Flow Chart: A Poem Ashbery, John

Ashbery invents and reinvents his self in this book-length stream-of-consciousness poem. In manically articulate free verse of long, supple lines, he conjures a secular landscape dotted with shadows of ancient gods, wherein he ferrets out "signs of life in the land of waiting." Bathos sets the mood: Alvin and the Chipmunks, Osiris, Mercury and Argus share common ground. Everyday reality is transmuted by imagination, wish, memory, and by the poet's romantic dialogues with an unnamed significant other. Is the universe a big joke, or is there meaning, perhaps even an organizing principle, behind it? Are free will and predestination reconcilable? How does one move beyond "a lifetime of self-loathing and shallow interests"? Ashbery ( Some Trees ) weaves a haunted, haunting music around these and other big questions, squeezing joy, ennui, despair, hope and a thirst for belonging out of ordinary experience.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ashbery's latest torrent of invention--a book-length meditation-cum-narrative whose true subject may be the process of its own unfolding--comes as close to an epic poem as our postmodern, nonlinear, deconstructed sensibilities will allow. Smoothly and deceptively cast in the syntax of discourse and persuasion, the poem forges on in hot pursuit of the unknowable, challenging us to keep up while simultaneously forcing us to reexamine what we've just read. "We are both part of a living thing now," the poet writes, and to read is to become implicated in the living process of the poem. "The force/ of meaning never extrudes," and Ashbery's sense of play and illusion confounds the scrawny powers of logic. Antecedents are untraceable, created and lost at the moment we are aware of their departures. Flow Chart gives us Ashbery at his most robust and determined.
- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.