Verse chronicle June 2007
Let’s do it, let’s fall in luff
On A Worldly Country by John Ashbery, Forty-Five by Frieda Hughes, Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong, Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel, and Selected Poems: Expanded Edition by Robert Lowell.
John Ashbery has long threatened to become a public monument, visited mainly by schoolchildren and pigeons. For half a century, he has pressed the limits of the expected and at last become an expectation itself—if the avant-garde has to die somewhere, become rear-guard at last, it will be in poems like those in A Worldly Country, where promises remain unkept, meaning is never surrendered or redeemed (as worthless as a Confederate bond), and gestures are frozen in medias res.[1] Ashbery has become too self-parodic not to be his own joke (“So why not, indeed, try something new?/ Actually, I can think of a number of reasons./ Wait—suddenly I can’t think of any!”), yet that joke lays waste to a lot of the poetry of the past half-century. If such a curate’s egg loves to be bad, God help us should he ever try to be good.
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