Verse chronicle December 2000
Author! author!
On Your Name Here, by John Ashbery; Talking Dirty to the Gods, by Yusef Komunyakaa; The Throne of Labdacus & Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992 by Gjertrud Schnackenberg; The Weather in Japan, by Michael Longley & Speech! Speech!, by Geoffrey Hill.
John Ashberys nonsense is a lot more amusing than most poets sense. What he does well is nearly inimitable, as the mutilated bodies of his imitators show (what he does badly nearly anyone can do, though most poets wouldnt even try). In the past decade, as old age has stolen upon him, he has published over nine-hundred pages of poetryif there were a poetry Olympics, Ashbery would take gold, silver, and bronze, as well as brass, antimony, tin, and lead. He turned seventy-three this year when did poetry have a more boyish septuagenarian? Will Ashbery ever grow up?
In Your Name Here [1] (a witty title that reminds us of all the sneaky things he can do with language), Ashbery has started making sense. This will come as a shock to most readers, because his poetry has lived a long time on the subsidizing strategies of sense without ...
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