John Ashbery’s 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 wouldn’t even try). In the past decade, as old age has stolen upon him, he has published over nine-hundred pages of poetry—if 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 making much sense at all— Ashbery writes poems that promise everything and deliver nothing. He’s the original bait-and-switch merchant, the prince of Ponzi schemes. Over and over, you’re lured into a poem, following along dutifully in your poetry reader’s way; then the trap door swings open and you’re dumped into a pit of malarkey—or a pile of meringue. And that has been the pleasure.

When Ashbery’s new poems mean, this is the sort of meaning they make:  

Terminal

Didn’t you get my card?
We none of us, you see, knew we were coming
until the bus was actually pulling out of the terminal.
I gazed a little sadly at the rubber of my shoes’
soles, finding it wanting.

I got kind of frenzied after the waiting
had stopped, but now am cool as a suburban garden
in some lost city. When it came time for my speech
I could think of nothing, of course.
I gave a little talk about the onion—how its flavor
inspires us, its shape informs our architecture.
There were so many other things I wanted to say, too,
but, dandified, I couldn’t strut,
couldn’t sit down for all the spit and polish.
Now it’s your turn to say something about the wall
in the garden. It can be anything.

Isn’t this a little, well, sentimental? Isn’t it a little, well, boring? Some of Ashbery’s sweet slippages of meaning are here, but only in the most desultory, attenuated fashion.

Ashbery had, and still has intermittently, a beautiful gift for language—very few poets since Shakespeare have so expanded the working vocabulary of poetry. Ashbery pilfers his words wherever he finds them (he’s been kicked out of most of language’s expensive shops and most of the thrift stores, too), and he carefully developed a style where the dizzying shifts of idiom distracted the reader with sublime little jolts or twitches of words unexpected—the banquet of meaning was indefinitely delayed. At worst this was like starving in a room of plastic fruit, but at best the permissions of the poetry were so delicious you hardly minded that an hour later you couldn’t remember a line (once we had throwaway lines—we have progressed to throwaway poems). You read every poem with hope, and ended most of them feeling swindled —yet how grateful you were, at times, for being swindled.

Ashbery has made virtues of his vices, as all good poets do. In the long run, the run of centuries, the poems that will become familiar will be the ones that make a little sense (though “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” one of the most important poems of the last half-century, is too long to be served up by anthologies). Even if Ashbery may seem a more discreet and less divided poet in a hundred years, he has less matter behind his poetry than anyone but a devout Dadaist. The sentences fall in divine order, though an order superficial to meaning, that ignores our proprieties of meaning.

When a poet has a method, he tends to adhere to it, especially if it discharges and exhausts the imaginative pressure that precedes writing. But the reader can never feel that pressure or that satisfaction. Ashbery at his most irritating, his most frivolous and trivial, is also Ashbery in the fullest command of his talents (he doesn’t have the talents a conventional poet requires). His gifts are impossible to adapt to the fulfillments of garden-variety poetry—he has to keep meaning permanently off balance (Ashbery writes the way Groucho Marx walked). Charming and witty and silly he can be till the cows come home, but he writes as if emotion were written in a language he can’t understand—the language of cows.

Ashbery is still capable of vintage nuttiness (“Today a stoat came to tea/ and that was so nice it almost made me cry”), but now the nuttiness is mixed with passages strangely romantic (“My mistress’ hands are nothing like these,/ collecting silken cords for a day when the wet wind plunges”), or politically wholesome (“In the end it was their tales of warring stampedes/ that finished us off. We could not go them one better/ and they knew it, and put our head on a stamp”—our head?), or simply, sweetly banal:

Once upon a time there were two brothers.
Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,
even. There was I: a stinking adult.

I thought of developing interests
someone might take an interest in. No soap.

However dull I thought Ashbery could be, I never thought he could be dull in the ordinary ways. Bring back the meringue! Bring back the malarkey!

“It is the author’s personal challenge that shame not dictate any facet of subject matter in this volume,” boasted the proofs of Yusef Komunyakaa’s new book. [2] This is what a corporation would call a mission statement. The intention is plain but the words have gone a little feral—without shame, can satire exist, or irony? There are a lot of gods in Talking Dirty to the Gods, so it’s clear why shame is on the poet’s mind—he is not going to let gods define his sins for him.

Komunyakaa, who won a Pulitzer in 1995, is the sort of poet who wears his politics on his sleeve, and he has very long sleeves. His earlier books were highly sentimental examples of contemporary poetic rhetoric, the poems longwinded, personal in the impersonal way confessional poems are, political without the shiver of an against-the-grain idea (when poets are political they’re almost always political in the same way), and crudely and garrulously romantic. In Talking Dirty, Komunyakaa tries to change the terms of that poetry: each of the 132 poems is only four quatrains long, and the lines are short.

These self-imposed limitations have kept Komunyakaa from the worst of his habits. The new poems are condensed, allusive, and bite-sized. He writes of the classical poet Stesichorus:

They say he lost his sight
When he slandered Helen,
Calling Paris a schoolboy
In her faithless embrace.

Seated on the wall of Troy
With King Priam & his cronies,
She wore cloth so thin the dead
Could decipher faults & ruins,

Naming each hero’s downfall.
The poet revised his story
Till she never left Attica,
Till he could almost see

The curves of a breast
Again, befuddled as a man
Cutting off a finger each day
To offer up for sacrifice.

These short lines, in an accentual measure that lacks even a hazy memory of Yeats, have a restraint and purpose the blowsy early poems rarely achieve. The mythical and classical poems are the most suggestive. Komunyakaa loves classics so much it’s sometimes hard to tell which classics they are—one second we’re reading about Lady Xoc (who must be Mayan), the next about Caesar. Some of the poems are so jammed with characters you need a scorecard to keep them apart: one dense passage throws in Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, Betty Boop, Prometheus, and da Vinci—all in seven lines. In the next poem you get Mark, Luke, John, Ezekiel, Paul (so far so good), and then . . . Horus!

It’s hard to dislike a poet who writes odes to maggots or slime mold. There’s an easy ebullience (and an easier virtue) to these poems: if brevity isn’t the soul of wit, it’s the soul of whim. Komunyakaa uses the abbreviated form like a memo book: there are poems about infanticide, sex toys, a castrato, Genet, the plaster cast of a dog at Pompeii, a man who wants to kiss his nipples, and all seven of the deadly sins (sins so short they’re like seven deadly dwarfs). Komunyakaa has a wide-ranging, devil-may-care imagination, but the poems would be better if morals weren’t invisibly attached: it’s odd that a poet who wants to talk dirty has the tongue of a temperance campaigner.

What would poets end up writing, without shame? (Shame is a better editor than most.) When a poet says, in a poem about pets, “After spending/ Seventeen billion on them yearly,/ No wonder they kill babies// & the homeless in their sleep,” the banality of the idea is almost as depressing as the sloppiness of the logic or the language. Them is the pets; they could be masters or pets: words have a way of getting away from Komunyakaa. Here an antecedent goes astray, there the subjunctive is misused, and only the tinniest of tin ears would allow “Turn me inside out like Donne/ Desired God to do with him.” The poet is given to lines like “No longer// Fat on death’s fugacity” or “His right hand slides down/ To her wet sadness” or “daydreaming/ My sperm inside her all afternoon.” That’s as dirty as the talk gets: if Komunyakaa ever did meet a god, he’d be polite as a parson. Though these new poems sometimes have the cool politic eye of contemporary Irish poetry, Komunyakaa loves the whiny, self-conscious confessions that are American as apple pie—the pie American poets now claim as their birthright.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s quirky, meditative version of the Oedipus myth has a musty, housebound air to it. The Throne of Labdacus occurs in slow motion, the motion of another age, where a creaking cart on a dusty road carries King Laius to his death, where pegs are slowly turned in the crossbar of a lyre (more lyres get tuned in this poem than in any poem for two-thousand years). Written in spare free-verse couplets, the poem is lit by the glow of the tidy, delicate images (like Dutch still lifes) at which Schnackenberg has long been a master:

The first warning passing through Thebes—
As small a sound

As a housefly alighting from Persia
And stamping its foot on a mound

Where the palace once was;
As small as a moth chewing thread

In the tyrant’s robe;
As small as the cresting of red

In the rim of an injured eye; as small
As the sound of a human conceived—

The god in Delphi,
Mouthing the words;

Then the god begins tuning the strings
With the squeak of the wooden pegs.

Thus, the fall of empires. The god is Apollo, god of poetry and music, but also god of prophecy. Such images are never casual for this poet, who specializes in scale—the housefly reminds us of a later empire, just across the Aegean from Greece, an empire whose legions were turned back at Marathon. And who fought on those plains but Aeschylus, who survived to write a tragedy —the [3] earliest we know of, though lost—on the tale of Oedipus? The moth might be called one of the accidental beneficiaries of the death of kings (though the moth larva, not the moth, feeds on clothing). The injured eye may be the blinded eye of Oedipus; but the detail of conception would seem odd, even sentimental, if we didn’t recall that Oedipus was conceived in defiance of an oracle.

Our age has tried to ignore the classical myths in the century since Freud took out his notorious patent. Homer is given new translation every year (Homer but never Virgil), yet the Greek plays—closer to us in time, more distant in feeling—come only slowly into English, in part because they remain so alien, so difficult to ferry across the river of translation. Schnackenberg writes in the margins of the myth, refusing to bring us one of those jazzed-up versions of Ovid or Horace or Homer that have become a minor mode of poetic enterprise.

The dust-jacket for The Throne of Labdacus claims that Apollo has been “given the task” of writing the score for Sophocles’s Oedipus (Oedipus Tyrannus, presumably). I was delighted to learn this, because even after two readings I couldn’t puzzle this premise from the poem. Schnackenberg takes the existence of Apollo no more seriously than we do (it’s hard to work up any feeling about Apollo), though it has been convenient for literature to keep in cold storage this alternative and miscellaneous cast of gods, from whom belief has been leached. The Throne of Labdacus is a warning about the nature of fate, which the Greeks believed even the gods had to obey. The Oedipus myth earns its ironies in malfeasance and blindness. The characters act in human ways for human reasons, sometimes compelling and kind— but the results are monstrous. Oedipus is fleeing the oracle when he meets and in ignorance kills his father (the earliest record of road rage); Laius, in one version, is traveling to the oracle to discover the fate of his abandoned, mutilated baby. When the revelations clatter forth years later, when Oedipus realizes he has murdered his father and slept with his mother, his self-blinding is the mirror of crime—but all the characters have been guilty of blindness.

Theirs is the general fate to which particular fates return, the fates from which no god can save us. When people stop worshipping gods, the gods die and are resurrected as symbols—gods are buried in the grave of art. As the myth of Oedipus struggles down the ages, surviving the birth and death of alphabets, the long dark age (after Mycenean civilization collapsed) when writing was forgotten, Schnackenberg finds in its bloody fates the name and nature of poetry. (Who has given Apollo his task? The poet, a god above gods.) The poem, often frustratingly indirect, enacts what it pretends to study—the use of the past to comment on the present, on whatever is most mysterious, and most obdurate, in men and women.

And engraved in miniature, undulating hexameters
In gold leaf so thin it shivers on the palm:

The god plucks a gold leaf from the basket
Of oracles in the temple and reads Drive him away—

Then crumples it into gold foil.

The beauty of the images can’t quite excuse the weary labyrinth of narrative. Schackenberg is a poet of bedazzling grace and technical gift, of mature self-possession (once I called her the best American poet under forty; now she is simply one of the best we have), but this poem has her depths without her passion. It has been conceived in a museum and executed in a library.

Readers who need introduction to the moody richness of her work will want Supernatural Love: Poems 1976–1992, [4] a collection of her earlier books. Schnackenberg has published slowly, rarely in the current mode (she was writing formal verse before the bandwagons were drawn up to the bandbox, though her recent poetry has been in stately free verse). Portraits and Elegies (1982) was an astonishing debut (with Amy Clampitt’s The Kingfisher, the most remarkable of the decade), and the following book, The Lamplit Answer (1985), was even better. A Gilded Lapse of Time (1992), though disliked by some critics, was as brilliant and disturbing as any book in recent American poetry. Schnackenberg’s recent poems, including The Throne of Labdacus, live in the shadow of Stevens, where few American poets are content (they would rather rent space in the shadows of poets much shorter). Her poems wrestle with moral failure not in the light of philosophy but in the darkness after it. The Throne of Labdacus is too clenched and rarefied, but if we are to have a poetry worth the name we must have poets willing to take artistic risks and, occasionally, fail at them.

Like most of the poets in Northern Ireland, Michael Longley has received far less attention than Seamus Heaney—a contemporary of Heaney must feel like an insurance adjuster who writes poems and discovers Wallace Stevens works upstairs. Morally divided, harrowed by history, Longley’s poems have been formed by the same political pressures and sundered inheritance; after a long silence in the Eighties he emerged as a more finely engraved, more emotional poet than a reader of his early work could have predicted. The poems in The Weather in Japan [5] are mostly miniatures (only a dozen of the nearly eighty poems are longer than sonnets), but miniatures of deep texture and fine glaze.

Pale butterwort’s smoky blue colours your eyes:
I thought of this when I tried to put together
Your every feature, but a buzzard distracted me
As it quartered the tree-tops and added its skraik
Or screel to the papery purr of the dragonflies’
Love-flight, and with so much happening overhead
I forgot the pale butterwort there on the ground
Spreading its leaves like a starfish and digesting
Insects that squirm on each adhesive tongue and
Feed the terror in your eyes, your smoky blue eyes.

What might have been Yeatsian romance (Longley often falls hard for Yeats) has been tempered to terror.

The classics have roused themselves in Longley’s recent work; half-a-dozen ancient poets have been absorbed into the vitality of his English, but Homer is the blind presence behind his Greek sense of fatality and necessity. He may find Homer in a doughboy or in a child suckling; Longley has lived through war, a desultory war where the problems are national but the victims local. He has made record—not of the movement of arms that fascinated Herodotus or Xenophon—but of the quiet moments where crimes endure in the evidence of the senses, where the lowly asparagus (which Nazis did not allow the Jews to purchase) is transformed into “mouthwatering fasces.” History is the ordinary that remembers the extraordinary.

Longley’s poems are haunted by graveyards—there are elegies for everything in sight. Wars ancient and modern fuse in the ruptured terrain of World War I, his father’s war, a war with uncomfortable significance for Ireland and Northern Ireland (Protestant and Catholic troops both fought in that war, but Eire sat out the next). Longley’s attention to the rich detail of field and flower—these poems are a field guide to Irish bogs—serves the duties of memory, as if to list each flower were to honor the anonymous dead.

Longley can make a fetish of objects (though no one makes fetishes like Heaney, who has founded a whole religion of observation). His besetting vice is sentiment— for Yeats, sentiment was a besetting virtue; when his influence isn’t harnessed, it goes straight for grandeur. A heavy-hearted poet sometimes wavers in pitch—Longley’s not quite capable of controlling sentiment for aesthetic ends, so it sounds like a false note, half-a-tone to the wrong. The new poems can be tediously domestic (there are a lot of poems about quilts, and by that I mean more than one), murmuring over ideas so small they’re just marginal scrawls, epitaphs hoping to be epigraphs, moody but monotonous (minor poets may not always be monotonous, but a major poet usually has more than one voice). Nevertheless, many of these poems have learned the lessons of war and are hard as resin.

What could turn a constipated poet like Geoffrey Hill, after poems famously given to grimaces, into a poet who gibbers with fury, who can’t reach the page fast enough? Speech! Speech! [6] closely follows The Triumph of Love (1998) and Canaan (1996), completing the development of a voice hoarse with its own angers, its fraught attempts at communication, but jabbering like a maniac. Hill let the cat out of the bag in an interview last spring: the cat’s name is Prozac.

Is style chemical? Can swallowing an amine neurotransmitter change the comprehensions of syntax a life has earned? Can the inner governings of meaning be overthrown by the palace coup of a few neurons? Hill is a poet deeply suspicious of his reader, of the compromises public speech demands. He feels—his criticism is rife with such worries—poetry too readily betrays itself for the reader, and his verse has squeezed most pleasure from its lines. A moral poet doesn’t need to be styptic or mute—think of Auden, brilliant and chatty —but Hill’s poetry is the Calvinist ethic made word: only the elect will labor toward meaning. “Say: coherence/ though not at any price. Would I exchange/ my best gift, say, for new spools of applause . . . ?”

It is difficult to say what Speech! Speech! is about—its subject is the closure of its own style (“You áre/ wantonly obscure,” he says). This brute monologue, addressing shadowy figures offstage, labors through 120 sections of a dozen lines—as many sections as the days of Sodom, the poem helpfully tells us (the reference must be to the Marquis de Sade, not the Bible). That is perhaps the only time the poem is helpful. It is easier to quote than complain.

Get stuck in. Hurdy-gurdy the starter
handle to make backfire. Call monthlies
double-strength stale fleurs du mal. Too close
for comfort | say it, Herr Präsident, weep
lubricant and brimstone, wipe yo’ smile.
COMPETITIVE DEVALUATION—a great find
wasted on pleasantries of intermission.
Say it: licence to silence: say it: me
Tarzan, you | diva of multiple choice,
rode proud on oúr arousal-cárrousel.

It’s not just that you can’t make meaning from these lines; it’s that even if you could you wouldn’t want to. Clusters of colons, accent marks fleeing from Hopkins (Hopkins’s accents are bullying even for a Jesuit), small caps, vertical slants (call them verticules) that sometimes mark an ambiguity but otherwise serve as little more than fancy pauses; Hill is an apprentice vandalizing the print shop.

Typography is the symptom of a failure deeper than font. The mixture of slang (“Get stuck in”), demotic (“wipe yo’ smile”), pop culture (“me/ Tarzan”), and wordplay (“arousal-cárrousel”) practices its instabilities in the terms of unmeaning. You might crank a Model A like a hurdy-gurdy and get backfire. Monthly magazines might be stale and “double-strength” (like a drug?), might be flowers of evil (can flowers be stale?), pathetic inheritors of Baudelaire. The labor of decoding comes at a price higher than the likely benefit.

The obscurities of modernism depended on convincing the reader the writing was worth reading, the tangle of tenses or snarl of syntax was made to be unraveled, that notes did not clatter down the page to no purpose, that ignorance preceded bliss (Eliot said, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”). Hill has taken as subject (and method) the betrayals visited on the artist who would record the violence of our fallen world, who refuses to be complicit with those responsible. His profound and accelerating distrust of the serpent of language (devil and destroyer both—Hill wriggles like poor Laocoön) has made him fend off the reader. This is a poem hedged with razor wire, but the stance is lazy. It’s more difficult to create a language that respects the complication of sense than to descend circle by circle into an Inferno of blitherings. You’re reminded of the language Dante designed for Nimrod— a language no one but devils could understand.

Eliot, who called The Waste Land “a piece of rhythmical grumbling,” presides over this poem from the margins: in the drop into demotic (clumsily handled by Hill), in a waste land no healing of the Fisher King could heal (“collops of sewage,/ wormed ribs jutting through rime”), in the multitude of voices (here the divided dictions of one voice, like a man receiving radio broadcasts through his fillings), in the drive from philosophy to flesh. Hill sees the governing presence as Daumier, the French caricaturist of middle-class pretense—but I’d say the mood is closer to the penny morality of Hogarth and the madhouse ravings of Ezra Pound. Speech! Speech! is too often a series of gabbling instructions, maledictions, blind meditations, public warnings:

Seek modem-demo, memos to dawn broker,
duty-savant. CODEBREAKERS our salvation.
Logos of futures, world-scam, meniscus
brinking, about to break, unbroken. Science
not beyond reason. Ultimate hope. Take,
e.g., Democracy—or try to take it—
as cryptic but convenient acronym.

Most of this is convenient, and all of it cryptic. Hill has serious purpose (much of his poetry is about salvation, and the failure to save), and he’s willing to nail himself to a cross to prove it—but also willing to climb down and display his stigmata in a freak show. If the instinct of speech is hesitant with its own betrayals, poetry can proceed only through silence or obscurity. Hill would like to invent a poetry monks could enjoy (if poems came as hair shirts, Hill would have his own designer label). Refusing to lower yourself to the mob is one thing, sneering at your readers another—it’s not a matter of finding the fit though few when there are no fit and no few.

The obscurity of Hill’s allusions might seem part of the problem, but the allusions here aren’t particularly obscure. Colonel Fajuyi, invoked more than once, is one of a long line of secular saints Hill has paid homage to. The military governor of the Western Region of Nigeria, Fajuyi lost his life during a coup while attempting to protect a guest from assassination. He should remind us of Lot defending the two angels, his guests in Sodom. Among other bits of arcana, Wanhope is from The Knight’s Tale, Sothsegger (“Truthteller”) from the poem once known as Richard the Redeless, Hut Eight where Turing and his men worked to break the naval Enigma code, Daventry and Droitwich the earliest BBC long-wave transmitters. In Speech! Speech! it’s not the allusions but the arguments that have fallen into mystery.

You could dismiss such a poem as a bad joke if there weren’t hints of Hill’s mortal power, of the poetry he refuses to write:

First day of the first week: rain
on perennial ground cover, a sheen
like oil of verdure where the rock shows through;
dark ochre patched more dark, with stubborn glaze;
rough soggy drystone clinging to the fell,
broken by hawthorns.

What can you do when a poet of major gifts refuses to employ them? If that’s a crime, in what court can we punish it? Only the court of contempt. The things that make us admire certain poets can, with only slight alteration, turn them into poets we despair of. How little it took the Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads to become the Wordsworth of Ecclesiastical Sonnets. There is one section in this valedictory poem that justifies the style, by partly refusing the style.

ÁM discomfited | nót nów being able
to take as fact even my own dying—
the apprehension or prospect thereof. My
faux-legalisms | are to be vouched for,
even if unwitnessed, ás are many things
I could indicate, but not show. Whát I see
here | are unfixable fell-gusts | ratching
the cranky chimney-cowls; their smókes blówn
hard dówn or túgged rágged; shade and shine
the chapel wind-vane’s blistery fake gold.
I imagine | yoú see this also: súch
is the flare through memory of desire.

Strip away the nose studs and belly piercings, the antics that make hay of this, and you have the drowned compassion and misty recriminations of the most important poet since Lowell. Hill would be the saint of his phrases, not the sniggering martyr, if he didn’t hate the humiliation of being read. You finish this poem in bewilderment and want to shout, “Author! Author!,” just to have someone to blame.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. Your Name Here, by John Ashbery; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 127 pages, $23. Go back to the text.
2. Talking Dirty to the Gods, by Yusef Komunyakaa; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 134 pages, $23. Go back to the text.
3. The Throne of Labdacus, by Gjertrud Schnackenberg; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 101 pages, $23. Go back to the text.
4. Supernatural Love: Poems 1976–1992, by Gjertrud Schnackenberg; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 278 pages, $19 paper. Go back to the text.
5. The Weather in Japan, by Michael Longley; Wake Forest University Press, 70 pages, $18.95, $9.95 paper. Go back to the text.
6. Speech! Speech!, by Geoffrey Hill; Counterpoint, 63 pages, $23. Go back to the text.

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