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ALAN HELMS
telligence and wit, something like Wittgenstein as played by W. C. Fields.
It
sets the level of the whole volume at a height to which few of
Ashbery's contemporaries can aspire.
Ashbery's impressive talents, serving so brilliant and skeptical a
mind, make for a difficult poetry; and it would be condescending to
his accomplishment, as well as disingenuous, to ignore the difficulty.
In his intense explorations into the fictions not only of an essential
self but also of an essential art, Ashbery's discontinuous meditations
often become intensely private, and at times inaccessible. As with earlier
"visionary" poets like Blake and of course the later Stevens, with whom
Ashbery is often linked and from whom he happily steals in a poem
like "Chateau Hardware," it sometimes happens that the world of fa–
miliar objects and relations recedes, "You" designates a somewhat solip–
sistic "I," and everyone and everything else becomes a dimly-perceived
"them" and " it." On these occasions, Ashbery's poetry runs the risk of
vanishing into the imagined world of its own favorite dream, the risk
of consulting only with its own motions, as its ideas and tones constantly
dissolve into and out of one another like a beautiful drift of clouds.
It's as if, sometimes, the poetry were so private and self-sufficient that
it could dispense with the irksome necessity of an audience.
But while these poems
are
private and self-sufficient, at their best
they are much less obscure, less vei led, than some critics have said. More–
over, there is also in Ashbery the insufficiently-remarked power of his
startlingly sudden, simple, moving human clarity. His poetry is made
restlessly alive by virtue of the tough job of "holding on to the hard
earth so as not to get thrown off,/ With an occasional dream, a vision."
It's this relentless pursuit of the "occasional dream," inhabiting a world
so desirable and yet so remote as to require the surrealistic vocabulary
and imagery of dreams, that holds the reader's attention. The
apparently
real world is indeed remote in Ashbery"s poetry, and it is always ready
to "tug" us back to those "respectable purlieus" of the unimagined
ordinary, "this state of being which is not so big after all." But even
that second-best reality contains the possibility of imaginative remove,
"This banality which in the last analysis is our/Most precious pos–
session, because allowing us to/Rise above ourselves." Ashbery reminds
us in the superb "Soonest Mended" that even though these imaginative
flights are rare and fugitive, nevertheless:
\
\
I
I
I
I
\
Night after night this message returns, repeated
In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us,
Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth,
The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them,
Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes
To be without, alone and desperate.
