POETRY
Hotel Lautreamont
by John Ashbery
Knopf, $23.00
John Ashbery's lyric speakers are always trying to go somewhere, or, more often, helplessly already going; they are on trains, on boats, on the run from the law, on neverending strolls. For Ashbery, now, destinations, final accomplishments, are, sometimes, nothing more than shared delusions, worn fictions:
...I am in this street because I was
Going someplace and now, not to be there
is here.
("The Whole is Admirably Composed")
Ashbery's style reflects the situations of his eternal travelers: his sentences wind their way around line and stanza breaks, often avoiding consistent, literal reference, turning the normal finalities or fixedness of cliches and buzzwords into things entirely strange. The poems are always about identifiable states of mind, but scenes and referents often shift, vanish or blur to better reflect the minds which contain them:
All that distance, you ask, to the sun?
Surely no one is going to remember to
climb
where it insists, poking about
in an abstract of everyday phrases? People
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