chairs enough

for everyone to be seated in time for the

lesson to begin.

There is, somewhere, transformative "light" to be discovered; there may be a lesson to be learned; we may be about to learn it; the process of apprehending reality, of learning to live in the world, may be ongoing, like all those journeys on trains and on boats and through forests and out of town, yet it may be neither lonely nor in any bad sense endless. Or it might not be; the childlikeness may be futile.

This path--from overcrowdedness to retreat, through loneliness, the fear of endings, and the search for childhood--is only one of many a reader could take through Hotel Lautreamont; in this dense book of 82 poems, there is a sort of conversation among the various kinds of quatrains--between those with refrains and those without, for example; there is a debate among several poems as to their speaker's putative uniqueness, and whether other people might notice it; there are love poems, and poems "about" architecture, and parodies of newspapers, fashion pages, idle chatter and funeral orations.

Ashbery loves contingency; for him, the lyric moment is the moment before our minds are made up for a particular action or a particular way of seeing. It is not the instant of choice, but the instant before, in which these poems take place. If that denies Hotel Lautreamont the chance to affirm any one view of life or mind, it is, surely, a small price to pay for lines, views, forms, surprises, ideas and indeed whole poems so various, comic, sad, elegant and moving as the many in Ashbery's new book.