The Lyrical Moment

POETRY

Hotel Lautreamont

by John Ashbery

Knopf, $23.00

John Ashbery's lyric speakers are always trying to go somewhere, or, more often, helplessly already going; they are on trains, on boats, on the run from the law, on neverending strolls. For Ashbery, now, destinations, final accomplishments, are, sometimes, nothing more than shared delusions, worn fictions:

...I am in this street because I was

Going someplace and now, not to be there

is here.

("The Whole is Admirably Composed")

Ashbery's style reflects the situations of his eternal travelers: his sentences wind their way around line and stanza breaks, often avoiding consistent, literal reference, turning the normal finalities or fixedness of cliches and buzzwords into things entirely strange. The poems are always about identifiable states of mind, but scenes and referents often shift, vanish or blur to better reflect the minds which contain them:

All that distance, you ask, to the sun?

Surely no one is going to remember to

climb

where it insists, poking about

in an abstract of everyday phrases? People

have better

things to do with their lives than count

how many

bets have been lost, and we all know the

birds were here once.

("From Estuaries, From Casinos")

This has been Ashbery's mode for 20-plus years; to be "clearer," it suggests--to be more dominated by the literal--would be false to the process of thinking which Ashbery's lyric normally represents.

Ashbery's meanderers are lost in, or overwhelmed by, crowds--of people, of data, of events, of promises. His speakers suffer from information overload, which leads to an amiable, brooding loneliness, an inability to stay focused on anything. One poem begins, "Tell me more...Actually we're overextended" ("Of Dreams and Dreaming"); many open with floods of pronouns, producing, temporarily, an infinity of possible contexts.

The facts come in too thick and fast for anyone to sort them clearly; this produces a vague sense that all contexts are alike, a contemplation of though itself rather than of its objects. The poet or his stand-ins, as facts overwhelm him, grows wistful, distant, unable to act. Here is the familiar dilemma of the "lonely crowd": "We bake a dozen kinds of muffins every day/yet we are cold and disquieting at heart." ("American Bar") Ashbery's comparatively wide appeal (given the surface "difficulty" of his style) suggests that we do, in fact, feel isolated and overwhelmed; his lyric detachment touches the nerve that "postmodern" novelists from Pynchon on have sought.

These new poems take on a sad and foredoomed search for privacy, for a state of mind (or a physical place) where one can be alone without loneliness, with one's pleasures exempt from examination:

...is there any

Deliverance from all of this? Why yes,

One boy says, we can step for a moment

Out into the hall...

Later, one protests, How did we get here

This way, unable to stop communicating?

("Brute Image")

This wish for privacy, for restraint, is most moving when the poems that express it are themselves restrained--either metrically, as above, or to two or three tones of voice or registers of diction, or, simply, by being short. As Helen Vendler has noted, the situations and contexts in an Ashbery poem relate not to one another but to the poem's (emotional) center. The poems are often strongest when some structural constraint adds to their centripetal force.

Coexisting with Ashbery's desire for privacy, however, is the desire to continue, to keep talking, to keep communicating, as an exemption from endings or from death. Facing death as others will not, Ashbery's speakers are out of place and quiet at the margins of their crowds, resigned or despairing even as they act out their roles in celebrations:

We were given false information on which

our lives were built, a pier

extending far out into a swollen river.

Now, even those straws are gone.

Tonight the party will be better than ever.

So many mystery guests. And the

rain that sifts

through sobbing trees, that excited skiff...

("On the Empress' Mind")

Sometimes the desire for privacy wins out, and the speakers complain about not being able to leave the world, or announce that they are in fact leaving it. At other times the speakers are too alone, and beg for time or energy to continue traveling/ working/ communicating.

We may expect a poet about to leave the world to wonder whether his work will survive. So he does, sometimes despairingly:

Once forgotten you're as good as dead

anyway. And who would help you now?....

...the thing has been

lived through, the experience sealed.

O what book shall I read

now? for they are all of them new, and

used,

when I write my name on the flyleaf.

Look,

here is another one unread, not written.

Time for you to choose.

These lines (from the final stanza of "It Must Be Sophisticated") blend the anxiety of the poet (will my work ultimately do anything new?) with the anxiety of the reader: have I, in this text, discovered anything new?

That wish for novelty takes its most unambiguous form as a longing, not for novel events, but for the perspective of a child, for whom everything is new: "What keeps us at peace is actually/the sight of an empty cage/and a few children's drawings of it." ("American Bar") Ashbery devotes the last poem in the book (the programmatically simplistic "How to Continue") entirely to this wish to be childlike. In this poem are "new friends to give you advice/ or fall in love with you which is nice...and when it became time to go/then none of them would leave without the other"--the desire for an end both to loneliness and to death here shading over, unconvincingly, into the unalloyed ideal.

Childhood-as-salvation appears frequently, usually to better effect, as in the wistfully comic ```Wild Boys of the Road''': "And there's the happy one,/so little she was excused from most occasions." This kind of praise for childhood as innocence, of course, is only possible for those who have left it entirely behind--if you really are too little to understand, you don't know what (sorrows) you're missing. If there is hope of poetic continuance in Ashbery's cosmology, it is in another, more plausible vision of childhood regained, a vision of childlikeness as a triumph of education. Surely the most hopeful parts of this new book are the poems dominated, not by journeys, parties or cities, but by pedagogy. In poems that begin as mock-lectures, Ashbery writes as listening child and, simultaneously, as the voice of experience:

These days the old man often coincides

with me; his remarks

have something playful and witty about

them, though they do not

hold together...

I'm sure they'll think we're ready now.

We aren't, you know. An icebox grew there

once.

Hand me the chatter and I'll fill the plates

with cookies,

for they can, they must, be passed.

("And Forgetting")

Cookies, crazily, "must" be passed; one must behave as if in a classroom, to be playful and attentive, for the other thing--the end we aren't ready for--will overtake us if we fail to maintain our childlike interests. (Ashbery's most optimistic poems usually take place indoors, in safety, in environments which preclude endlessness.) The same blending of the scholar's voice with the inquiring child's takes over in this book's most triumphant poem, "Notes From the Air":

A yak is a prehistoric cabbage; of that, at

least we may be sure.

But tell us, sages of the solarium, why is that light

still hidden back there among house-plants

and rubber sponges?

For surely the blessed moment arrived at midday

and now, in midafternoon, lamps are lit,

for it is late in the season...

...And where shall we go when we leave?

What tree is bigger

than night that surrounds us, is full of

more things,

fewer paths for the eye and fingers of frost

for the mind,

fruits halved for our despairing instruction, winds

to suck us up? If only the boiler hadn't

exploded one

could summon them, icicles out of the rain,

chairs enough

for everyone to be seated in time for the

lesson to begin.

There is, somewhere, transformative "light" to be discovered; there may be a lesson to be learned; we may be about to learn it; the process of apprehending reality, of learning to live in the world, may be ongoing, like all those journeys on trains and on boats and through forests and out of town, yet it may be neither lonely nor in any bad sense endless. Or it might not be; the childlikeness may be futile.

This path--from overcrowdedness to retreat, through loneliness, the fear of endings, and the search for childhood--is only one of many a reader could take through Hotel Lautreamont; in this dense book of 82 poems, there is a sort of conversation among the various kinds of quatrains--between those with refrains and those without, for example; there is a debate among several poems as to their speaker's putative uniqueness, and whether other people might notice it; there are love poems, and poems "about" architecture, and parodies of newspapers, fashion pages, idle chatter and funeral orations.

Ashbery loves contingency; for him, the lyric moment is the moment before our minds are made up for a particular action or a particular way of seeing. It is not the instant of choice, but the instant before, in which these poems take place. If that denies Hotel Lautreamont the chance to affirm any one view of life or mind, it is, surely, a small price to pay for lines, views, forms, surprises, ideas and indeed whole poems so various, comic, sad, elegant and moving as the many in Ashbery's new book.