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PARTISAN REVIEW
more breathtaking feats of equilibrium as he catches consciousness
in its own act : "The performance is worth knives." ("The Ascetic
Sensualists ,"
The Tennis Court Oath).
A review can give the merest
sketch of so prolonged a quest romance. Yet that it must be so con–
sidered, the poems themselves leave no doubt, presenting themselves
as so many stages of pilgrimage: "It is the blankness that succeeds
gaiety, and Everyman must depart/ Out there into stranded night
..." ("The Task") .
Plotting that pilgrimage has been the delight of critics because
Ashbery has been so teasingly metacritical, challenging even as he ac–
knowledges his masters : "And one is left sitting in the yard/ To try to
write poetry/ Using what Wyatt and Surrey left around . .." ("Grand
Galop"), "So I cradle this average violin that knows/ Only forgotten
showtunes, but argues/ The possibility of free declamation
anchored/ To a dull refrain .. . / Our question of a place of origin
hangs/ Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,!In coves with
the water always seeping up, and left/ Our trash, sperm and excre–
ment everywhere , smeared/ On the landscape, to make of us what
we could ." ("Street Musicians"). Inviting to critics as Ashbery can be
in his epistemological and lit/crit ruminations, he finally slips away
into figure and music, eluding the academy: the vision is sensual, il–
logical , and mortal , drenched in subjective time.
It is also intensely private, concerned with the poem-as-action
simulating consciousness : "No,!/ We aren't meaning that anymore
..." "Its flexing is its account" ("On the Towpath") . These flexings
take many forms: prose poems and eight and nine stress lines whose
Jamesian syntax seems 'designed to ward off death, couplets and
quatrains of stunning curtness . The human loves suggested by the
shifting pronouns stand, finally, for a love story of language which
weeps at its own estrangement from its object; the "selves" constituted
are delivered into a state of transparency 'Until no part/ Remains
that is surely you" ("Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror").
Such privacy appears a far cry from Spe'nder's public poetry: it
might seem, at times, as though Ashbery's enterprise were "purely"
linguistic . Yet this
oeuvre,
evasive as it is, has its place in the
polis.
It
takes as its medium language at its most polluted and betrayed, the
landscape of cant, jargon, jingles, and cliches which we, as citizens,
share : "We hold these truths to be self-evident:/ That ostracism,
both political and moral, has/ Its place in the twentieth century
scheme of things . . ." ("Decoy") . It is the landscape Emerson
describes in
Nature:
"The corruption of man is followed by the cor-
