Flow Chart is John Ashbery's latest experiment; he continues to do his thing, but he knows better than anyone that experimental techniques play differently in 1992 than in 1962, let alone 1912. "One is doomed, / repeating oneself, never to repeat oneself, you know what I mean?" states his predicament. His oversize, long-lined, book-length poem has all the "avant-garde" markings, but he has no illusions that its formal discontinuities represent cultural opposition:

    What right have you to consider yourself
    anything but an enor-
       mously eccentric though
    not too egocentric character, whose sins of
    omission haven't omit-
      ted much,
    whose personal-pronoun lapses may indeed
    have contributed to
       augmenting the hardship
    silently resented among the working classes? If I
    thought that for
       a minute I'd … yet,
    remembering how you didn't want to get up
    today, how warm
       the bed was and cozy, you
    couldn't really begin with a proletarian, accustomed as they are
       to backbreaking
    toil and so (you'd like to think) don't feel it that
    much. Besides
       they never read Henry James' novels.
    Just for the sake of argument let's say I've never
    done an honest
       day's work
    in my life. It's hardly heartbreaking news, not
       a major concern.

This is an experiment without the authorization of either a political agenda or science, the other traditional appeal of the "new"; "And as for me, sad to say, / I could never bring myself to offer my experiments the gift of objective, scientific / evaluation." Not only do Ashbery's "experiments" play into the system, but their "newness" is positioned as an anachronism. While the poem takes liberties with notions of "poems," by now that is the norm, and Ashbery actually locates his poet as a wanderer "in the halls of the nineteenth century: its exhibits, / talismans, prejudices, erroneous procedures and doomed expeditions": "I must shade my eyes from the light with my hands, the light of the explosion / of the upcoming twentieth century."

Whether Ashbery's "halls" are meant to hold the echoes of Wordsworth or not, Flow Chart may be best read alongside The Prelude. It is an autobiographical poem, recording "the origin and progress" of the powers of the poet's mind—although Ashbery duly registers appropriate suspicions about "progress," "poet," and "mind." It also reviews his published books: "John's report cards." Wordsworth could well be describing Ashbery's project, beginning with the desire "either to lay up / New stores, or rescue from decay the old / By timely interference": drawing out "With fond and feeble tongue a tedious tale" in the "hope" that "I might … fix the wavering balance of my mind"; and offering the "Song," "which like a lark / I have protracted," to the "Friend" as a "gift," though "prepared" under the "pressure of a private grief, / Keen and enduring," in the confidence that "the history of a Poet's mind / Is labour not unworthy of regard." Both poems give a minute account of subjective responses to events, whether cataclysmic or barely registrable by those less "elevated" sensibilities who lack as large a capability of "being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants." Ashbery's "egotistical" anti-sublime—consumed with "exquisite nitpicking" and putting "too fine a deconstruction" on everything that may or may not have happened to "me," while days, seasons, and decades roll by "outside"—reaffirms that "we moderns have to 'leave our mark' / on whatever we say and do; we can let nothing pass without a comment / of some kind." In other words, despite Ashbery's unrelenting irony, and despite the ironies that become apparent in juxtaposing him with Wordsworth, reading Flow Chart is an experience comparable to nothing so much as to reading The Prelude.

Wordsworth's assumption that "each man's Mind is to herself / Witness and judge" holds for Ashbery: "Nothing is required of you, yet all must render an accounting." Indeed, legalistic terminology of trials, judges, and sentences abounds in his poem. If there is a "private grief" or a private accounting for some real or imagined failing or guilt, we cannot possibly know it, so that everything registers on a "higher" plane as another attempt, complete with its attendant anxieties, to justify the ways of a "Poet's mind." Certain details—the presence of "John," recurrent plays on "Ashes," and vague references to family, sex, mourning, writing, history, and earlier poems—make for an autobiographical drift, which renders Flow Chart more compelling than recent Ashbery books, but as usual he denies us the "specifics" and even apologizes for his lapses: "forgive us / our stitch of frivolity in the fabric of eternity if only so that others / can see how shabby the truth isn't and make their depositions accordingly." We are left with the fact that "This is a poem," for it does meet the minimum requirements of allusions and line breaks: "be one of those / on whom nothing is lost. Organize your thoughts in random lines and, later on / down the road, paginate them." Ashbery's "random lines" do add up to "something like / my autobiography": "I say 'I' / because I'm the experimental model of which mankind is still dreaming, though to myself / I'm full of unworkedout bugs and stagefright." More, "I see I am as ever / a terminus of sorts, that is, lots of people arrive in me and switch directions but no one / moves on any farther; this being, in effect, the end of the line, a branch-line / at that."

Not clearly authorized to indulge in a more autobiographical reading, we must resort to a literary reading of such negative millennialism and trace the fortunes of the humanist subject in postmodern times. "Somebody dust these ashes off, open / the curtains, get a little light on the subject: the subject / going off on its own again," Ashbery seems to plead, and we can only agree, but no such luck; he and we are left with "this mound of cold ashes that we call / for want of a better word the past," which "inflect[s] the horizon," "calling attention to shapes / that resemble it and so liberating them into the bloodstream / of our collective memory." As his autobiographical subject dissolves into a universal subject, our reading is deflected to an academic one, and there are enough allusions and meditations on writing to keep us going. Thus personal experience, self-accounting, and private trials are the subjects of the poem, but Ashbery treats them as irrelevant to the reader, who is nevertheless asked to read it—to consume this product.

This product sells "personal experience"—regrettably incommunicable and perhaps not entirely consequential—and "poetry," which is, regrettably, only a luxury for those who can afford such conspicuous consumption: "the coat I wear, / woven of consumer products, asks you to pause and inspect / the still-fertile ground of our once-valid compact / with the ordinary and the true." If we unravel this a bit, we see that we are asked to tailor Ashbery's "coat" to the canonical tradition, never mind the consumer products. Despite the present straits of the "poet," he is "asking" us to reconsider the same "compact" that Wordsworth, for example, invokes to legitimate Lyrical Ballads: "It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association … it will undoubtedly appear to many persons that I have not fulfilled the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title." Here is Ashbery: "I can tell you a story about something. The expression will be just right, for it will be adjusted / to the demands of the form, and the form itself shall be timeless though / hitherto unsuspected." Thus

                his literature will have performed its
      duty
      by setting you gently down in a new place and
      then speeding off
         before
      you have a chance to thank it. We've got to find
      a new name for
         him. "Writer" seems
      totally inadequate; yet it is writing, you read it
      before you knew
         it. And besides,
      if it weren't, it wouldn't have done the unex-
      pected and by doing
        so proved that it was quite
      the thing to do, and if it happened all right for
      you, but wasn't
         the way you
      thought it was going to be, why still
      that is called fulfilling part of the bargain.

By interweaving Wordsworth and Ashbery at such length, I am suggesting that Ashbery practices his novelties with one eye on tradition. Dressing his "stories" for "the new financial age that offers better reception / to things of the future, like mine," is a marketing strategy, for he is interested in selling: "For a dollar I could put it in the mail to you, / my little tract." This might sell better now than Whitman's "I do not say these things for a dollar" of more than a century ago. Indeed, "To the 'newness' then, all subscribe": "So for / sixteen years I dazzled the constituents with sayings of a country I had never seen; they knew I / raved but thought it must always be so when men dreamed, but my darker / purpose never surfaced." "In fact," Ashbery continues, "we never see all there is to see / which is good for business too: keeps the public returning / these days of swiftly eroding brand loyalty": "such / is the interesting climate we live in." If he has a "darker purpose" that is not merely teased into being by his evasive, marketing strategies, it would be the very old-fashioned one of keeping alive, by keeping it in the dark, a private self.

This, for me, is the pathos of Ashbery's project. Flow Chart confirms the cultural marginalization of "high" poetry by representing itself as a kind of preserve where the subject—the endangered species—may be kept alive. No more an "agent" than a cog in the machine, Ashbery's poet attends to "the obscure reveries of the inward gaze," tirelessly registering the rhythms of his inner life and, just as tirelessly, enumerating the difficulties of writing. And his fashionable coat, woven of consumer products, offers camouflage and better protection than the entirely different "enterprise" of going naked. The intractable nature of the poem—as of any Ashbery text—confirms that poetry does not make any difference, unless, perhaps, it markets difference. "The handwriting on the wall" says "return to your abstractions … life / has no need of you just yet." This knowledge floods the poet with sudden clarity and reaffirms his charge: "I though I should / sharpen my appearance, for that way lies light, lies life, and yes I am / talking about new clothes as well." One must admire Ashbery's ability to have his cake and eat it, too, in these hard times. He keeps telling us that his poem is only about himself and could matter less; but it looks sharp and it pierces. He offers a product, novel in cloth and cut, yet he keeps apologizing that, in substance, it has no cultural function. For the substance he quixotically sets out to preserve comprises the relics of the humanist subject, the "holy remnants of the burnished / mirror in which the Almighty once saw Himself, and wept."

Flow Chart is not merely a parodic simulacrum of a Romantic poem; it has a more serious undercurrent and, I like to think, a real investment in charting the fortunes of the subjective life, public as well as private. Ashbery's poem is how Wordsworth's project sounds today, indistinguishable from the ravings of a mind of "wavering balance." Yet Ashbery is impelled to continue producing it in this way: "I have the feeling my voice is just for me, / that no one else has ever heard it, yet I keep mumbling the litany / of all that has ever happened to me." Similarly, we are impelled to keep reading, not because we expect some ultimate "high" of revelation but for the intermittent "buzz" we get. With no "metaphysical reasons," he goes on doing what he does because he has lost the "formula for stopping," as Jean Baudrillard remarks apropos joggers. After a while we lose the "formula," too, for Flow Chart is amazingly moving—at least for one given to conspicuous consumption. The poem that deploys an avant-garde style markets, after all, an elitist product, and it attracts us because it shows how "poetry" plays today within the larger cultural discursive economies. In Ashbery's words, "You can't / can it and sell it, that's for sure, but it is a commodity, and someday all / will be wiser for it." And, for some "specialists," it plays as a nostalgic preserve, helping alleviate certain anxieties: "I will show you fear in a handful of specialists."

This fearful specialist would like to think, though, that Ashbery remains committed to preserve, "produce," or "enlarge" the capability "of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants." That, in Wordsworth's terms, "is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind." To keep alive the "discriminating powers of the mind" is, I would argue, Ashbery's "darker purpose," a downright conservative aim that finds models in Wordsworth and James. In other words, I do not buy Ashbery's fashionable "coat"; while Flow Chart is dressed as a pure product of its culture, it is also a conservative critique, which "darker" and "worthy purpose" gives the author the "right to the name of a Poet."

Or, at least, to the "label" of a poet. "Darkness" in Ashbery, early and late, is associated with the personal, "a darkness of one's own." If his writing is designed to resist the erosion of the very idea of the personal, naturally he can't deliver his "message" or give us the clue to decode it. This is the "quite tiny key to success" he "holds[s] in his hand." He can leave behind only "clues … fated not to be found this time," a "trace / of his passing," or a "flicker of ashes in the grate." But here is another irony of his career: "Because in the dark / you knew something and didn't tell it," "the notion / became a battle-cry and soon everybody was trying to disconnect his life and seal it / off, unsuccessfully." He registers an anxiety of influence in reverse, lamenting the appropriation of his stylistic signature—his way of not telling. Since a flow chart diagrams a manufacturing process. Flow Chart is an appropriate title for the autobiography of a poet who keeps processing his personal experience into a mere signifier of what is most personal, so that it becomes cultural or literary currency, a simulacrum, a "guaranteed … label, which lasts forever."

For Flow Chart is more personal than the personal can ever be, not only because our times are so "interesting" but also because life, as Ashbery often reminds us, is a generic proposition, after all; it's anybody's life. So why continue?

                          how
     do you keep going next time?
              And I told him for half a dime I'd quit and
     screw
     you too, only that's not done, the very
     pillars of our civilization would crumble …
     … we the keepers of the trust … have to
     somehow find the missing key.

But how? "Where is the one who takes out the ashes, / leaves the key behind"? And who would want to be this "one" anyway? What would there be without the ashes? What if "these marginalia … are the substance of the text"? "What / if poetry were something else entirely, not this purple weather / with the eye of a god attached, that sees / inward and outward? What if it were only a small, other way of living?" What if "a pleasant, slightly numbed sense of wonderment" were all the reader was vouchsafed? But who could brush off someone who says, "despite my bluster and my swaggering, / [I] have no real home and no one to inhabit it except you"? Plus, "if I am to be cast off, then / where? There has to be a space, even a negative one, a slot / for me, or does there?" And "Where are the standard bearers? Why / have our values been lost? Who is going to pay for any of this?" Or "Is it that I'm a sort of jerk?" In short, Flow Chart is a very entertaining book, which moves us practically to tears:

         You get A for effort, but the road to hell is
      paved
      with good intentions. But I'll take the blight,
      thanks. I'm good at working under pressure,
      as indeed we all must be.