understanding what she is saying even when we could not translate it.

This is a passage that is characteristic of the critical prose of John Ashbery. He is never vague; he never hedges. His pen is as sharp as his discerning eye. It is interesting (to turn to the content of the passage) that the poet says nothing about the gestural aspect of the work of this Abstract Expressionist, the unconscious manipulations of the brush so much written about by those who stress the surrealist aspect of the Abstract Expressionists. It was not automatism that Ashbery favored in surrealism. "The automatic gestural painting of Pollock and Klein and their contemporaries looks different from the patient, minute, old-master technique of Tanguy," he notes.

Understandably, then, he loves the work of de Chirico. Is it because objects are so clearly defined even as they are so strangely juxtaposed? I must mention that Ashbery admires another aspect of the painter Joan Mitchell, for like the poet, the painter "does not talk much about her own work, perhaps not out of reticence, but because the paintings are meaning and therefore do not have a residue of meaning which can be talked about." Surely that last statement relates to his own poetry. He does not like to talk about what his poetry means. The poetry, to Ashbery, is the meaning. Words, after all, to the poet "treat the outside of things as though it were their soul."

This emphasis on the "outside of things" explains his attitude toward Minimal Art and particularly his attitude toward Brice Marden, whose 1975 survey at the Guggenheim Museum led to the artist's international fame. What the artist was showing were his masterly monochrome canvases but even those canvases evoked subtle feelings of color and light. John Ashbery, writing in 1972 about the artist even before the Guggenheim show (and of course before the current show of the "Cold Mountain" paintings of 1988–91 at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City, through June 21), saw that despite the artist's concentration on the monochrome he was creating not abstractions but luminous objects "for the senses." Ashbery wrote, in part:

Appearances to the contrary, his art is not negative minimal but positive phenomenal; it is not an abstraction but an object made by and for the senses…. Some of his colors can't even be described, let alone paraphrased…. Each seems to be the product of every color on Marsden's palette except one: and although these colors have left no visible traces of themselves, they nevertheless burn insidiously in the noncolor that has replaced them. To create a work of art that the critic cannot even begin to talk about ought to be the artist's chief concern: Marsden has achieved it.

Ashbery is indifferent to schools and fashion. He can admire the work of Nell Blaine as well as that of Brice Marden. Early on he praised those fresh, sensuous colors of the lively palette of Blaine, who was an early friend of the poet. He certainly understood the stages in her development. In 1986, he wrote that the painter "long ago moved on from the Constructivist abstraction of her early career, when Hélion and Leger … incited her toward a geometrical painting that looks less orthodox and more casual than much American abstract painting of the time. It was only natural, no doubt, that she would eventually move on to figuration, since nature in its liveliness and unpredictability is already latent in her abstractions. Yet the early disciples subsist in her work today, which is never 'impressionistic' even when trying to capture the subtleties of mist-shrouded mountains…. The sensuality in these works is backed up by a temperament that is crisp and astringent, which is as it should be, since even at its most poetic, nature doesn't kid around." How Ashberyan that realistic, sharply observed, that unromantic understanding of what's out there: "even at its most poetic, nature doesn't kid around."

What is baffling about John Ashbery is his ability to separate his experience with the visual arts from the content of his poetry. There is very little reference to art in his poems. Even his visual imagery is more metaphor than image. With Ashbery the visual dissipates into the elusive, into faded moments without the dimension of time. Events therefore exist simultaneously. Without time in its usual sense, a demarcation of past, present, and future, Ashbery's events can be occurring all at once—they have been, they are, and they will be. It is all a projection anyway. Nothing is—certainly nothing as static as a visual image. Nothing is, and at the same time, everything is—all at once. In one of his most memorable poems (much anthologized), "The Instruction Manual," in one of his best volumes, Some Trees (1956) (a volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, so casually introduced by W. H. Auden), the poet is enormously local, visual, referential in his treatment though the intention of the particularities is to evoke dream, even romance. The poem contains half a dozen little stories that the persona makes up about "dim Guadalajara. City of rose-colored flowers," as he tries to escape from the "press of having to write the instruction manual"—a manual on the use of a new metal. The description is precise, visual, delicate as the poet conjures up in his revery the city of colored houses, young lovers, an aged mother, fanning herself with a palm leaf fan, yearning for her son, the promenaders, the marketplace, the men selling hats and swatting flies, the delicious public library with its shades of pale green and beige. In a much later poem in his 1975 volume the poet knows that even to arrive in a dream city is to be "wasted with eternal desire and sadness":

     There are still other made-up countries
     Where we can hide forever,
     Wasted with eternal desire and sadness,
     Sucking the sherbets, crooning the tunes, naming the names.

A major poem having its source in art is "Self-Portrait In a Convex Mirror" in the volume of that title (1975). Yet the poem starts but hardly remains with the portrait by the Renaissance painter Parmigianino. The poem begins:

     As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
     Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
     And swerving easily away, as though to protect
     What it advertises.

The poet seems carefully to describe the portrait but because his purposes are tangential, not referential, not descriptive, the portrait almost immediately becomes not object but turning off point toward (as he writes in the poem "Hopo' My Thumb" in this same volume) "our selves concaved into view."

So it is "our selves" that is really the subject, but "our selves" with Ashbery is the "I," the "you," the "he"—all forms of the self in these quest poems, for it is always "I" and the other, who are both separate and the same. That strange gesture in the portrait, therefore, "thrust at the viewer / And swerving easily away," is "your gesture"

     … which is neither embrace nor warning
     But which holds something of both in pure
     Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.

This portrait that is Francesco Parmigianino, that is the poet, that is you, that is he, is the mirror into the mirror of "self-reflexiveness," as David Shapiro calls it in his excellent analysis of the poem in his John Ashbery: An Introduction To The Poetry. But there is nothing triumphantly narcissistic in this self-reflexiveness. "One would like to stick one's hand / Out of the globe, but its dimension, / What carries it, will not allow it." The portrait is fixed, a stasis. Yet in the experience of the making of it, there was action, in a way a very banal action. Ashbery quotes Vasari's description of the portrait's beginnings:

     … Francesco one day set himself
     To take his own portrait, looking at himself for that purpose
     In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers …
     He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made
     By a turner, and having divided it in half and
     Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself
     With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass.

But when, as the poet relates it, "in the silence of the studio" Francesco lifted "the pencil to the self-portrait," when even as he drew and "many people came and stayed a certain time," when "those voices in the dusk" became "memories deposited in irregular / Clumps of crystals," what became of those experiences, Ashbery asks the painter, that "became part of you"?

     … Whose curved hand controls,
     Francesco, the turning seasons and the thoughts
     That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds
     Like the last stubborn leaves ripped
     From wet branches? I see in this only the chaos
     Of your round mirror which organizes everything
     Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty.
     Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing.

Art that began in mundane movements, achieved its mastery, and ended with the artist, having organized everything in his "chamber" for the portrait, knowing and revealing nothing. The artist or the poet creates and then is left with "eyes which are empty." Is art or poetry achieving its fixity, its certainty, only to end in a final uncertainty, in death itself—that land of unknowing, in the portrait, in the poem? Once it was love that "tipped the scales but now is shadowed, invisible / Though mysteriously present, around somewhere." Now even daytime is "nondescript, never-to-be-defined." But we do know something, nothing very startling:

     … All we know
     Is that we are a little early, that
     Today has that special, lapidary
     Todayness that the sunlight reproduces
     Faithfully in casting twig-shadows on blithe
     Sidewalks.

Of course you can't live in a poem, a museum—"And we must get out of it even as the public / Is pushing through the museum now so as to / Be out by closing time. You can't live there." No, you can't merely live in the museum, and even Parmigianino, Ashbery tells us, must have realized that his very portrait never actually achieved what he himself had wanted. What is there then? "Daily activity"? "To be serious about sex / Is perhaps one way," and then there is the philosophy, the ideologies one lives by, but "Each person / Has one big theory to explain the universe / But it doesn't tell the whole story." Whatever is the answer? And it is not Steinian. Ashbery, who now becomes perilously near to being an advocate of suicide (or does he?), in the agony of the predicament, writes:

     Therefore I beseech you, withdraw that hand,
     Offer it no longer as shield or greeting,
     The shield of a greeting, Francesco:
     There is room for one bullet in the chamber.

Is the bullet to be in the painted chamber or in the chamber of a gun? Is suicide the answer? The mirror then won't provide a knowing portraiture? The mirror is then transformed. but it is a hideous transformation of the mirror, the major vehicle of the poem. The poet notes that he has seen the city: "it is the gibbous / Mirrored eye of an insect"—so trivial, yet so monstrous, that "gibbous / Mirrored eye of an insect." And all there is left "here and there, in cold pockets / Of remembrance, whispers out of time." So that the poet begins with a portrait painted by a sixteenth-century artist in a convex mirror, places himself in that mirror only to try to break through "that globe," but in the attempt questions the very making of any art. Shapiro considers that "it might be said that the poem finally admits no self-portraiture except the portraiture of a text, a text like a painting." In such a case, the text may remain, but only "here and there, in cold pockets / Of remembrance, whispers out of time."

I have described this poem at some length because, it seems to me, to hold much of what is central to the work of Ashbery. Time, the imagination, poetry, self and the other, loss, love, death,—these are the motifs of Ashbery (and I purposely use a musical term). In the poet's recent interview with Dinitia Smith he admitted that one way to read his poetry is to think of it as "music," as if his words were a musical composition, and he added: "Words in proximity to one another take on another meaning. What you hear at a given moment is a refraction of what's gone before or after." But these surface motifs can only be understood—or heard—in that flow of sound, that movement of the language, the interweaving of vowel and consonant creating a present, a present moment, the only moment in a time that is seductive as it moves musically on and on, as the poet notes momentary experience within time's flow, the only consolation of these "whispers" that are "out of time."

Isn't it likely that the poet named his last book Flow Chart (1991) because he is so attracted to the flow of time—and to the business and language of contemporary life, for "flow chart" is a contractor's schedule for his painters, electricians, etc., who have to know the sequence of the tasks they have to perform in their jobs. The job requires a certain time. It is a fixed time but because there are always so many contingencies—workers become ill, machinery breaks down, parts are not delivered—the flow chart is interrupted by the random emergency. In his own "flow chart" miscalculations do not merely delay the job of simply getting on, they lead to "the more terrible realization," as the poet had even noted in "The System" in Three Poems, "of reconciling their own ends with the cosmos." But in Flow Chart Ashbery is much more cynical, his wit is more sharp-edged, but happily there is plenty of it. Beneath his skepticism ("the truth, if there ever could be such a thing") is a deep-seated awareness of the terror of our times.

      We live in an age when terror
     opens like breadfruit and one must pick and choose—the seeds
          and proverbs just
     aren't that numerous. Everybody must vote. Everybody's vote
          be accepted into the
     tilting radio tower that is collapsing in one's own best
          interest in one
     dark swoop of mingled horror and relaxed apprehension….

And if there is no horror, there is a "feeling of emptiness" that keeps "turning up like a stranger." Or incessant despair. What to do—"No place to put my despair. Never mind, we'll unpack it later." This kind of black humor is ever present in this series of long poems. The poet always rebounds, however; becomes his usual calm, accepting self. It is because he accepts the contradictions, the simultaneity of horror and pleasure (not necessarily within the experience of the same person). He concedes:

     so history constantly dwindles, although one can still feel
        remarkably fit and well-adjusted
     to life in an era more decadent than anything that has preceded
        it … that anyone should have to die
     so that we may stay on here, sodden but alive, fortunate
     to be able to contemplate our mortality from a distance
        amid kindness
     and late imperial emblems, golden dregs of another civilization
     than the one we gulped down just a short time ago.

Ashbery won't allow the tragic note. Whether it is the threat of death, recognition of brutal imperial wars, personal loss, Ashbery brushes it all off, becomes casual, playfully utters cliches and wonderful one-liners: "Twenty centuries is too much." There is no theological questioning. He goes on with the journey of life, a "journey" that "flows past us like ice chunks." Ice chunks! Not exactly reassuring, but he tells it as he sees it—and endures, ready for the next small pleasure that yields "a pleasant, slightly numbed sense of wonderment."

This is a book that is very New York City. "It seems," he writes as only a realistic, knowledgeable New Yorker can, "only yesterday / that one could find cheap walkup apartments in the East 50s." But what to do about it all? He can only return to his Cagean attentiveness and urge with his usual humor:

     … Meanwhile, be one of those
     on whom nothing is lost. Organize your thoughts in random lines
        and, later on
     down the road, paginate them. You'll see bluebells and cowslips
        on every hill; even
     dragonflies will have become a thing of wonder, as long
     as you don't get too close, and let water run through it all….
     As long as we're on this planet
     the thrill never ceases. Even a garage can be a propitious place.

And love, what about love? Ashbery says that all his poems are about love. In this volume death certainly seems obtrusive, but in a way here and in all of the volumes the poems are love songs but with the lover absent because the lover and the beloved are one—another aspect of the interchangeability of pronouns in the poet's world.

The "beloved," as Ashbery uses the term, is the universal principle, the cosmic mystery that is there in its essential affections but still eludes us. In the last section of Three Poems called "The Recital," the poet comments that "emotional happiness blossoms only once," and we are daily fighting "the hydra-headed monster of apathy." It is the stillness that Ashbery is battling or trying to understand because for him it has not yet turned into the true meditator's void. So that in one sense Ashbery has not reached his "beloved," which is apathy, the void, toward which his muted, seductive sounds, his siren songs, are drifting.

Even sex, especially in Flow Chart, seems beside the point. He says there: "I now … / have come belatedly to realize that sex has very little to do with any of it, / that is directly, except insofar as it makes you do something you hadn't thought about / because it brought you to a place you hadn't thought of visiting, / some quiet corner of a garden, unnoticed before, whose perfection of design / no longer seems a threat, / but rather a greeting instead." The absence of the "sensual" lover in the poems (despite Ashbery's occasional welcoming of sensuality in a kind of abstract way) explains much in the poet's work.

There is love of the world, the "other," but since the "you's," the "I's," the "he's" are all forms of the self in these quest poems, there is really no love partner creating fire or tension in the works. As a result, there is little tension, little drama as one ordinarily feels it in a lyric or even in a meditative poem of tradition. In a way, the poems are all love songs with the lover absent because the lover and the beloved are one. Absence, therefore, becomes one of the motifs of the poems. Absence is implied, for example, in his characteristic use of ellipsis, what he calls "this leaving-out business" in "The Skaters." Absence is not, however, the lack of presence, for in what Richard Howard has called Ashbery's "poetics of continuity and encirclement" presence is the central ingredient of absence. In "The Skaters," the poet notes:

      the carnivorous
     Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving
     Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know
       involves presence, but still
     Nevertheless these are fundamental absences, struggling to
       get up and be off themselves.

Absence, therefore, necessarily involving presence, is one of Ashbery's important motifs, another one of the contradictions that the poet memorializes, for it is not the world's ambiguities that the poet responds to but its contradictions existing side by side—a condition in the world which to the poet is equivalent to inevitable failure on every level of life. As he says in Flow Chart, "Isn't it all going to be a fiction / anyway, and if so, what does it matter where we decide to settle down?"

The contradictions are not Hegelian, not Marxist. There are no opposing forces. Contradictions are—and in being lie still: "Whatever was, is, and must be," Ashbery writes. His quiet music is the poetic equivalence of this stillness. It is in fact the seductive musical element in Ashbery's poetry that makes it live. It is a seduction urged on by an uncanny music, a rhythmical seduction that relates his work to Eros—the only Eros in his work, for, as he says in "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid'" in Houseboat Days, even love is no "cause for self-congratulation" and in the "living picture" [my italics] that is life,

         You get around this as though
     The eternally revised geography of spring meant
     Something beyond its own sense of exaltation….

Since essentially all is "stillness," "zero," the flow of time rushing forward and staying still as the Red Queen implied (and Ashbery reminds us), the beloved too is both here and not here, and therefore can be embraced only in memory, or in the moment that has passed: "We were walking / All along toward a door that seemed to recede / In the distance and now is somehow behind us shut," the poet writes in the last named poem. Even sensuality throbs toward what Ashbery calls "nostalgia," and the present moment is all and nothing, is absence as well. Such poetry is flux and stasis. Such a poetry has the music of the silence of no time—not the "no time" of the Keatsian persuasion but the "no time" of the Einsteinian revolution. Ashbery knows time is standing still or at least in its rushing forward is rushing backwards head on. "How wonderful the fields are," Ashbery writes. What else is there to say? Is it not all attractive—especially if one knows enough "not to insist, to keep sifting a mountain of detritus / indefinitely in search of tiny yellow blades of grass"?