Parallel Movement of the Hands

All I really knew about John Ashbery's reputation was that of being a relatively "difficult" read, not as transparent as some of the other poets of his generation. I think I have read a few of his shorter works and didn't have a good sense of what I was going to find in this, the first collection of his unpublished writings which were unfinished at the time of his death.

Ashbery found inspiration for these poems in many places - Tom Swift and Hardy Boys novels, adventure movies, piano etudes by Carl Czerny, movie fan books, alongside the writing of other poets and writers. There are five long works here "The History of Photography," "The Art of Finger Dexterity," "Sacred and Profane Dances," "21 Variations on My Room," and "The Kane Richmond Project" have lines of verse and prose poetry sections assembled from these sources collage-style, then reworked over years at the level of individual words and lines in a way that I recognize myself as experimenting with, though on a vastly more daring, more intense level than I have imagined. He is not afraid of fragmenting his sentences with all these different sources seemingly incongruously, content to throw around vast shifts in tone. Concerns of rhythm, rhyme, meter, voice, and diction can be subordinated, requiring the reader to work out what other organizing principles might still remain to hang onto. I could see little bits of interesting word combinations, but was usually unable to figure out whether there was a correct emotional response to the work I was supposed to have. When I read Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus a few months ago I had a different experience, because there the emotional effect was almost always clear even when I found the words confusing. Maybe some of this happened because of the unfinished nature of the poetry, but I suspect that if these had been finished and published at some point, we would have a similar reaction to them too, because that was just the way he conceived of things. The introduction and the end notes (which comprise well over half the book's pages) are invaluable to reassure one that it wasn't simply a matter of having missed something that makes these works hard to read, but instead something intrinsic to the way they were composed.

All in all, I wouldn't say that this is a collection that everyone interested in poetry ought to love. I think when it comes to how much a reader would get out of it, it would make a big difference how much patience and indulgence they bring to the effort. I have been wanting to read Ashbery's collection "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" for a while now and I think this made me more willing to take the plunge.

I received this book in the form of an Advance Reader's Copy through Netgalley so that I could post a review of my impressions.