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.

Not the smoothness, not the insane clocks on the square,
the scent of manure in the municipal parterre,
not the fabrics, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird,
not the fresh troops that needed freshening up. If it occurred
in real time, it was OK, and if it was time in a novel
that was OK too. From palace and hovel
the great parade flooded avenue and byway
and turnip fields became just another highway.
Leftover bonbons were thrown to the chickens
and geese, who squawked like the very dickens.

This is tosh, but Ashbery’s patented,