Now that his Collected Poems 1956-1987 are in the Library of America, John Ashbery can rejoice in having become a classic author without having had to die for the privilege.  For all that, much of Ashbery’s recent verse has been essential, and very enjoyable, reading, not because it already feels timeless, but because it feels contemporary.  When Ashbery is on song, there is no poet better attuned to the highs and lows of American language and culture as it is now, no poet better able to be elegant and reflective amidst the daily hubbub.   So, while Ashbery may have a tendency to repeat himself, and while none of the recent books quite match up to the great volumes of the seventies, his books have still had plenty in them to surprise and delight.  There have been poems that are funnier, angrier and more politically pertinent than the Ashbery of old.   There have been welcome new influences, most notably that of James Tate.   There has too been a willingness by Ashbery to chance his arm, as in his forays away from his habitual free verse into more traditional forms.   So one comes to Planisphere with high hopes.

The book’s titles run the A-Z, ‘Alcove’ through to ‘Zymurgy’.  It’s the arrangement of the dictionary, the encyclopaedia or the gazetteer, and, as one would expect, the poems have the vocabulary and range of subject matters to match.  At the same time, received knowledge is merrily subverted, and clichés are flipped – sometimes pointedly, sometimes for amusement’s sake – while idle thoughts are put to work.  There are one or two novelties, such as the not-very-exciting collage of movie titles that is ‘They Knew What They Wanted’, but for the most part we have the sort of free verse trains of thought and twisty tales which are Ashbery’s stock-in-trade.  The collection, though, does have a particular feel.  This is partly a matter of length.  The sentences go for the snappy over the sinuous.  The poems have got briefer too.  Most don’t make it over the page, and only ‘The Winemakes’ runs to three.

This turns out to be a mixed blessing.  On the upside, the poems have a tremendous zip to them, and can travel from one register and range of reference, time or place to another at a stupendous lick.  And, though it is considerably more paratactic than the Ashbery of old, the poetry doesn’t lurch you or make an unattractive clunking sound as it makes the gearchanges, it glides smoothly from one sentence and its world to the next.  In the opening verse of ‘Plywood Years’, for instance, we head from the language of high Christian poetry, to a reflection on it or perhaps a showy contemporary expostulation, then to an old-fashioned colloquial endearment, and then to venerable noun with a gaudy modern referent being used as a verb.   The theme appears to be reflection, narcissism, and Christmas:

Here in the open, love lies apart,

singing to its beads.  How reflective is that?

Don’t be such a goose, love said.

They’ll tinsel you.

To read this sort of poetry is to move in a dazzle.

On the downside, frequently, you aren’t given enough time to step out of the bus and look around before being whisked off again. ‘Plywood Years’ immediately moves on to a language more suited to celebrity survival tales: ‘They came after me and in the end I was a sot.  They said in TV it didn’t matter.  One fallen ice cube is left.’  And the pattern continues down the verses, until you come to wonder if you’ve seen everything there is without seeing anything at all.  The effect is compounded in the really short poems; these seem to scoot off before they’ve even arrived.

The enjoyment in Ashbery has so often been, to use the title one of this collection’s better poems, his ‘Perplexing Ways’, following tangled, hypotactic threads, of thought or sensuous apprehension, perhaps getting lost, then being forced to come back to make more sense of the tangles.  In these crewcut poems, the effect is – to switch metaphors – not that of the tangle but of an incessant channel-hopping.  And, as is the way with channel-hopping, the result often feels affectless, disengaging one’s interest in or care for whatever eye-catching sights flick past.  It is usually possible to construe a theme, allegory or connection that will make a sort of sense of things, but it has to fight, and will often loose to, a sense of pointlessness and disengagement, and one that is usually less satisfying than the perplexity of the truly difficult, the challenge of the surreal or the charm of Edward Lear-like nonsense.

A jaded sense of glut pervades this book – the glut of America, but also the glut in and of Ashbery’s poems.  Yet this isn’t fully interrogated, doesn’t become something which itself can become a matter of strong thought, care and emotion, as it has done in Ashbery in the past.  Instead, it merely provokes a switch from mild interest to mild uninterest and a more or less comfortable anomie.  ‘River of Canoefish’ is at once deft diagnosis and symptom of the problem.  It tells the history of how the canoefish (an Ashberyian invention) have proliferated since their first discovery in 1825.  It is tempting to read the lines as a description of the poems themselves and the lines within them:

Today they are abundant as mackerel, as far as the eye can see,

tumbled, tumescent, tinted all the colors of the rainbow

though not in the same order,

a swelling, scumbled mass, rife with incident

and generally immune to sorrow.

Shall we gather at the river?  On second thought, let’s not.

Faced with so many pretty, unemotional fish, one is tempted to agree.

Ashbery has greater recourse to the tricks of the joke or the comic routine than ever.  In addition to the expected wordplay and whimsy, again and again Ashbery will bait and switch between sentences or over the line break as in: ‘What kind of a nuthouse is this/ Hansel wondered’, ‘The bad news is the ship hasn’t arrived;/ the good news is it hasn’t left yet’.  It’s a technique which can offer an instant hesitation or revaluation of a thought or hand-me-down phrase as well as the odd chuckle.  But, watching old Father John continually stand on his head becomes too routine a routine.  Moreover, despite the trappings, there are fewer good laughs in Planisphere than there have been of late.  Indeed, what is intended as comic can appear simply self-indulgent, as is the case with the prattle over an old b-movie that is ‘The Tower of London’.

The more successful poems in Planisphere tend to be those which keep the focus of attention up for longer than a line or two at a time.  ‘Breathlike’ contemplates an idea ‘like a rut/ made thousands of years ago by one of the first/ wheels as it rolled along’ in a way that seems simpler than Ashbery usually is, but is beautiful and suggestive.  ‘Episode’ successfully turns to sepia tinged memories of the 1930s from the present, with a unified contemporary perspective and musical themes.  ‘Planisphere’ itself is a poem of three paragraphs, each of different but seemingly related views, each long and engaging enough for one to wish to construct a way of seeing all three together. In so doing, it lives up to its title: a planisphere has two disks joined by a pivot, the bottom of which has a startchart, the top of which has an eliptical hole which allows the viewer to see a portion of the night sky, as viewed from a certain time and place, never the whole.

In the end, for all there is to admire, this is a disappointing book: with even the best poems being, by Ashbery’s standards, not particularly impressive.  Though some might be difficult to interpret, I don’t have the sense that the poems have been, one way and another, difficult for Ashbery to write.  Instead, too often they play as diverting bagatelles which make the charge of inconsequentiality, so often levelled unfairly at Ashbery’s work, a harder one to answer satisfactorily. A disappointing John Ashbery book is still better than most others’ triumphs, but that isn’t reason enough for those who aren’t already committed fans or completists to buy it.  Over the last half century, Ashbery has stocked the waters with hundreds of large, beautiful fish.   Go and seek them out. The minnowy canoefish of Planisphere can wait.

John Ashbery, Planisphere, Carcanet Press, 2009.  £12.95.  978-1-847770-89-9

© William Wootten, 2010

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.