Ashbery in The Paris Review

I have a special affection for John Ashbery, who is still putting out great, confounding work as he closes in on eighty. Though deciphering his often obliquely impressionistic poems sometimes leaves me scratching my head, they are just so damn beautiful that it hardly matters. Three Quarks Daily noticed today that the Paris Review has just published four new poems by him; unfortunately, only one is available online.

On Seeing an Old Copy of Vogue on a Chair

For all I know I was meant to be one of those marchers
into a microtonal near-future whose pile has worn away—
the others, whose drab histrionics provoke unease to this day,
so fair, so calm, a gift from cartoon characters I loved.
Alas, the happy ending and the tragic are alike doomed;
better to enter where the door is held open for you
with scarcely a soupçon of complaint, like salt in stew
or polite booing at a concert he took you to.

No longer shall the grasses weave quilts for our revenge
of lying down on, or a faint breeze stir milady's bangs.
What is attested is attested to. To flirt with other thangs,
peacockish, would scare the road away.

Frogs give notice when the swamp backs up, and butterflies
aren't obliged to stay longer than they do.
Look, they're already gone!
And somewhere, somebody's breakfast is on exhibit.

See what I mean? Meghan O'Rourke had a good piece in Slate last month about how to read Ashbery, including this excerpt:

This can make for strange reading. Ashbery becomes a kind of radio transistor through which many different voices, genres, and curious archaeological remains of language filter, so that the poems are like the sound you would hear if you spun through the FM/AM dial without stopping to tune into any one program for long. Sometimes (as you can imagine) this is infuriating. But in the best of Ashbery, the excess verbiage helps make the moments of lyric focus all the more propulsive and startling, like coming across a lost tune as you spin the dial—the sort of thing that briefly brings promise of "a movement out of the dream into its codification." Endings, in particular, are a forte of Ashbery's. Take the beautiful passage that concludes his famous long poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror":

We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.

Many more resources on reading Ashbery can be found here and here, and a decent selection of his poems are available at Bard College's Ashbery Resource Center. Totally worth the time and effort.