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 followers of Ashbery, though in "Litany" he has discovered a form which is perhaps his clearest expression to date of the fact that:

Sometimes a pleasant, dimpling
Stream will seem to flow so slowly all of a
Sudden that one wonders if it was this
Rather than the other that one was supposed to read.

When the two monologues click, when for example we hear "materialize" and "dematerialize" pronounced at the same time, or "finality" followed by "fatality," or when one voice stops and the other seems to continue the thought, we can only wonder if it was intended or not. Obviously the poems weren't written simultaneously—was it choreography or chance? Of course there are elements of both; what's important is that "Litany" keeps us guessing and that the poet has given up, at least in part, his role as controlling presence. With "Litany," Ashbery continues to redefine poetry by changing the status of the poet from one who creates meaning to one who creates the occasion for it.

Of course there's controversy here. Ashbery's "poetry of distraction"—"compositions made of what the day provides"—asks to be read as it is written, that is, by suspending judgment of what the poem is about, what it means and where it's going. "We must learn to read in the dark," he tells us, indicating that the rewards will not go to the reader who can squeeze coherence out of any text, but to the one who somehow "found the strength / To be carried irresistibly away." Ashbery's poems have been called "fitful," "abstruse," "obsessively autobiographic," and he has been criticized for what is called his "hyper-conscious awareness." (Except for the obsessive bit, he is probably loved for these same characteristics.) But even the critics who have judged his previous work inaccessible or unsociable will agree that in As We Know Ashbery has found a way to be simple. Still fitful, still idiosyncratic and likely to "start out with some notion and switch to both," Ashbery has allowed himself startling fits of clarity. We get long discursive passages—on the state of poetry, the need for humanistic criticism, or the need to be taken care of, all written in the baldest prose—that demonstrate Ashbery's enduring commitment to the idea that anything is material for poetry, "as any magic / Is the right thing at the right time." And if this book is to be called obsessively autobiographic, it should be mentioned that the obsession is with writing our biographies as well, because as the title indicates, As We Know is about common knowl edge—common, but perhaps never before articulated. It's "the same thing we are all seeing, / Our world," he says in "A Tone Poem," but who can say, he asks in "Litany," "Exactly what is taking place all about us?"

Not critics, certainly, though that is precisely
What they are supposed to be doing, yet how
Often have you read any criticism
Of our society and all the people and things in it
That really makes sense, to us as human beings?
I don't mean that a lot that is clever and intelligent
Doesn't get written, both by critics
And poets and men-of-letters in general
But exactly whom are you aware of
Who can describe the exact feel
And slant of a field in such a way as to
Make you wish you were in it, or better yet
To make you realize that you are in it
For better or for worse, with no
Conceivable way of getting out?

Why, John Ashbery of course.

Picture-making is the trap "Litany" wants to avoid by describing, not the mean event, but the feel of "the rushes slanted all one way." The leaves and branches "tried to slant with them" because their motion was imagined as effort and that image is now fused with the perception.

Strangely enough, Ashbery's animism has been used as evidence against him. In a review of his last book, Houseboat Days, one critic complained that the poet's "'nature' appeared as a stage version of reality," and called the tendency "narcissistic." (No doubt he'll be interested in Ashbery's argument that landscapes are more human than portraits.) To me, Ashbery's animism is recognition of the fact that "the seeing is taken in with what is seen." "Tapestry," the poem this line appears in, begins by pointing to the difficulty of separating the tapestry from the "room or loom which takes precedence over it"—from our ideas of its origin. His clinical, textbook diction makes it clear that he is not discussing poetic ways of seeing but basic human perception:

The eyesight, seen as inner,
Registers over the impact of itself
Receiving phenomena, and in doing so
Draws an outline, or a blueprint,
Of what was just there….

Ashbery's concern in "Tapestry" is not with displaying his own poetic prowess or powers of association but with discussing a shared problem: "We can hear it, even think it, but," he says in "A Tone Poem," try as we might, we "can't get disentangled from our brains." And this is Ashbery's gamble in As We Know; he claims to know how and what we think. "You know what I mean," the title seems to say, and the success or failure of the book teeters on his ability to tell us what we know, to say, in his best T. S. Eliot voice, "There comes a time when the moment / Is full of, knows only itself," and have the reader answer, "Yes, come to think of it, there does."

"But this is about people. / Right," Ashbery says in "Litany," reminding himself and us of his promise to speak "to us as human beings." Of course there are only individual testimonies to say that the promise is kept. Even when the outlook is bleak, I find the book consoling because no matter how terrible "the thin, terrifying edges between things" may be, it is soothing to hear them named accurately and compassionately. There is a person on the other end of these poems who is sad, cynical, and a little angry. He is also happy, well-adjusted and has a way of describing our situation that:

One advantage of "Litany's" format is that it allows for a conversational manner of speaking which might be judged facile, or too much like prose, if each monologue were not complicated by the other. But "Litany" doesn't worry about being mundane; in fact, it flaunts it. One monologue begins with "The simple things / Like having toast or / Going to church" and the other ends by asking a simple favor: "I've written several times but / Can't straighten it out—would you / Try?" Here is a long poem which mocks the idea of any invocation and refuses to come to its dramatic conclusion. And shouldn't there be more literary allusions? and what about these wordy, uncondensed sentences that crop up? Here's a poem that doesn't play by the rules.

Maybe it's unfair to read so much revolution into "Litany" though. It doesn't protest established notions of poetry as much as it gets along without them.

All I want
Is for someone to take care of me,
I have no other thought in mind,
Have never entertained any….

But why you
May ask do I want someone to take care of me
So much? This is why:
I can do it better than anyone, and have
All my life, and now I am tired
And a little bored with taking care of myself
And would like to see how somebody else might
Do it, even if that person falls on their face
Trying to, in the attempt.

Surely this is bad poetry by contemporary standards. It repeats itself. It tells when it should show. Where are the sensual images? Certainly not that person falling on his face; that's the resident cliche, which is followed by a perfect instance of tautology: "Trying to, in the attempt." Surely this is bad poetry and maybe that's what makes it so appealing. Rather than reduce the feeling to a phrase or name or metaphor, Ashbery expands it, luxuriates in it and the common words that express it. Throughout "Litany" and the shorter poems which follow, he can be seen mining ordinary language, and not only for the wisdom or humor stored in its sayings, but for the beauty of simple expression:

She said this once and turned away
Knowing we wanted to hear it twice….

An idea I had and talked about
Became the things I do.

These lines have what I want to call a totally linguistic appeal. In its context, "She" does not refer to anyone, so that "turned away" does not create a visual image. The image here is in the idea, the shared experience of having heard something we would like to hear again. In the same way, "An idea I had and talked about" is language specific. There are no pretty words referring us to the sensible world, only the familiar, colorless ones which are normally edited in the poetry-making process. We usually demand some roughage in our verse and do without an article there, a preposition here. But rather than shorten the phrase, Ashbery prefers to economize by leaving out the explanation, the controlling context, which would otherwise provide a comfortable transition from one thought to the next. These are the "privileged omissions" which keep us continually off balance, afraid to look anywhere but at our feet. By calling this a poetry of distraction, we miss the sense in which it is a poetry of extreme concentration. In and between the lines it is our "chronic inattention" Ashbery is attacking.

At times the omissions are easily filled. In the first of "Litany's" three sections, one stanza begins, "There was another photograph / In that album," when there's been no mention of photographs or an album. But what more background do we need? The line provides its own; someone was talking about some photos and we've come in in the middle. Yet there's a nagging insufficiency in an explanation like this because it tends to limit possibilities which Ashbery has carefully left open. Having learned to accommodate these, we're still faced with the transitions which occur in a rapid series, intended, apparently, to disorient us. Generally speaking, it's no fun to be lost ("I Might Have Seen It" is one exception), and willfully obscure is another name for cheap verse. When Ashbery loses us, however, it's usually with the purpose of finding us again. An elusive and difficult opening to "Knocking Around" is followed by the reassurance, "Nothing is very simple." And in "My Erotic Double," just when the poem is leaving its original scene, and us, behind, Ashbery speaks to the confusion and in doing so releases us from it: "We are afloat…." Now enjoy it.

One destroys so much merely by pausing
To get one's bearings, and afterwards
The scent is lost.

The thought is not a new one, to Ashbery or to modern poetry, but in "Litany" it takes on special meaning. In the armchair, we can stop and flip back a few pages or sneak a preview, but a public performance will go on without us. Keeping up with "Litany" means accepting our uncertainty. Take the scenery in section I: Spain and the Sahara, Greece and the bayou, tumbleweed and tropics, airports, terraces … the object is to keep us moving, and this whirlwind tour is only part of the disorientation. There is the chatter of two voices—a kind of sensory overload—and on top of it, the usual difficulties and distractions associated with a public reading.

Book in hand, it's easier to see how "Litany" manages to console us in the face of so much confusion. John Holden, writing for The American Poetry Review (July/August 1979), has already mentioned Ashbery's predilection for the syntax of a well-reasoned prose paragraph, how Ashbery uses the sound of logic to connect disparate images. The stanza may begin with a concise topic sentence, as, for instance, "What was green before is homeless." This is supported by the fact that "The mica on the front of the prefecture spells out 'Coastline'…." Nonetheless they "come round to my idea, my hat, as it would be if I were you in dreams and in business only…." Holden's point is that by presenting an argument thoroughly convinced of itself, Ashbery is able to give idiosyncratic associations the credibility of logical extensions. Similarly, by using a word twice for its different functions, he will pivot undetected from one thought to the next. Or, as in "A Box and Its Contents," the phrase "You see" is not repeated but receives a second meaning retroactively:

You see, only some of the others were crying
And how your broad smile paints in the wilderness
A scene of happiness, with balloons and cars.

As abrupt as the transitions in an Ashbery poem may be—as staggering to us cognitively—they are not abrupt to the ear, and this is the triumph of Ashbery's lyricism. In a voice neither manic nor neurotic, he manages to shift from topic to topic, changing postures, overwhelming us with divergent feelings and reactions—signs which in a Berryman or Plath prefigured an early end.

I was waiting for a taxi.
It seemed there were fewer
Of us now, and suddenly a
Whole lot fewer. I was afraid
I might be the only one.

A paranoid thought, to be sure, but so wryly expressed we can hardly worry for Ashbery's sanity. "I might be the only one," the left column says in the pause between stanzas on the right. "And I too am concerned that it / Be this way for you," the right begins, "That you / Get something out of it too." Again, simple words expressing a simple desire show a reluctance to "poeticize"—communication so direct, who can doubt its sincerity? It's as though Ashbery cares more for us than for poetry.

Fortunately, he never has to choose; Ashbery has found a means of expression totally adequate to—because inseparable from—its message. Language is not the enemy. The customary struggle with words will not take place, because in fact words can express how he feels, what he means, though we may have to change our ideas of expression to see how "It is they who carry news of it / To other places. Therefore / Are they not the event itself?"

"Litany" is not the telling of a story but the story itself, of how someone once sat down and began writing, and certain things occurred to him and were the grammar presiding over what might be said. Easy acceptance of itself makes "Litany" a machine—a poetry machine—which produces itself. These would probably be fightin' words if Ashbery did not use the analogy himself:

It isn't. "Litany" goes on for another twenty-five pages and feels as if it could go for twenty-five more, spontaneously generating, an infinitely renewable resource, with each monologue drawing on the other, just as "Self-Portrait" draws on Parmagianino's Self-Portrait, and "Fantasia on 'The Nut Brown Maid'" draws on its 16th century pretext, "The Nutbrowne Maide." Ashbery will discuss his, our, fatigue, but he won't complain about it. In fact it's a good sign.

Among the things that "Litany" calls itself—"an outburst," a "lullaby that is an exclamation," "a blatantly cacophonous if stirring symphony,"—it is also a writer's workshop, and this is one of its most pleasant surprises. For the present, our work is this poem, but throughout it there are references to our novel, our work outside the poem.

Ashbery acknowledges what most poets prefer to ignore—that the audience for poetry today is made mostly of poets and would-be poets. We may not be accustomed to such direct tips, but we are probably looking for them, and they are part of what makes As We Know such a friendly book. Kind even.