I have criticized John Ashbery so often for what he is, I would like to praise him for what he is not. [1] American poets have always been uncomfortable with a poetry whose designs remain in language. We are a content-minded country, where language is a McCormick reaper, an old manual typewriter, a Frank Lloyd Wright blueprint. Ashbery writes as if language were a medium. With its swooping declensions into the colloquial, its quick-change-artist’s unmasking, his poetry reminds us that the soiled, complacent manner of our poetry —its do-it-yourself Romantic style—is a slavery of our own invention. Ashbery is a tone, not an argument; and his delight in spraying graffiti on every monument has been indulged with deep puckish delight, all the while without his writing a memorable poem except on the rarest occasion.

An Ashbery poem begins in the following way:

A loose and dispiriting
wind took over from the grinding of traffic.
Clouds from the distillery
blotted out the sky. Ocarina sales plummeted.

Believe you me it was a situation
Aladdin’s lamp might have ameliorated. And
       where was I?
Among architecture, magazines, recycled fish,
waiting for the wear and tear
to show up on my chart. Good luck,

bonne chance. Remember me to the zithers
and their friends, the ondes martenot.

Here is the confidence of tone and vagueness of reference, the absurd and irrelevant statement (“Ocarina sales plummeted”), the slangy phrase (what other poet would dare