American Book Review

Page 16 American Book Review The best poems in this new selection reproduce something like “the texture of thought itself.” B O O K R e V i e W S Notes oN the Air Jeff Cassvan noTes From The air: seleCTed laTer poems John Ashbery Ecco http://www.harpercollins.com 384 pages; cloth, $34.95 In 1969, John Ashbery began his review of Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems by acknowledging his addiction to her work and registering the hope that the title was an error and that there would be more poems “and at least another Complete Poems.” Although Ashbery’s work has also created a hunger for itself, his addicts need not panic; the more we devour it, the more of it there seems to be. Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, the long-awaited companion volume to Ashbery’s first Selected Poems (1986), covers ten collections of the last twenty years but does not include poems from the most recent, A Worldly Country (2007). And Ashbery’s title for his new selection is telling. The finest of the poems he has chosen are relatively brief lyric variations on his major theme. Ashbery is our great chronicler of the temporality of insight: the impermanence of our realizations and their inevitable reconfigurations. As the heir of Wallace Stevens, he has taken it to heart that we are “thinkers without final thoughts / in an always incipient cosmos.” Here is the opening of “The Big Cloud”: For ages man has labored to put his dreams in order. Look at the result. Once an idea like the correct time is elucidated It must fade or spread. Decay, under the old tree, is noted. That’s why we frame them, try to keep them on a wall, Though it is decreed that the companionable Trooping down to be with us, to partly become us Must continue for them and us to flourish:… Such flourishing, we learn in “Dangerous Moonlight,” is not like the “enharmonics” of the poetry that resides in mere existence, “the kind that shopkeepers and people walking along the street lead,” which is equated here with an “evenness” “that fills them up to whatever brim / is there, and stays, transient, all the days of their lives.” The voice Ashbery constructs in these lines is that of a professor who is dismayed by the leaping around of a little “surgeon-poet” too busy to clarify his response to a muddled interlocutor (“I wish I could help but I’ve a million things to do / and restoring your peace of mind isn’t one of them”). The professor believes the poet’s life is only superficially agitated and that he can “open a drawer of rhetorical footnotes…and in there’d / be something that rhymes with him and his coziness, his following the trail / all the way back to his point of origin.” According to this type of academic , the poet is different because “He sees, and breeds: / otherwise the game isn’t worth the candle to him. He’d as soon rhyme breeze / with breathes” as examine and verify the reality of the objects in our world. This rigid distinction between criticism and poetry, however, is delusive. Like the world of the rhyming professor, the poet’s world is compounded of the perceived and the created. If we grant that passive listening (or seeing) has a conserving power “so it’s really a full-fledged element in the creative process,” then we must also recognize that “as mattering ages, it hardens into something like good luck, / no longer kinetic.” Ashbery’s unrest may often agitate but, as he reminds us in “My Philosophy of Life” (a poem that is worth comparing to the early work “The Instruction Manual” as an indication of the growth of his powers ), “there’s a lot of fun to be had in the gaps between ideas. / That’s what they’re made for!” “Just when I thought there wasn’t room enough / for another thought in my head,” the speaker begins, “I had this great idea….” There is, of course, a poetry in mere existence; the problem is that while “[s]ome people have an idea...