have better

things to do with their lives than count

how many

bets have been lost, and we all know the

birds were here once.

("From Estuaries, From Casinos")

This has been Ashbery's mode for 20-plus years; to be "clearer," it suggests--to be more dominated by the literal--would be false to the process of thinking which Ashbery's lyric normally represents.

Ashbery's meanderers are lost in, or overwhelmed by, crowds--of people, of data, of events, of promises. His speakers suffer from information overload, which leads to an amiable, brooding loneliness, an inability to stay focused on anything. One poem begins, "Tell me more...Actually we're overextended" ("Of Dreams and Dreaming"); many open with floods of pronouns, producing, temporarily, an infinity of possible contexts.

The facts come in too thick and fast for anyone to sort them clearly; this produces a vague sense that all contexts are alike, a contemplation of though itself rather than of its objects. The poet or his stand-ins, as facts overwhelm him, grows wistful, distant, unable to act. Here is the familiar dilemma of the "lonely crowd": "We bake a dozen kinds of muffins every day/yet we are cold and disquieting at heart." ("American Bar") Ashbery's comparatively wide appeal (given the surface "difficulty" of his style) suggests that we do, in fact, feel isolated and overwhelmed; his lyric detachment touches the nerve that "postmodern" novelists from Pynchon on have sought.

These new poems take on a sad and foredoomed search for privacy, for a state of mind (or a physical place) where one can be alone without loneliness, with one's pleasures exempt from examination:

...is there any

Deliverance from all of this? Why yes,

One boy says, we can step for a moment

Out into the hall...

Later, one protests, How did we get here