As Umbrellas Follow Rain
John Ashbery
publisher: Qua Books, 2002
isbn: 0-9708763-0-0
price: $20 (hardcover)
Red Skelton asked me if I had a book coming out. He seemed drowned
in lists of trivia and itching-powder dreams --
you know, the kind that make you wake up
and then sort of fall back asleep again.
His brother was cleaning up after the elephants [...]
[34]
While unambitious for the Nobel-shortlisted author of the pomo answer to The Prelude, each of these 30 short lyrics displays the quite, attentive mastery that has become Ashbery's trademark since his collection April Galleons, when he seemed to put away his avant-garde party suit permanently and adopted the "French zen" persona he credited his old friend, Frank O'Hara, for founding.
One poem has him ruminating nostalgically on the now-extinct "pancake clock" -- "It had tiny Roman numerals embedded in its rim" -- while another, "Random Jottings of an Old Man," starts as a Suess-like spectacle of evicting an unwanted poetry-jotting houseguest who could or could not be the author himself and evolves into a whistful, Proustian revelry of sounds and senses: "The pianola never recovered from the loss." [8]
"Runway," the poem quoted above, is one of the more slapstick of the book, but ends on a note that effectively mingles the ancient metaphor of the sea voyage with some Dada non-sequiturs that, if anything, make you feel a little more comfortable in your own two-sizes off skin:
Soon we were leaving home
forever, to be pitched about on storm-tossed seas,
flagrant to be back amid multiple directions. For though there are some
who can live without compasses, it dissolves all complexity
if one is perpetually in the know.
[34]
If only for this new emotion he's invented -- "flagrant" longing to be perpetually "out of the know" -- Ashbery's new book is worth reading, as it tirelessly bucks the tide and challenges our habits of thinking and feeling.
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