Once forgotten you're as good as dead

anyway. And who would help you now?....

...the thing has been

lived through, the experience sealed.

O what book shall I read

now? for they are all of them new, and

used,

when I write my name on the flyleaf.

Look,

here is another one unread, not written.

Time for you to choose.

These lines (from the final stanza of "It Must Be Sophisticated") blend the anxiety of the poet (will my work ultimately do anything new?) with the anxiety of the reader: have I, in this text, discovered anything new?

That wish for novelty takes its most unambiguous form as a longing, not for novel events, but for the perspective of a child, for whom everything is new: "What keeps us at peace is actually/the sight of an empty cage/and a few children's drawings of it." ("American Bar") Ashbery devotes the last poem in the book (the programmatically simplistic "How to Continue") entirely to this wish to be childlike. In this poem are "new friends to give you advice/ or fall in love with you which is nice...and when it became time to go/then none of them would leave without the other"--the desire for an end both to loneliness and to death here shading over, unconvincingly, into the unalloyed ideal.

Childhood-as-salvation appears frequently, usually to better effect, as in the wistfully comic ```Wild Boys of the Road''': "And there's the happy one,/so little she was excused from most occasions." This kind of praise for childhood as innocence, of course, is only possible for those who have left it entirely behind--if you really are too little to understand, you don't know what (sorrows) you're missing. If there is hope of poetic continuance in Ashbery's cosmology, it is in another, more plausible vision of childhood regained, a vision of childlikeness as a triumph of education. Surely the most hopeful parts of this new book are the poems dominated, not by journeys, parties or cities, but by pedagogy. In poems that begin as mock-lectures, Ashbery writes as listening child and, simultaneously, as the voice of experience:

These days the old man often coincides