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— Oswald Spengler 

John Ashbery is the only significant poet to have followed Wallace Stevens in devoting his poetry almost entirely to writing, about the poetic act itself. Everything in Ashbery's poetry is 'meta-', and can only be understood, or (as theorists would say) naturalized, in a meta-' fashion. Raised to a seeming-classic status by the post-structuralist tide of there-is-nothing-outside-the-text nihilism, Ashbery's work is probably the supreme exemplification in English-language verse of what Perry Anderson in a critique of the whole of post-structuralism once called 'the magalomania of the signifier'. In the rambling and (as Ashbery has himself claimed) senseless thought process which is an Ashbery poem, events or objects sometimes appear, images are run past us, but they are self-analytically undermined and dissolved away again before there is any risk of them creating any durable poetic meanings. 

In Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, often thought to be his most accessible volume, Ashbery has a poem called 'A Man of Words'. It touches obliquely, and more disparagingly than Wallace Stevens would ever have touched, on the philosophically marginalized situation of the 'man of words' in the modern world. It begins: 

His case inspires interest 

But little sympathy; it is smaller 

Than at first appeared. 

Ashbery's own 'case' has inspired far more than interest, and his frequent air of self-deprecation and almost universal air of traditional-poetry-deprecation have been seen by many readers as signs of a truly modern — in effect quintessentially post-modernist — recognition of the relativistic plight we are all in. One of the things that can make Ashbery readable, at least in his less self-communingly knotted-up poems, is the easy way he combines an intellectual awareness of the various slippings and slidings of our perceptions with what looks like a down-to-earth sincerity and a range of dictions (the epistemological and the New York demotic rub shoulders together) designed to express those slippings and slidings in natural-seeming words. Some of his longer pieces, however philosophically involuted, however weighed down by intellectual trivia, however lacking in all of the traditional ways of using images to build poetic meanings, can still be understood on a line-by-line basis without very much difficulty; nearly all of his poems, whatever their final intelligibility, retain something of the casual charm of easy-goingly self-reflexive prose. It is only after reading him in extenso that one might begin to wonder whether one is reading the same restlessly self-interrogating poem over and over again. With the arrival of Ashbery, the 'men of words' tradition of American poetry abandoned entirely the grand- manner diction of a poet like Stevens while carrying all of Stevens's philosophical haverings and temporizings into the thought-by-thought structure of individual poems: 

Or: 

As indeed it should, since Ashbery's entire philosophical underpinning, and what makes him bard of those post- structuralist theorists who have embraced the Derridean dictum about there being nothing outside the text and who would like to have a poet to prove it to them, is a fabric of error. Ashbery has been spoken of, apparently complimentarily, as having a 'sense of life's ability to escape all imposed formulations' (see his entry in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English). It is hard to see how any poet nowadays could get into business at all without possessing such a sense. To have such a sense is a part of the modern awareness, and it has been a part of the subconscious awareness of all artists at all times and what made them embark on their artistic endeavours in the first place. To have a `sense of life's ability to escape all imposed formulations' is to be aware of the challenge that faces all art and all living; it is not just an awareness of some newly discovered and uniquely modern state of affairs that the artist must spend all his time discoursing to us about. To write poetry as though life's ability to elude our formulations meant that there is nothing to do but endlessly to discuss or to illustrate this ability — rather than actually budding to and trying to arrive at some better formulations — is to surrender the whole artistic enterprise at the start. It is rare for an Ashbery poem to give us any actual semblance of the experience of thinking, as opposed to a merely disembodied and almost random stringing-together of freely-associated thoughts. (The dis- embodiedness of Ashbery's within-poem thought processes sometimes seems very close to the disembodiedness of the psycho- analytic patient's free-associating on a couch, and such processes are not, for the most part, a revealing or exemplary enough mode of human experiencing to provide good material for poetry. Two or three such poems, believably rooted in their speaker's situation, might be enough for any normally considerate poet's output.) The 'snapped-off perceptions of things' that Ashbery self- confessedly 'braids too much' lead us nowhere except towards the abandoning of the whole human enterprise of making life intelligible. The delusions of post-structuralism's inaccessibility-of-truth, realism-is-illusory, names-are-a-pretence, there-is-nothing- outside-the-text theories can only be partly to blame for Ashbery's poetic style (and much of his work was written before such theories got going anyway): the real — and it is an existential and spiritual — responsibility must rest with the poet himself and his own uprooted psyche. 

(The reader might try making grammatically appropriate substitutions at random here and noting their effects on the poem). Ashbery has now to all intents and purposes gone beyond subject matter altogether: having gone through talking about the experience of talking about what it is that he is having thoughts or feelings about (one almost feels nostalgic for his earlier nostalgia for real subjects), he has now virtually eliminated the last, thin traces of experientiality from his work. In Wakefulness — not a state that the reading of this book is very likely to induce to anyone — no one is there, nothing much is happening there, and there is no there there anyway. Always careful how he says things — in many of his poems, even whole books, he shows himself a competent formal technician — Ashbery is now very carefully saying almost nothing at all. 

Ashbery has claimed of his poetry, perhaps in obilque recognition of the spiritual challenge that more traditional readers might accuse him of evading, that 'it is playful and im- provisational, it doesn't preach'. This is virtually to imply that the only alternative to a playful and improvisational poetry must be a poetry that preaches. The fatal poetic problem with Ashbery is not that his poetry does not preach, or even that it says almost nothing at all, except for a few things about how difficult it is to say things: it is that it shows us nothing either. There are virtually no aesthetic semblances of any of our ways of experiencing, no revelations of how things are; nothing is presented — unless very rarely the experience of the breakdown of meaning, which is only one kind of human experiencing and hardly one uniquely worth focusing an entire poetry on. Is Ashbery's poetry really just a `different kind' of poetry, it might (with some desperation) be asked — as allegory, say, is just a 'different kind' of poetry? Only if the warning notices, trial excavations, mud-slides, earth-moving equipment, multi-coloured safety flags, and NO THROUGH ROAD signs that we may find ourselves encountering on a major highway are really just a different kind of road.