Strategies for the War on Culture

Page 20 American Book Review Place continued from previous page is not overly burdened with the hereafter, and there’s only a modest infusion of melancholy, more for the slightly silly marching-on, for little days stacked like dollar cakes on days, well after the immortal soul’s been secured by virtue of its virtuosity. Is this the time to tackle a major oeuvre, or are we banished to the shallows of content, when one hears a companion curse and pick up the load again, coming out into temporary sunshine and the past has waxed benign, one more time? Is this launch definitive? Over and over, he plays greatness in a minor key, keeping in mind there are to be no more major poets, and keeping in mind major poets must now feign their minority, working only in miniature, size being wrought by repetition, by way of the petit exponential .And so there’s this and that, and this again, and that again, and this and this and that and that, French-knots made of the constant doubling of words as rhythm and rhyme (“like ice in ice cream”) and the rhyme of rhyme itself, closing circles stanzas started (“Majesté…résumé”), carrying through a line (“The welterweights, flyweights and bantamweights”), or cropping up sporadically in several stanzas (“it behooves us,” “plant him in our caucus,” “because of us,” “As the season grew serious”), or sewing up severed (“No need for these not to cohabit as long as the horses / can stand it”) and unsevered couplets (“O brackish clouds and dangerous, / the moon is unambiguous”), so nothing’s left to chance (“It was it or us, surely”). Ashbery has said he uses basic rhyme as a way of saying this paltry too is poetry, but the problem is that of course it is, and has been since, well, Ashbery. The New York School (poets) distinguished itself in part from the NewYork School (painters) by declaiming the transcendent detritus (American/ascendent), at least ’til Robert Rauchenberg wound up and let loose with the Coke bottles and stuffed goats, and Andy Warhol pimped it out to maximal effect. But Eliot and Ezra Pound included common-speak in addition to the rhyme-thud and its elegant aside, and Ashbery’s lived in the thinner air for over thirty years, so why chime in now? There’s something too decorative about Ashbery’s latest version of the sofa for the tired businessman. It’s perhaps too easy, and perhaps too true, to discern bell-tolling in A Worldly Country. I’ve been reading these poems as they’ve appeared in recent years in The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, Conjunctions , etc., and they’ve reminded me of Willem de Kooning’s work in the 80s, canvases filled more with negative space or the silence that can sound louder than even the richest cacophony because it is the horror of the sound within, the quiet coming of the quietus.Ashbery, eighty this year, has not lapsed into silence or greater negation, but into clearer articulation , the counterpuntal point of his previous famous obfuscation. Rhyme is happily ubiquitous, and rhyme always handholds reason, if just at the juncture of an ordering system. And order abounds. Throughout these poems, chaos is carefully combed into immutable place, highest in “Phantoum” ’s maxed-out sestina, in which other-worlded dancers spin amidst an infernal flock of goofy-sounding birds, laying eggs that turn to colors that cartoon another world of otherwounded others, the “I” holding, like the dancer’s eye, the spot on the wall saved for the fly. Frankly, there’s a shine here that seems stuck. Ashbery moves lightly, lightly, but with a giant tread, his humility, like his causality, overly practiced. “Mirage control has sealed the borders / with light and the endless diffidence light begets.” Diffidence dangers into indifference, however, and there’s something that begins to chafe, something too decorative about Ashbery’s latest version of the sofa for the tired businessman. Humble in his greatness, which cannot help, like his hallowed within-notes, but escape, genius loosed with the abrupt premeditation of a fart doled in...