Robert Peluso, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Sunday 29th May, 2005

Making the creative life worth living

During the past decade or so, cultural productions of all kinds have come to be seen as simple "content" or "product" by the people in charge of marketing them. Given the extraordinary amounts of time, money and effort our cultural mandarins invest in manufacturing this easily manipulable "content," a book that views artistic creation as "human willpower deploying every means at its disposal to break through to a truer state than the present one" seems quite subversive.

It is; and so it should be, according to John Ashbery, in this collection of essays...Ashbery's book is an important complement to his poetry and a welcome look into the deliberations and dispatches from one of our most valuable poetic voices. At a time when asking permission has become something of a national pastime, his message arrives with all the more urgency.

Edited by Eugene Richie, this beautifully produced volume...is a feast of Ashbery prose. Arranged chronologically, the selections range widely over American and European art forms, particularly literature and the visual arts, of the past four decades. Included are blurbs and prefaces, essays, tributes and biographical sketches, along with notes, introductions, and reviews, even a transcript of a conversation with poet Kenneth Koch.

Although the early works can be burdened by surprisingly uneventful prose, they possess the excitement of Ashbery assembling his central views. By contrast, the later works ring with the clarity of a mission well under control. Each section offers rewards of its own. But if the occasions that produced the writings are diverse, then their motive is remarkably consistent.
Whether he is looking at writers or painters, personal friends or historical figures, Ashbery inquires relentlessly into the meaning, purpose and possibilities of creative expression.

In some ways, a more recent rumination on the origins of his own poetry holds true of almost everything Ashbery says in this new book; it was, he writes, "in part a reaction to the cultivated blandness around us." The statement is revealing because when all is said and done, Ashbery is not so much interested in what art is as what it can do. And when undertaken for the right reasons, it can do quite a lot.

Escaping the pressures of public compliance (his several caustic observations on poetry readings drive home this point) is the job of all substantial art, which, like Ashbery's own best poetry is not about "content"; rather, it is about the process of putting possibilities into play, the drama of the mind at work.

Throughout the collection, whether in his formal analyses or his personal reminiscences, Ashbery argues strenuously for an art that matters, an engaged and active art that points toward the wild and uneasy places of a fully lived life. Transformations, surprises, gaps, drama, things on the brink of existence, these are the ingredients that form, to borrow some of his favorite words from the early writings, the alchemy of potential that marks that higher purpose of genuine artistic effort.

In today's intellectual Legoland, where high praise is earned for creating things (whether poetical or political) according to the instructions, Ashbery's insistence on the risk and drama of the individual mind engaging with the world on its own terms is genuinely revolutionary and perhaps more needed than at any time in recent memory.

The conclusion to his first entry could stand as a fitting motto for this entire collection:

"And if, on laying the book aside, we feel that it is still impossible to accomplish the impossible, we are also left with the conviction that it is the only thing worth trying to do."