The Economist, 26th March 2005

King of the Kaleidoscope

There was a time when John Ashbery's obtuse writing style was seen as too strange to be poetry at all. All that interweaving scraps of conversation with literary references, mixing the high-flown and the orotund with the casually demotic, used to give his readers vertigo. Now, though, Mr Ashbery, who will be 78 in July, has become something of a national monument, albeit one which visitors walk around and occasionally, if still a little warily, even glance up at.

This month Mr Ashbery publishes his latest book of poetry. Last November he brought out a collection of selected prose, which included book and film reviews, literary essays and art criticism. Each of these books sheds light upon the other.

The poetry is vintage Ashbery. The ease and the seeming casualness of the voice works in direct opposition to the complexity of the message. Readers are drawn into tiny fragments of storylines which are forever thwarted by the poet's unexpected veerings off in entirely different directions. High and low vocabularies sit together, the homely rubbing shoulders with the sacred. Reading through this collection is a little like Alice's pursuit of the White Rabbit, that respectably dressed creature who was forever hurrying ahead checking his watch and muttering to himself. Mr Ashbery's poetry, too, sometimes seems like private mutterings which are not quite meant to be overheard.

His prose, however, helps us to get beneath the skin of Ashbery the poet in quite fascinating ways. When he writes about other writers and other artists, he seems to be explicating his own work, explaining both what it is and the way it came to be how it is. When he talks about Gertrude Stein, he refers to the world which she creates in her poetry as a counterfeit of reality that is more real than reality itself. This may well be what Mr Ashbery intends in his own work. He has never wanted to describe a world which is common to us all.

Gertrude Stein believed that her work had to mirror the messy complicatedness of life, which swipes at you from all directions. Mr Ashbery feels the same way. When he describes the work of Pierre Reverdy, a French poet, with its overheard fragments of conversation, its dismembered advertising slogans and its generally bizarre collage-like method of proceeding, he could just as easily be describing one of his poems.

Mr Ashbery loves the weird, the outlandish and the ceaselessly digressive in others, and one is led to believe, in himself. The American poet, in writing about Raymond Roussel, another French writer, wondered whether he was a curiosity or a genius. The same could be asked of Mr Ashbery himself.