SOURCE: "Reading John Ashbery's Poems," in The Denver Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 4, Winter, 1976, pp. 6-34.

In 1972 John Ashbery was invited to read at Shiraz, in Iran, where for several years the Empress had sponsored a festival gathering music, art, and drama remarkable, even notorious, for its modernity: Peter Brook's Orghast, Robert Wilson's week-long production Ka Mountain and GUARDenia Terrace, Merce Cunningham's dances, the music of Stockhausen and John Cage. Ashbery and another visitor, David Kermani, reported that "to a country without significant modern traditions, still under the spell of its own great past, where a production of Shaw or Ibsen would count as a novelty, such an effort even might seem quixotic". Taking into consideration Iranian critics who demanded Shakespeare first or Chekhov first, Ashbery's own response was delighted and characteristic: "The important thing is to start from the beginning, that is, the present. Oscar Wilde's 'Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves' might well have been the motto of the festival, and its justification." That oversimplifies his view of tradition and modernism, this poet who has rich and felt connections, for example, to Traherne and Marvell as well as to recent poets like Wallace Stevens and Auden and Marianne Moore. But the present is always Ashbery's point of departure: "Before I read modern poetry, the poetry of the past was of really no help to me."

Familiar notions about a poet's development won't quite apply to Ashbery's work. He doesn't return to objects, figures, and key incidents which, as the career unfolds, gather increasing symbolic resonance. Nor do his poems refer to one another in any obvious way. Ashbery writes autobiography only inasmuch as he writes about the widening sense of what it is like to gain—or try to gain—access to his experience. The present is the poem. "I think that any one of my poems might be considered to be a snapshot of whatever is going on in my mind at the time—first of all the desire to write a poem, after that wondering if I've left the oven on or thinking about where I must be in the next hour." Or, more tellingly, in verse ("And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name", a recent poem):

Like Penelope's web, the doing and undoing of Ashbery's poems is often their subject: fresh starts, repeated collisions of plain talk with the tantalizing and frustrating promises of "poetry". The "desire to communicate" erodes, over a pointed line-break, into hasty beleaguered utterance. Nor does an accumulating personal history provide a frame for him with outlines guiding and determining the future: "Seen from inside all is / Abruptness."

And the great flower of what we have been twists
On its stem of earth, for not being
What we are to become, fated to live in
Intimidated solitude and isolation.
("Fragment")

In his images of thwarted nature, of discontinuity between present and past, Ashbery has turned his agitation into a principle of composition. From the start he has looked for sentences, diction, a syntax, which would make these feelings fully and fluidly available. When he used strict verse forms, as he did in much of his first book, Some Trees, it was always with a sense of their power to explore rather than certify that he was a poet. There are three sestinas in Some Trees, and one, the remarkable "Faust", in his second book The Tennis Court Oath.

These forms such as the sestina were really devices at getting into remoter areas of consciousness. The really bizarre requirements of a sestina I use as a probing tool…. I once told somebody that writing a sestina was rather like riding downhill on a bicycle and having the pedals push your feet. I wanted my feet to be pushed into places they wouldn't normally have taken….

Ashbery's rhyming, too, was restless. At the close of "Some Trees" his final rhymes create a practically unparaphrasable meaning, the two words inviting overtones they wouldn't have in prose:

Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

There were other, drastic attempts to get at "remoter areas of consciousness", some of them in The Tennis Court Oath close to automatic writing. "Europe", a poem Ashbery now thinks of as a dead end, was "a way of trying to obliterate the poetry that at the time was coming naturally" to him. Exploding any notion of continuity, it consisted of "a lot of splintered fragments … collecting them all under a series of numbers". The "French Poems" in The Double Dream of Spring were first written in French, then translated "with the idea of avoiding customary wordpatterns and associations." In Three Poems, his fifth book, long prose pieces were a way to overflow the "arbitrary divisions of poetry into lines", another way to an "expanded means of utterance".

What I am getting at is that a great deal of Ashbery's writing is done in an atmosphere of deliberate demolition, and that his work is best served not by thinking about development, but by following his own advice: beginning at the beginning, "that is, the present". Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) is the present with which I want to begin. The long title poem of that volume is in every sense a major work, a strong and beautiful resolution of besetting and important problems. Ashbery had already broached these problems in The Double Dream of Spring, in which he characteristically approached the world as a foreigner, sometimes in the role of explorer, sometimes as a pilgrim, and almost always as someone bewildered by the clutter of a situation which, wryly phrased, "could not be better". The world of that book is often divided, out of bristling necessity, between inside and outside, between we and a dimly identified they. "They are preparing to begin again: / Problems, new pennant up the flagpole / In a predicated romance." Access to the present was more peremptorily barred than it was to be in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

The Double Dream of Spring had looked at alternatives with grim amusement. In "Definition of Blue" the cant words of social engineers, historians, and broadcasters—capitalism, romanticism, impetuses—drain away, with their tripping rhythms, into colorless sentences, while the imaginative eye, seeking out materials for escape, finds only that "erosion" has produced:

This comic decay of language and the laws of perspective allows us "A portrait, smooth as glass, . . built up out of multiple corrections / And it has no relation to the space or time in which it was lived." The joke is on us, especially the grammatical joke that it is the portrait which lives, fragments of personality out of touch with anything but the mirroring tricks which make it seem to be a likeness. Meanwhile

The separation of "nether world" from the independent and inaccessible world of plenitude, the blue surroundings which drift past us and "realize themselves", is a source of frustration and mockery.

Yet Ashbery also takes a rueful "pop" pleasure in the vocabulary of "packaging", allowing it to deflate itself, as in the double take of a "world that could not be better". The feelings here are not totally resolved, nor are they meant to be. Ashbery once said that he was willing for his poems to be "confusing, but not confused".

It seems to me that my poetry sometimes proceeds as though an argument were suddenly derailed and something that started out clearly suddenly becomes opaque. It's a kind of mimesis of how experience comes to me: as one is listening to someone else—a lecturer, for instance—who's making perfect sense but suddenly slides into something that eludes one. What I am probably trying to do is to illustrate opacity and how it can suddenly descend over us, rather than trying to be willfully obscure.

"Definition of Blue" is, on the surface, laconically faithful to expository syntax, the sinces and buts and therefores which lash explanations together. The logical bridges lead into eroded territory, and then unexpectedly back again; the poem moves in and out of focus like a mind bombarded with received ideas. So—"mass practices have sought to submerge the personality / By ignoring it, which has caused it instead to branch out in all directions." Or, with deadpan determination—"there is no point in looking to imaginative new methods / Since all of them are in constant use." Just at the point when imagination seems reduced to novelty, an overloaded switchboard, we learn that this "erosion" with its "kind of dust or exaggerated pumice" provides "a medium / in which it is possible to recognize oneself. A serious challenge peeps through: how far are we responsible for, dependent upon, these denatured senses of identity?

"Each new diversion", Ashbery tells us, "adds its accurate touch to the ensemble." Mischievous saboteur that he is, Ashbery's pun on diversion shows how much he enjoys some of the meandering of unfocused public vocabularies and the "accurate touches" they supply (as to a wardrobe?). But, basically, our sense is of someone bristling, boxed in by a maze of idioms, frustrated and diminished by his presence there. Only the mirrored portrait lives "built up out of multiple corrections". Or, to be more exact, in a petrifying shift to a past tense and the passive voice: "it has no relation to the space or time in which it was lived"—a disaffected vision of personality if there ever was one. The world of "packaging" appears to have robbed him of a life, of his access to power and vision.

I have chosen this example, more extreme than some of the others in The Double Dream of Spring, because it is so energetically answered and refigured by Ashbery's long poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror". In that more recent, more encompassing work, the poet takes charge of the emerging self-portrait rather than suffering it as he had in "Definition of Blue". He tests an identity captured by art against the barrages of experience which nourish and beset it. He is sparked by a Renaissance painting, Parmigianino's self-portrait, alongside which he matches what proves to be his own: a mirror of the state of mind in which the poem was written, open to waves of discovery and distraction, and aware of the unframed and unframable nature of experience:

Today has no margins, the event arrives
Flush with its edges, is of the same substance
Indistinguishable.

Parmigianino's work is itself problematic and haunting, done on the segment of a halved wooden ball so as to reproduce as closely as possible the painter's image in a convex mirror exactly the same size. That Renaissance effort, straining to capture a real presence, touches off in Ashbery a whirling series of responses, visions and revisions of what the painting asks of him.

…..

"Self-Portrait" begins quietly, not overcommitted to its occasion, postponing full sentences, preferring phrases:

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. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face, which swims
Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose. It is what is
Sequestered.

A lot could be said about Ashbery's entrance into poems and his habit of tentative anchorage: "As on a festal day in early spring", "As One Put Drunk into the Packet Boat" (title: first line of Marvell's "Tom May's Death"). Such openings are reticent, similes taking on the identity of another occasion, another person—a sideways address to their subject or, in the case of "Self-Portrait", a way of dealing with temptation. The speaker in "Self-Portrait" appears to "happen" upon Parmigianino's painting as a solution to a problem pondered before the poem begins. At first glimpse the glass of art and the face in the portrait offer him just the right degree of self-disclosure and selfassertion, the right balance of living spirit and the haunting concentrated maneuvers of art. The judicious give-and-take appeals to him: thrust and swerve; toward and away; protect and advertise. (This is, by the way, one of the best descriptive impressions of a painting I know.) That balanced satisfaction never returns. What at first comforts him, the face "in repose", prompts an unsettling fear: "It is what is / Sequestered." This is the first full sentence of the poem—brief, shocked, and considered, after the glancing descriptive phrases. An earlier draft of the lines was weaker: "protected" rather than "sequestered" and the word placed unemphatically at the end of the line, as if some of the meance to be sensed in the finished portrait hadn't yet surfaced.

From then on the poem becomes, as Ashbery explains it in a crucial pun, "speculation / (from the Latin speculum, mirror)", Ashbery's glass rather than Francesco's. All questions of scientific reflection, capturing a real presence, turn instantly into the other kind of reflection: changeable, even fickle thought. The whole poem is a series of revisions prepared for in the opening lines, where in Parmigianino's receding portrait he imagines first that "the soul establishes itself, then that "the soul is a captive". Finally, from the portrait's mixture of "tenderness, amusement and regret":

The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

In an earlier draft of the poem it was not quite so clear why such strong feeling emerges:

Rewriting those lines Ashbery allowed more emphatic fears to surface. "The soul is not a soul." Acting on an earlier hint that Parmigianino's mirror chose to show an image "glazed, embalmed", Ashbery sees it in its hollow (overtones of burial) rather than in the neutral "space intended". "Our moment of attention" draws sparks between the glazed surface of the portrait and the poet's transient interest which awakens it, and places notions like the soul irredeemably in the eye of the beholder. When the poet looks at this ghostly double, alive in its mirroring appeal, the emerging fear comes across like Milly Theale's (The Wings of the Dove) in front of the Bronzino portrait resembling her, "dead, dead, dead".

Throughout "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" the poet speaks to the portrait as in easy consultation with a familiar, but with an everchanging sense of whether he is addressing the image, trapped on its wooden globe, or the free painter standing outside his creation, straining to capture a real presence, restraining the power to shatter what may become a prison: "Francesco, your hand is big enough / To wreck the sphere, …" An explosion has been building from the start as Ashbery returns over and over, puzzled by that hand which the convex mirror shows "Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer / And swerving easily away, as though to protect / What it advertises". At first that defensive posture in a work of art attracts him, an icon of mastery. But, a little later, feeling the portrait as "life englobed", he reads the hand differently:

One would like to stick one's hand
Out of the globe, but its dimension.
What carries it, will not allow it.
No doubt it is this, not the reflex
To hide something, which makes the hand loom large
As it retreats slightly.

The hand returns not in self-defense, but

Philosophic questions mount, but always apprehended through gestures, new expressions glimpsed as one stares at the painting—here a glint of self-mockery, as the painter absorbed with prowess finds himself trapped by his medium after all. "But your eyes proclaim / That everything is surface…. / There are no recesses in the room, only alcoves." The window admits light, but all sense of change is excluded, even "the weather, which in French is / Le temps, the word for time". The opening section of "Self-Portrait" winds down, the poet bemused but his poetry drained of the emotional concentration which had drawn him to the painting; a glance at the subject's hands sees them as symbolically placed, but inexpressive:

This is not Ashbery's final reading of the portrait's gesturing hand. But it launches a series of struggles with the past, with "art", with the notion of "surface", with the random demands of the present—struggles which are not only at the heart of this poem but a paradigm of Ashbery's work. Parmigianino's portrait has to compete with the furniture of the mind confronting it: the poet's day, memories, surroundings, ambitions, distractions. The solid spherical segment becomes confused, in the Wonderland of the mind, with other rounded images, toys of attention—a ping-pong ball on a jet of water, and then, at the start of the second section, "The balloon pops, the attention / Turns dully away." There is a rhythm to reading this poem, however wandering it may seem. We experience it as a series of contractions and expansions of interest in the painting, depending upon how much the poet is drawn to its powers of foreshortening and concentration, and alternately how cramped he feels breathing its air. The transitions between sections are marked as easy shifts in inner weather, opposed to the weatherless chamber of Parmigianino's portrait:

The balloon pops, the attention
Turns dully away.

…..

As start to forget it
It presents its stereotype again

…..

The shadow of the city injects its own
Urgency:

…..

A breeze like the turning of a page
Brings back your face

The painting occurs to him at times as a ship: first, a "tiny, self-important ship / On the surface". In mysterious relation to it the enlarged hand in the distorted portrait seems "Like a dozing whale on the sea bottom". Threatening? Or a sign of throbbing vitality, an invisible part of its world? Later the portrait

Toward the end of the poem, the ship sails in to confirm some sense of

Self-important and tiny? Issued from hazards? Flying unknown colors? Through contradictory senses of the ship, Ashbery judges the portrait's relation to risk and adventure, to the mysterious otherness of "arrival" in a completed work of art.

What happens, for example, when we start to imagine the life of cities behind the surface of a work of art, in this case the sack of Rome which was going on where Francesco was at work; Vienna where Ashbery saw the painting in 1959; New York where he is writing his poem? These are ways Ashbery has of summoning up the countless events which nourished the painting and his response to it. That outside life, again imagined in terms of risk, adventure, voyages, can be profoundly disturbing—a life not palpable in a "finished" work

Such images focus the problem of how much life is lived in and outside a work of art. There is no point in disentangling what is hopelessly intertwined. The images flow toward and counter one another, and the reader accumulates a bewildering sense of what it is to be fulfilled and thwarted by his own grasped moments of vision (all attempts at order, not just artistic creation, Ashbery tries to remind us). Francesco's portrait has the capacity to make us feel at home; we "can live in it as in fact we have done". Or "we linger, receiving / Dreams and inspirations on an unassigned / Frequency". But at another moment the portrait seems like a vacuum drawing upon our plenty, "fed by our dreams". If at one point the mind straying from the conical painting is like a balloon bursting, not much later the straying thoughts are imagined as wayward, even sinister progeny of the painting: The balloon has not burst at all. "Actually / The skin of the bubblechamber's as tough as / Reptile eggs".

Struggling with the past, with art and its completeness, Ashbery is also struggling with the impulses behind his own writing at the very moment of writing.

The threat is pressed home by a shift from an impersonal "you" to an endangered "me". The finished work of art is like "A cloth over a birdcage", and the poet wary of its invitations:

Yet the "poetic", straw-colored space
Of the long corridor that leads back to the painting,
Its darkening opposite—is this
Some figment of "art", not to be imagined
As real, let alone special?

By the closing pages of the poem two irreconcilable views of "living" have proposed themselves. Parmigianino's appears to be a "Life-obstructing task". ("You can't live there.") More than that, the portrait exposes the poet's own efforts in the present:

Our time gets to be veiled, compromised
By the portrait's will to endure. It hints at
Our own, which we were hoping to keep hidden.

When "will to endure" and "life-obstructing" are identified with one another, as they are here in describing our daily fiction-making activities, the psychological contradictions are themselves almost unendurable. Imagining is as alien and miraculous as the ambivalent image he finds for it: "A ship / Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor." Our creations, torn out of our hands, seem installed "on some monstrous, near / Peak, too close to ignore, too far / For one to intervene". Another way of looking at it: "the way of telling" intrudes "as in the game where / A whispered phrase passed around the room / Ends up as something completely different".

An alternative? Though the poem is always pressing us out of the past, it has no unmediated language for the present, which is as hard to locate as other poets' Edens. Where poets describing unknown worlds have always "liken'd spiritual forms to corporal", Ashbery must perform some of the same likening to enter the corporal present itself. He knows the present only from before and after, seen as through a terrifying hourglass:

Four of these five monosyllables—"This past is now here"—point to the present with all the immediacy of which English is capable, and past disarms them all. There is no comfort in the provisional, in being open to the rush of things. In fact, one of the most devastating contemporary critiques of randomness in poetry comes in the final moments of Ashbery's poem. Yet it is a critique from within, in a poem open to the vagaries of mind—and from a writer deeply committed to describing the struggle we have describing our lives. This is his unique and special place among contemporary poets. The blurring of personal pronouns, their often indeterminate reference, the clouding of landscapes and crystal balls, are all ways not only of trying to be true to the mind's confusions but also to its resistance of stiffening formulations.

In the distorting self-portrait of Parmigianino, Ashbery found the perfect mirror and the perfect antagonist—a totem of art and the past caught in the act of trying to escape from itself. Parmigianino's work of art confirms the poet in a vocation which refuses to be rescued by art, except in the moment of creation.

This is a difficult dialectic to which he submits. Francesco is the indispensable partner in a continuing conversation; yet Ashbery's final reading of the painterly hand in the self-portrait is the boldest stroke of all:

Therefore 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:
Our looking through the wrong end
Of the telescope as you fall back at a speed
Faster than that of light to flatten ultimately
Among the features of the room,…

The pun on chamber—one last gift of the portrait's vocabulary turned against it—the dizzying transformations of rounded room into telescope and gun barrel, are triumphant tributes to all the contradictions of this poem and the hard-won struggle free of them. It would be a shallow reading which sees this poem as a modernist's dismissal of the past. Ashbery translates that topos into radical and embracing human terms. The elation we feel comes from the writer's own unwillingness to take permanent shelter in his work. Any work of art—not just those of the distant past—has designs on us, exposes for what it is our "will to endure". Ashbery builds the awareness of death and change into the very form of his work. It is the old subject of Romantic lyric—of Keat's Ode on a Grecian Urn—but here without undue veneration for the moments out of time. Ashbery admits into the interstices of his poem a great deal of experience—confusion, comedy, befuddlement, preoccupation—in which he takes as much joy as in the "cold pockets / Of remembrance, whispers out of time", which he also celebrates. His withdrawal from the privileged moments is never as regretful or as final as Keats's from his "cold pastoral". Nor is it as rueful as Ashbery's own sense of desertion in "Definition of Blue" where "you, in this nether world that could not be better / Waken each morning to the exact value of what you did and said, which remains". In that earlier poem Ashbery feels diminished and powerless before a "portrait, smooth as glass, . . built up out of multiple corrections", which "has no relation to the space or time in which it was lived". In the spaciousness of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" Ashbery radiates a new confidence in his ability to accommodate what is in the poet's mind: the concentrated poem and its teeming surroundings. In its achieved generosity and fluidity, in its stops and starts and turns, Ashbery's long poem dispels some of the frustrations of language and form, or assimilates them more closely to the anxieties and frustrations of living.

…..

I said before that "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" answers problems posed by Ashbery's poetic past and helps refigure it.

Every moment is surrounded by a lot of things in life that don't add up to anything that makes much sense and these are part of a situation that feel I'm trying to deal with when I'm writing.

Ashbery said this to an interviewer in 1972, as if anticipating the free and flexible voice he found for "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror". That year he had published the long prose pieces he entitled Three Poems, a work which evidently released him into an "expanded sense of utterance":

…the idea of it occurred to me as something new in which the arbitrary divisions of poetry into lines would get abolished. One wouldn't have to have these interfering and scanning the processes of one's thought as one was writing; the poetic form would be dissolved, in solution, and therefore create a much more—hate to say environmental because it's a bad word—but more of a surrounding thing like the way one's consciousness is surrounded by one's thoughts.

However odd or puzzling that last phrase may be, we can sense the pressure behind its deliberate, almost involuntary awkwardness. In both quotations Ashbery uses the word "surrounded" to suggest the number of seemingly unrelated "thoughts" or "things" at any given moment pressing behind the little that is articulated. This tension is the point of departure for Three Poems:

These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will, something soon comes to stand in their place. Not the truth, perhaps, but—yourself It is you who made this, therefore you are true.

We are dealing with rich polarities in Ashbery's work. The impulse to "leave all out" can be felt as early as a poem like "Illustration" from his first book. The protagonist of that poem is a nun about to leave behind the irrelevancies of the world by leaping from a skyscraper. As this droll hierophant remarks: "I desire / Monuments…. want to move / Figuratively, as waves caress / The thoughtless shore." The narrator, too, is convinced: "Much that is beautiful must be discarded / So that we may resemble a taller / Impression of ourselves." That was one way of saying it, the way of concision and foreshortening.

But then there is another way to have it, as in "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name", a more recent poem (1975):

A difference in approach makes all the difference. "Illustration" proposes a "taller / Impression of ourselves", an epigrammatic and visionary avoidance of ordinary "beauty". "Ut Pictura" makes space for a flustered, fuller and meandering, version of self. Vision is invited by coming out into a clearing and taking a relaxed view of the surroundings. The poet finds "a few important words" and "a lot of low-keyed, / Dull-sounding ones".

Though these poems come from different periods in Ashbery's career, I don't want to suggest that one voice or approach replaces the other. But with Three Poems Ashbery rounded a critical corner. Its perpetuum mobile style prepared him, when he returned to verse, for a new fluidity, a way to readmit the self to his poetry. Alive in its present, and determined as any Jack-in-the-Box, that self pops up when any moment of poetic concision threatens to falsify or obliterate it. The discovery comes as a relief, not so much a calculation as a necessity. Leaving things out, "forget as we will, something soon comes to stand in their place. Not the truth, perhaps, but—yourself."

I am talking, then, about complementary gifts or voices in Ashbery's poetry. He has his own deadpan way of putting it: "In the past few years have been attempting to keep meaningfulness up to the pace of randomness … but I really think that meaningfulness can't get along without randomness and that they somehow have to be brought together." No wonder that the long "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" stands as a centerpiece to his work in the early 1970s; no single short poem could handle such a copious problem. It would be a mistake to see this merely as an aesthetic question, a poet talking about poetry, about the relative virtues of condensed vision and expansive randomness. The emotional coloring that Ashbery gives this conflict, especially in his long poem, suggests psychological dimensions and stresses. Art "leaving things out" involves a sense of melancholy and sacrifice, a restlessness, a threat to vitality.

The Double Dream of Spring is shadowed by such feelings; the short poems of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror often counter them. Together, these two books five years apart, with their different moods, give a sense of the range and playfulness and boldness of Ashbery's emerging work. There are some poems, of course, which might be in either book. Still, certain characteristic titles belong to one and not the other: in Double Dream, "Spring Day", "Summer", "Evening in the Country", "Rural Objects", "Clouds"; in Self-Portrait, "Worsening Situation", "Absolute Clearance", "Mixed Feelings", "No Way of Knowing", "All and Some". The latter pick up colloquial ways of describing the emotional weather of the moment. Titles from Double Dream tend toward the generic and the pastoral. (Not that any Ashbery title is more than a clue or point of departure, less a summary and more a key signature for the poem.)

In The Double Dream of Spring Ashbery seems absorbed in the forms that lie just behind an experience; the day's events are "Fables that time invents / To explain its passing". Common phrases are challenged; buried meanings are coaxed out of them so that they surprise us with a life of their own, or chastize us for a sleepy acceptance of the "phraseology we become". Ashbery wants to push past the hardening of life into habit, the way it congeals into patterned phrase, the metaphysician's equivalent of "You are what you eat". I don't know whether "Young Man with Letter" is touched off by yet another appearance of a golden, well-introduced youth into the city which will absorb him. But the impulse of the poem quickly becomes something else: to awaken the "fable" sleeping behind a phrase like "making the rounds".

Another feeble, wonderful creature is making the rounds again,
In this phraseology we become, as clouds like leaves
Fashion the internal structure of a season
From water into ice. Such an abstract can be
Dazed waking of the words with no memory of what happened before,
Waiting for the second click. We know them well enough now,
Forever, from living into them, tender, frivolous and puzzled
And we know that with them we will come out right.

The cliché ("making the rounds") is teased alive by the strange sad comparison with the seasons. Ashbery performs what he then identifies, "dazed waking of the words", eventually "living into them". Many of the poems in Double Dream perform such discoveries, satisfied with nothing merely accidental, nothing less refined than "Fables that time invents / To explain its passing". Still, having gone beyond gossip in "Young Man with Letter", having absorbed a single bit of tattle into a large melancholy sense of natural cycles, Ashbery is left with some nagging questions. Once he has sidestepped the "corrosive friends" and "quiet bickering" in this poem, there is still something distant and unreal about the "straining and puffing … commas produce":

The frustration and self-mockery, the sense of being deprived of the present, are inescapably twinned with the discoveries made in such poems. The mood is odd and disquieting; however gratifying the visionary insight, the poet also seems to feel experience being taken out of his hands. Hence, the way fresh hopes verge into nightmares in the long suspended sentence at the opening of "Spring Day":

The immense hope, and forbearance
Trailing out of night, to sidewalks of the day
Like air breathed into a paper city, exhaled
As night returns bringing doubts

That swarm around the sleeper's head
But are fended off with clubs and knives, so that morning
Installs again in cold hope
The air that was yesterday, is what you are

In this supple maze of syntax, things seem over, exhausted, before they begin; "immense hope" turns into "cold hope" in "the air that was yesterday".

Again, a sense of pleasure in natural cycles is slowly withdrawn in "Years of Indiscretion".

Whatever your eye alights on this morning is yours:
Dotted rhythms of colors as they fade to the color,
A gray agate, translucent and firm, with nothing
Beyond its purifying reach. It's all there.
These are things offered to your participation.

These pebbles in a row are the seasons.
This is a house in which you may wish to live.
There are more than any of us to choose from
But each must live its own time.

The experience offered here, beginning in random pleasures of the eye, seems at first to belong to us, to our wishes and choices. And yet "participation" suggests limits to our control, and the ambiguous "its" in the last line shadows independent processes in which we "participate" but do not endure. The grave diction soon removes us into an atmosphere refined and impersonal, our lives roles rather than improvisations. "There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like," Ashbery says of the generalizing screen which stands between us and details of the landscape ("For John Clare"). "Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside—costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street."

In one of his best short poems, "Summer", Ashbery imagines the winter latent in summer branches: "For the time being the shadow is ample / And hardly seen, divided among the twigs of a tree." Winter's poverty emerges later in a full-blown reminiscence of Stevens: "and winter, the twitter / Of cold stars at the pane, that describes with broad gestures / This state of being that is not so big after all". I am struck by the frequency with which Ashbery returns in Double Dream to myths of the seasons, as to photographic negatives, for the true contours governing experience—and what's more important, he is looking not for myths of rebirth but for myths of diminution. In "Fragment" we learn that

Summer was a band of nondescript children
Bordering the picture of winter, which was indistinct
And gray like the sky of a winter afternoon.

In the poem "Summer", "Summer involves going down as a steep flight of steps / To a narrow ledge over the water."

Ashbery takes his title The Double Dream of Spring from de Chirico and so puts us on warning that we are stepping through the looking glass into those deep perspectives and receding landscapes of the mind. He leads us, once we are prepared to follow, to yearned-for, difficult states, free of casual distraction.

To reduce all this to a small variant,
To step free at last, miniscule on the gigantic plateau—
This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.

Does the present exist principally "To release the importance / Of what will always remain invisible?" he asks, with some urgency, in "Fragment". The Double Dream of Spring seems to answer that question in the affirmative. It is Ashbery's most successfully visionary book, however sad its tone. Unlike Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which struggles to include and authenticate the present, Double Dream finds the most striking images in its glimpses of the fables behind our lives, and it most yearns for the state which is both free and death-like, diminished.

The welcoming stuns the heart, iron bells
Crash through the transparent metal of the sky
Each day slowing the method of thought a little
Until oozing sap of touchable mortality, time lost and won.

"Soonest Mended"—so goes the title of one of the best of these poems, illustrating a point we can scarcely grasp until we supply the first half of a proverb which has been mimetically suppressed: "least said; soonest mended". Double Dream calls for tight-lipped irony as well as yearning for visionary release. In "Soonest Mended" comic self-awareness and proverbial wisdom are the ways Ashbery finds to deal with the deposits of history and hazard which determine the course of life:

They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game
Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes
And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last.

It is entirely in keeping with the tone of this poem that we are left uncertain as to whether we are borne out of the stadium triumphant or dead. Or both. Just as, at the end of "Soonest Mended", action is described as

The brave carelessness here is licensed by some certainty that no matter how many mistakes we make, no matter what happens, we do return to the "mooring of starting out". We can also read this as helplessness. The tone is partly elegiac, owning up to the futility of our efforts, with "mooring" sounding as much like death as a new life. The entire poem has this doubleness of feeling. Its long breathy lines shift quickly from one historical hazard to another; it doesn't take long to get from the endangered Angelica of Ariosto and Ingres to Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile. Caught up in a whirligig of historical process, the self has no chance to recover balance, and above all, no conceptual means, no language to do so. Still, the energetic lines breathe the desire to assert ego and vitality. The poem sees the world as so full of bright particulars that no rules of thumb can keep up with them; and so it is fairly bitter about standard patterns of history and learning, sees them only as shaky hypotheses. "Soonest Mended" doesn't yet pretend pleasure in the present, a pleasure Ashbery does experience in later poems; and yet the poem doesn't entirely fall back on dreams of another world. Falling back, not with too much conviction, on the proverbial wisdom of the title, Ashbery has found a middle diction: ready to improvise, yielding to but not swamped by randomness.

…..

I have talked about complementary voices and attitudes in Ashbery's work—alternatives between which "Soonest Mended" seems poised—the ways of concision and copiousness. Before Three Poems Ashbery was strongly attracted to foreshortening, "leaving all out", moving figuratively: discarding things so that we "resemble a taller / Impression of ourselves". It is easy to forget how fierce and compelling that desire was:

Something has happened between that fevered vision and the more relaxed, but still yearning, close of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror": the Parmigianino portrait recedes, virtually assassinated by the poet; it becomes

Both this passage and the one from "Clepsydra" acknowledge a constellation of dreams perhaps more "real" than "real life" ("the certainty that it / Wasn't a dream"). But the version in "Self-Portrait" is wistful, rather than driven: Ashbery seems open to the varieties of experience, registers more pleasurably the ache of the veiled and ineluctable dream. He makes his bow to an ironic view of the visionary self ("the 'it was all a dream' / Syndrome") before returning to a hidden truth behind colloquial language ("the 'all' tells tersely / Enough how it wasn't"). The present disguises the tempting dream behind Parmigianino's portrait, but disguises it in the "radiance" of the Poet's room. No need to choose between the present and the unseen—and in the pressured light of the passing of time, no way to do so.

It is the jumble of everyday pleasures and frustrations that we hear most often in the fluid style of some of the shorter poems of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Even the longer poem "Grand Galop" is almost literally an attempt to keep the poem's accounting powers even with the pace of inner and outer events. Naturally it doesn't succeed. The mind moves in several directions at once, and the poem is partly about the exhaustions and comic waste carried along by the "stream of consciousness":

The custard is setting: meanwhile
I not only have my own history to worry about
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming.

At the start of the poem, the mind moves on ahead of some lists of names (weigela, sloppy joe on bun—the end of the line for Whitman's famous catalogues) and then the poem says we must stop and "wait again". "Nothing takes up its fair share of time". Ashbery calls our attention repeatedly, and with frustration rather than exultation, to the fact that the poem's time is not outside time.

"Grand Galop" also laments the generalizing and pattern-making powers which intervene and block our experience of particulars:

Imperfect and featureless fall with deadpan accuracy in lines which expose the hazards of "aping naturalness". Ashbery's "Man of Words" finds that

All diaries are alike, clear and cold, with
The outlook for continued cold. They are placed
Horizontal, parallel to the earth,
Like the unencumbering dead. Just time to reread this
And the past slips through your fingers, wishing you were there.

Poetry can never be quite quick enough, however grand the "galop", however strong the desire to "communicate something between breaths". This explains some of the qualities of Ashbery's style which trouble readers. What seems strange is not so much what he says as the space between his sentences, the quickness of his transitions. "He" will become "you" or "I" without warning as experiences move close and then farther away, photographs and tapes of themselves. Tenses will shift while the poem refers to itself as part of the past. We feel as if something were missing; we become anxious as if a step had been skipped. So does the poet who, in several of the shorter poems, describes himself as a dazed prologue to someone else's play, or longs for a beautiful apocalypse:

There are moments when Ashbery takes perilous shelter in the world of fable and dream, as in "Hop o' My Thumb", whose speaker, a kind of Bluebeard, imagines possessing his sirens ("The necklace of wishes alive and breathing around your throat") in an atmosphere at once hothouse and "Lost Horizon":

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.

Yet these worlds, while drawing out some gorgeous imaginings, generate as much restlessness as the confusing world of daytime plenty. We may share the moment in "Märchenbilder" when "One of those lovelorn sonatas / For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse". With it goes impatience, the desire to escape, a very rich and suggestive ambivalence. The fairy tales

The third of the exotic poems in this volume, "Scheherazade", suggests what Ashbery is after in such works. He doesn't retell the story of the Sultan and the ideal storyteller, but he does explore with evident interest and desire the condition of that inventive lady. She is part of a world of dry lands, beneath which are rich hidden springs. "An inexhaustible wardrobe has been placed at the disposal / Of each new occurrence." She loves the "colored verbs and adjectives",

But most of all she loved the particles
That transform objects of the same category
Into particular ones, each distinct
Within and apart from its own class.
In all this springing up was no hint
Of a tide, only a pleasant wavering of the air
In which all things seemed present,…

That love of detail and rich ability to cope with it, an experience of the world without anxiety, without being overwhelmed by plenitude, is rarely felt in Self-Portrait, and therefore to be envied in the world of "Scheherazade". Is it available in the randomness of daily life in America? Ashbery has an affectionate eye and an especially affectionate ear for the comic and recalcitrant details of American life: "sloppy joe on bun" stands not too far from the weigela which "does its dusty thing / In fire-hammered air". In "Mixed Feelings" several young girls photographed lounging around a fighter bomber "circa 1942 vintage" summon up a sense of the resistant particulars which tease the imagination. The fading news-shot flirts with the poet's curiosity. He names the girls of that period affectionately—the Ruths and Lindas and Pats and Sheilas. He wants to know their hobbies. "Aw nerts, / One of them might say, this guy's too much for me." Each side has its innings: the girls are imagined as wanting to dump the poet and go off to the garment center for a cup of coffee; the poet, laughing at their "tiny intelligences" for thinking they're in New York, recognizes that their scene is set in California. What's delightful about this poem is the relaxed exchange of imagining mind with imagined objects, a kind of seesaw in which each is given independent play. Though the girls are dismissed, he is fully prepared to encounter them again in some modern airport as "astonishingly young and fresh as when this picture was made".

One of the most engaging things about Ashbery's book is his own susceptibility to American sprawl, while understanding its impossible cost. There is a serious undertone—or is it the main current?—in a poem called "The One Thing That Can Save America".

The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,
And you instantly know what I mean?
What remote orchard reached by winding roads
Hides them? Where are these roots?

Along with a healthy love of quirkiness, Ashbery expresses a bafflement that any individual radiance is ever communicated from one person to another. The "One Thing" that can "Save America" is a very remote and ironic chance that

The poem reaches a political point which it would be oversimplifying, but suggestive, to call "populist".

The enemy, over and over again, is generality. The generalizing habit, he tells us in "All and Some", draws us together "at the place of a bare pedestal. / Too many armies, too many dreams, and that's / It." I don't mean that Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror gets down to cracker-barrel preaching. There is too much self-mockery for that.

Do you remember how we used to gather
The woodruff, the woodruff? But all things
Cannot be emblazoned, but surely many
Can, and those few devoted
By a caprice beyond the majesty

Of time's maw live happy useful lives
Unaware that the universe is a vast incubator.

What I am getting at is that Ashbery's new variety of tone gives him access to many impulses unresolved and frustrated in The Double Dream of Spring.

Whitman's invitation for American poets to loaf and invite their souls can't have had many responses more mysterious, peculiar, searching, and beautiful than Ashbery's recent poems. Where he will go from here there is, to use one of his titles, "no way of knowing". What is important is that Ashbery, who was on speaking terms with both the formalism of the American 1950s and the unbuttoned verse of the 1960s is now bold and beyond them. His three most recent books have explored apparently contradictory impulses—a melancholy withdrawal, and a bewildered, beguiling openness—which stand in provocative tension with one another. Older readers have tended to find the poems "difficult"; younger readers either do not experience that difficulty or see past it, recognizing gestures and a voice that speak directly to them. Perhaps it is reassuring to them: a voice which is honest about its confusions; a voice which lays claim to ravishing visions but doesn't scorn distraction, is in fact prey to it. Ashbery does what all real poets do, and like all innovators, his accents seem both too close and too far from the everyday, not quite what we imagine art to be. He mystifies and demystifies at once.