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PARTISAN REVIEW
that say it like that you might ask / Dream it like that over landscapes
spotted with cream and vehement / Holes in the ground ...
?"),
the poems
chase their own tails even as they work out frequently ingenious and
touching structures.
Ashbery's Muse, as he identified her in one of the splendid "sonnets"
in
Shadow Train,
is Forward Animation, and his poetry is preeminently a
matter of enigmatic volatility. In his breath-taking version of one of Zeno's
paradoxes, there is always "a more abrupt truth / That preempts ... The
hors d'oeuvres this moment is preparing." One result of his commitment to
this principle is that of our durable contemporary poets he is the hardest to
call up from memory. While on the one hand we might recall a given poem's
general thematic coloration, and on the other hand we will remember many a
poignant phrase, we will not be able to quote him at any length. Not that the
glittering moments are embedded in dull magma. On the contrary, often
enough a whole poem coruscates, as one turns it around and around in a
good morning light. Or we could borrow from his own admiring description of
Gertrude Stein and Antonin Artaud, of whom he once wrote that "just as
each second of life seems to alter the whole of what has gone before, so the
endless process of elaboration which gives the work of these two writers a
texture of bewildering luxuriance - that of a tropical rain-forest of ideas -
seems to obey some rhythmic impulse at the heart of all happening." The
exotic plenitude of this volume is such that we seem already to have arrived
at "a certain day of reckoning," when "Every available jug or receptacle will
be seen to be full to overflowing, / Not with anything useful,just the same old
stuffof imaginative / Speculation."
It
is clearer and clearer that Ashbery is, fitfully, a visionary poet and
that his vision, usually little more than a "glimpse," is of the abundance, the
preciousness, and the mazy involvement of the elements in the world. He
recalls certain novelists, from James (whose own labyrinthine elaborations he
compared to Stein's) through Proust to Carlo Emilio Gadda. Writing of the
latter, Calvino remarks that he "tried all his life to represent the world as a
knot, a tangled skein of yarn; to represent ... the simultaneous presence of
the most disparate elements that converge to determine every event."
These vagarious poems, in which "everything is always becoming a lot of
things," imply a similar tissue of relations, a subject they occasionally address
explicitly - as in "Sighs and Inhibitions," where "When we think we think, or
turn over
in
our sleep, / Someone else's business is boldly attached to this."
The problem of sustaining any inkling of things as a whole is a recur–
rent worry in this volume. For one thing, the maze of the world alters its
nature from moment to moment. "We ride and ride, and still the view comes
on," as Ashbery observes with dismay in "Winter Weather Advisory"; and
we write and write, and "the same old story is different / With each new
telling," as he muses elsewhere. For another thing, the very
extent
of the
