John Ashbery’s latest book of poems—his twenty-sixth, not counting various compilations and re-issues—is “Breezeway” (Ecco). As with most of Ashbery’s work, its medium is composed partly of language foraged from everyday American speech. The effect is sometimes unnerving, as though somebody had given you your own garbage back as a gift, cheerfully wrapped. Ashbery is nearly eighty-eight; more than ever, his style is a net for the weirdest linguistic flotsam. Few others of his generation would think to put “lemon telenovela” or “texasburger” in a poem, or write these lines: “Thanks / to a snakeskin toupee, my grayish push boots / exhale new patina / prestige. Exeunt the Kardashians.” He has gone farther from literature within literature than any poet alive. His game is to make an intentionally frivolous style express the full range of human feeling, and he remains funnier and better at it, a game he invented, than his many imitators.
It’s common for people to prefer a prior Ashbery, though few can agree on which one. There is the noncompliant poet of “The Tennis Court Oath,” his 1962 book, giddy in his defiance of meaning; the poet of childhood and its longueurs whom we encounter in his seven-hundred-and-thirty-nine-line poem, “The Skaters” (1966); the sublime meditative poet of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1975); the elegist of “Your Name Here” (2000).
But for years now Ashbery has been writing poems like those in “Breezeway,” short lyrics that begin anywhere and end with a shrug, formed from a bricolage of pop-cultural trivia and cliché. They aren’t “closed works,” as he has put it; they are lengths of consciousness that he will “snip off” at random intervals, like licorice cut from a spool:
The style works partly by taking phrases whose contours already exist in the mind—“remnants of super storm Elias,” for example—and substituting near-misses: the verb “to bark down” is almost “to back down” or “to break down,” which I suppose you might do when hit with a storm’s debris; the meaningless adverb “jugularly” might be “jocularly” or “muscularly,” misheard through the storm’s strong winds. You’d rather have a “winch” than a “wench” in a storm: the context implies the former, the tone the latter. These poems conjure a massive mental errata slip made up of what they almost say and nearly mean.
Ashbery’s style prizes such mistakes and misapprehensions, as though looking for the word on the tip of the tongue. William James described consciousness as the “alternation of flights and perchings,” suggesting that we tend to overvalue the “perchings,” the nouns or the primary verbs in a sentence that steal the spotlight from the little words, like “in,” “and,” “but,” “or,” and “of.” It was James, a profound influence on Ashbery, who coined the term “stream of consciousness,” and who insisted on what he called a “reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life.” James’s “flights” and in-between zones find, in “Breezeway,” a breezeway: a structure between structures, a place to rest that is not a resting place, a “long Q & A period” before the big event is adjourned—a period marked, as in the title of one poem, by deliberate “Andante and Filibuster.”
These are late poems, working alertly within the uncommon genre of poems written in extreme old age, a genre they in turn significantly expand. The poems anticipate death but hold it off—they filibuster—by transfiguring it into comic forms. Before I looked it up, I figured that “Auroch” was a parody of the fashionable names hipsters give to their children, but “Seven-Year-Old Auroch Likes This”—while it mentions “a Brooklyn family”—in fact refers to aurochs, an extinct variety of cattle. The bad news is that you’re extinct; the good news is that you’re only seven. Switch this around, and you get Ashbery’s plight: the species carries on while you approach mortality. The feeling of renewal within doom, of gearing up for the last time, colors the poem:
I suppose we will all be faced with the choice of whether to become an “antique mud wrestler,” rotting in the grave, or “a can of soup,” shelved in an urn beside the others in some mini-mart mortuary. Am I reading too much into these lines? Of course; but part of the fun in Ashbery is finding how much narrative sense can be pieced together from these remarkable associative feats, in order to appreciate the surplus above and beyond the story they nearly tell. In the afterlife, maybe we’ll run into all the people who were old when we were young, like the stars of “Masterpiece Theatre”; in the meantime, just trying to speak the language of adolescents is enough to kill a person.
“Breezeway” is partly about the contents of individual memory, so distinct from the official cultural record. It’s “Exeunt the Kardashians” because, like all the effluvia of the current moment, the Kardashians replaced an earlier canon of throwaway cultural artifacts, and will themselves be replaced by newer ones soon.
But this relentless tilling of culture by culture does not erase our individual memories. These poems are little lockboxes for all the forgotten material of an idiosyncratic mind, from Mr. Coffee Nerves to the Ritz Brothers to Klondike Scotty. The irony is that culture now has a means of recalling these forlorn details, in the form of Google and YouTube. For a poet of Ashbery’s predisposition, this nearly miraculous reappearance of things long thought lost and now instantly available to anyone who looks creates a new kind of old age, where, instead of watching the bird feeder, a person can watch the culture, his own past flashing eerily before his eyes.
Now that we can view “The Black Cat” or “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang” on our phones, we forget that, for a person growing up in the nineteen-thirties, seeing a particular film might have seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime event. The movies were especially important if you grew up in a rural outpost like Sodus, New York, where Ashbery spent his childhood; they were more important still if you were gay, since they brought to you, sitting in the dark, an entire palette of suppressed desire masquerading as straight romance. The title of the poem “Queer Subtext” suggests the way that you cannot help but look for one when you’re watching that kind of film, even when confronted with “young, freelancing, orange-juice-in-the-desert, / mythical ladies of China.” But subtexts generally aren’t acknowledged in the titles of poems, or at all; that’s what makes them subtexts. “The Ritz Brothers on Moonlight Bay” plays this kind of game, hiding its secrets in plain sight:
Avalanches are “gay” and oblivion is “playing catch-up” because these features are filtered through the prerogatives of a horny kid, suddenly more eager to “bugger” than to set the “attendance record,” though sex is another kind of attendance, and offers another opportunity to set a “record.” The “long line of attendees” suggests a wake and an orgy, the mourners gathered not “hat in hand” but “cock in hand”—though the phrase could also modify the “I,” whose fantasies govern the passage.
The finest lyrics in this book rank with Ashbery’s best short poems: “Farm Hubbub,” “Supercollider,” “A Breakfast Radish,” the prose poem “Dream of a Rarebit Fiend” (its title taken from a 1906 silent film, long impossible to find, now easily available on YouTube), “Hand with a Picture,” as well as “Listening Tour”:
The speaker, probably dead from the avalanche he described, remembers the minute distinctions and gradations of judgment that the living use to pass the time. It struck me that all of Ashbery’s recent work could be imagined as posthumous, fixated as it is on the revealed beauty of allegedly trivial experiences. Which network you prefer doesn’t matter, until it matters, later, that it once mattered. From his current vantage point, monitoring the past with a gift as big as any American poet has ever controlled, keeping an ear alert for the invigorating ironies of the present, Ashbery must know he is one for the ages.
The final poem in this book, its title quoting Robert Herrick, is “A Sweet Disorder.” It ends with the great question that Keats asked at the end of “Ode to a Nightingale.” Most poets who live into their eighties must occasionally think of Keats, who died at twenty-five, and wonder what that beautiful young man’s old age might have looked like:
