And the stars were shining seems to be a minor Ashberry's work, but don't be confused...a great poet is always great. This book is especially delightful. Ashberry plays with the dazed reader making a strange and confusing mixture of images and sounds (something like watching "Lost Highway", by David Lynch), painting everything with his particular sense of humour and his vision of life. A bit flamboyant, but completely great. To miss it is a crime, as every vulgarity.

And The Stars Were Shining By John Ashbery

John Ashbery's penchant for the long, discursively philosophic poem has sometimes served to distract critical attention from his mastery of intensely conceived short lyrics.

We all have a favourite Ashbery flavour, and mine is the gin-fizz dynamic at work in the relative brevity displayed by the best of the shorter poems gathered in this collection. In fact, I would argue that you would have to go back to Houseboat Days (1977), to find a comparable success in terms of Ashbery's ability to compress poetic experience into an accommodatingly resonant tension-field. With Ashbery's method there is always the danger that expansiveness contributes to fluctuating air-pockets in the poem's flight-path, and the reader's encounter with inconsistently sustained epics like Flow Chart is one of locating pivotal wobble in the stratosphere of Ashbery's poetics.

Ashbery's lyric concerns are invariably with retrieving the moment from unrecorded notice. It's the transient nature of experience underscored by a deep sense of loss which fires Ashbery into attempting to arrest whatever proves meaningful to his impulsive plot. As he writes in 'The Improvement':

"We never live long enough in our lives/ to know what today is like./ Shards, smiling beaches,/ abandon us somehow even as we converse with them./ And the leopard is transparent, like iced tea."

Ashbery's acute sense of being disinherited from the world of things, and the poem is an attempt to establish discourse with this aesthetic, has him incessantly preoccupied with chasing meaning out of assumed appearances. His way is to puzzle worry into potential existential crisis:

"Nothing seems strong enough for/ this life to manage, that sees beyond/ into particles forming some kind of entity -/ So we get dressed kindly, crazy at the moment./ A life of afterwords begins."

('The Improvement')

Ashbery's disorientated, upended approach to his subject matter imparts the feel of innovative modernism to his work. And while his poetry is personal by way of its predominantly quiet disclosures: 'I never get hangovers until late afternoon/ and then it's like a souvenir, an arrangement,' he is never confessional in the manner of Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath. Ashbery's quiet presence permeates, but never crowds his lyrics. Some of the finest poems to be found in this collection, 'Works On Paper I,' 'Ghost Riders Of The Moon,' 'Free Nail Polish,' 'Local Time,' 'My Gold Chain' succeed by playing enigmatic narrative against specific visual imagery. In the best of Ashbery the abstract and the concrete unite to impart allusive mystery to the poem. The ending of 'Works On Paper I' perfectly demonstrates what Ashbery does best.

"Those who wish to remain naked are coaxed out of laughter/ with tea and nobody's nose is to the grindstone/ anymore, I bet, and you can figure out these shivering trees./ But the owner of the bookstore know that the flea was blown/ out of all proportion,/ with September steps to go down in passing/ before the tremendous dogs are unleased."

Here the juxtaposition of the disarmingly casual and the lyrically authoritative combine to create Ashbery's inimitable tang of urbane poetry, a genre he orchestrates with consummate ease throughout this sparkling collection. If by comparison the long title poem suffers from a characteristic lack of focus, then the poem's obliqueness and obscurity are counterpointed by Ashbery's inexhaustibly pitched poetic eloquence.

JEREMY REED

There is a great deal of humor in this work. Ashbery is a very droll writer.

Let's assume you're browsing this page because you have at least some familiarity with John Ashbery's poetry. Let's assume you're familiar with the classic short poems represented well in the Selected Poems (you should be), perhaps the long poems like "the Skaters" or "A Wave" or "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (read them too). Once that reading is behind you, and especially if you've read the three long pieces in Three Poems, Flow Chart is a necessary next adventure.Before I read Flow Chart, I think I carried a prejudice against long poems, and given Ashbery's tendency to difficulty, the prospect of reading Flow Chart was exactly my idea of laborious reading. But once I began my fears and prejudices disappeared. Though I was already a fan of Ashbery, and had read and reread most of his work, Flow Chart was soon tops on my list of satisfying reading experiences. And exactly that term, "experience", is what distinguishes this Book above mere books, separates this Poem from American poetry. This is a book one reads to experience oneself reading, to participate, so to speak, as a reader inside what must be called a work of art.By my measure, this is Ashbery at his very finest, freest, most exuberant, and most melancholy. Don't let the length dissuade you from reading this poem. Give yourself some time, allow yourself to take it in slowly, over the course of a week or two. You might find yourself, as I did, finishing a first reading and immediately scheduling the next weekend to enjoy it again in a single sitting.

Raymond Roussel was an eccentric French writer who was born in 1877 and apparently committed suicide in 1933. His best known works of those translated into English are his novels Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa. Roussel wrote novels, tried to adapt them to the stage, and then tried to write a play for the stage. The audience responded to the play by throwing things and yelling at each other. Roussel, who never experienced anything like widespread acclaim, has nonetheless influenced French literature. Eventually, he was to gain the support of the surrealists. Decades after his death, he is remembered fondly by the OuLiPo - a group of Paris-based writers devoted to exploring new experimental literary forms. Two American poets - John Ashbery and Harry Mathews (also a member of the OuLiPo) - hold him in high esteem and here the two of them offer new translations of some of Roussel's works. How I Wrote Certain of my Books is the title of this collection and also the title of an essay by Roussel to explain how he wrote the two novels I mentioned. The rest of the collection includes an excellent introduction and biography of Roussel by John Ashbery, the first chapter of each of the two novels, the fifth act of one of Roussel's plays, the third canto of his poem "New Impressions of Africa," and the notes to serve as an outline for another novel Roussel apparently never wrote. Roussel's novels are among what I consider the great untranslatable works of the twentieth century. Much of the imagery and plot detail are bizarre flowerings of imaginative detail rooted in French puns. When this is translated, one gets only the strange details, but none of the phonetic basis underlying them. Like a joke that isn't funny, or a sonnet which has been paraphrased so that it no longer rhymes. The canto of the poem "New Impressions of Africa" was my favorite part of the collection. I've never read a poem with nested parentheses and lengthy footnotes before. The translation preserves aspects of the rhyme and meter, even throughout the footnotes. Although this volume doesn't contain the entire poem, it does contain all of the 59 drawings that originally accompanied it. But these drawings are not only not by Roussel, they aren't even interesting. In an introduction, which explains how Roussel had sent 59 captions to a hack artist to make mundane sketches to compliment his bizarre poem, Salvador Dali is quoted as saying that, seen in the context of the poem, the drawings "shed their banality and become metaphysical." Fine, but here the drawings are not only not shown in the context of the poem, the entire poem isn't even presented. I can save you some time by telling you right now that the drawings numbered 40-48 accompany the poem on pages 97-103. Read How I Wrote Certain of my Books as an introduction to one of France's literary madmen, and for an exceedingly clear description of how Raymond Roussel wrote certain of his books. To anyone who is curious for a taste, but not a full course, of Roussel's writing, this volume will serve well. Should you be utterly taken by the writing, however, you may be dismayed that few of the works are represented in their entirety. You will never get to find out how the novels end or how the play begins. At its best, How I Wrote Certain of My Books will send to your library looking for more.

It's a tragedy of Rousselian proportions that this is the only easily-acquired text of the Master in print... Roussel was, after all, the subject of Michel Foucault's very first (& to me his only readable!) book DEATH & THE LABYRINTH (a perfect companion to this collection/introduction). The present volume is essential to complete one's appreciation of the 'novels' LOCUS SOLUS & IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA, should they drop into your lucky lap...you see, I too find myself thoroughly intrigued/mesmerized/in awe of the strange achievement of this genius-nut, inspirer as well of Breton, Cocteau, Dali, Leiris, Duchamp especially, Robbe-Grillet coitainly, Perec indubitably; but these dudes don't hold a candle to the lucid lunacy, fertile-beyond-belief imagination, and quaint language perfectly suited to express the convoluted twisted-mythic enigmatic obsessions of RR... who felt the Star on his forehead while but a teen, which Star had begun to glow on high when he was found...

Having listened to poets like T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, and Ted Hughes give excellent readings of their work, the reinditions offered on this tape seem as banal as many of the poems, I'm sorry to say. Too many of the poets read with an awful, pseudo-low-brow academic accent- an exaggeration of the way Berryman and Lowell spoke- infusing flat poems with bland, artifical emotion. Listening to many of the poets on this tape read from other poets is disheartening: comparing Seamus Heaney reading Ted Hughes to Ted Hughes reading Ted Hughes, Frank Bidart reading Robert Lowell to Robert Lowell reading Robert Lowell, or (I can't remember who) reading John Berryman to John Berryman reading John Berryman highlights how mediocre most of the readings on this tape are. Nonetheless, I'd suppose that listening to poets read their work offers us an idea of how they'd like their work to be read, so this tape is an invaluable resource for connoiseurs of contemporary poetry- and, of course, many of the poems on this tape are quite good, although I think very few, if any, are extraordinary, and the quality of the readings is almost uniformly uninspiring. I would recommend instead tapes of T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, etc., or tapes of young up-and-coming poets who put more energy and intelligence into their poetry and their oratory.

This is an excellent compilation of poets reading their own work and the work of others not in attendance at this gala event. I learned much about poets who were unfamiliar to me, like Thom Gunn. The poems selected are great as are those of the poets assigned to each of the readers. Seamus Heaney is, as always, in great voice. Listen to "keeping going" and you will see what I mean.

_Wonder Tales_ is a small and expensive collection of French courtly fairy tales, most written by upper-class women. Their themes seem frivolous now, but the stories were actually quite subversive for their time; in them, the authors promoted female autonomy, true love, and marriage by choice rather than by arrangement. (The authors themselves often were the victims of terrible arranged marriages. In these stories they dream of a better world.)

The stories are not the succinct tales we are used to; they can be byzantine and winding. Just when you think it's time for "happily ever after", in comes another twist. But the tales are for the most part both funny and romantic, and I enjoyed them.

This might even be considered essential reading, if you're reading _From the Beast to the Blonde_. As I read Warner's scholarly study, I kept wishing I had access to the obscure stories she was constantly quoting. When I found this, it helped a great deal; I only wish _Wonder Tales_was sold in paperback as a companion volume to Beast/Blonde.

As one of the editorial reviewers comments, this book is intended for gift-giving. It is a charming, diminutive hardcover containing six French fairy tales from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, translated by some prestigious modern writers and translators, with an introduction, biographical notes, and bibliography by Marina Warner. These tales (and those in future volumes which Warner says she hopes to bring out) are especially interesting to read after Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde, which examines the French salon society and its members (mostly women) who used the writing of these tales as a form of social protest as well as entertainment and even escape. But three of these six tales, as well as a number of others from the same milieu, appear in translations by Jack Zipes in his inexpensive paperback "Beauty and the Beast and Other Classic French Fairy Tales." If you are interested in a broad selection of these tales, including some famous ones like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Sleeping Beauty" (complete with Perrault's violent episodes that are often left out in children's versions), Zipes is a good choice. The texts are there, along with some scholarly introductions and biographies of the authors of the tales in a mass-market format.

Warner's book is more aesthetically pleasing. Its elegant, whimsical design and first-class literary translations invite the reader to escape into stories that are part magical fantasy and part social commentary. These tales are longer than the usual children's fairy stories, and they tend to have more elaborate adventures and quite worldly descriptions of clothing, decoration, and other amenities of aristocratic life. Most of the plots resolve themselves through the intervention of fairies, whose actions may seem unmotivated (deciding not to help a heroine on one page and then suddenly turning up to save her from being eaten by an ogre a couple pages later). I personally find this easier to take in this charming little hardcover than in the no-nonsense mass-market format of the Zipes collection.

Warner's book is also significant in that, in addition to the three tales that overlap with Zipes, it contains some genuine rarities in the genre. According to Warner's introduction, two of the six Wonder Tales, "Bearskin" and "Starlite", have never been translated into English before, and Charles Perrault's tale, "The Counterfeit Marquise," has never been included in previous Perrault collections (perhaps because, having no supernatural characters, and taking cross-dressing as its theme, it would not be considered appropriate for the juvenile audience that these collections have historically targeted).

Regarding the translations themselves, I compared at random some paragraphs in the stories that appear in both books. The quality of the prose is not miles apart, since both books strive for accuracy in translation. Nevertheless, if you admire the writing of John Ashbery, Gilbert Adair, Terence Cave, Ranjit Bolt, and/or A. S. Byatt, that could be another reason to choose this book.

An all-poetry anthology, featuring the very best established and up-and-coming contemporary American writers. CONJUNCTIONS:35 American Poetry: States of the Art

FALL, 2000 Edited by Bradford Morrow

Table of contents

John Ashbery, Four Poems

Lyn Hejinian, Two Poems

Myung Mi Kim, Siege Document

Brenda Coultas, Three Poems

Arthur Sze, Quipu

Jorie Graham, Six Poems

Michael Palmer, Three Poems

Mark McMorris, Reef: Shadow of Green

Susan Wheeler, Each's Cot An Altar Then

Ann Lauterbach, Three Poems

Clark Coolidge, Arc of His Slow Demeanors

Gustaf Sobin, Two Poems

Alice Notley, Four Poems

Tessa Rumsey, The Expansion of the Self

Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, Two Landscapes

Forrest Gander, Voiced Stops

Tan Lin, Ambient Stylistics

Marjorie Welish, Delight Instruct

Laynie Browne, Roseate, Points of Gold

James Tate, Two Poems

Honor Moore, Four Poems

Leslie Scalapino, From The Tango

Bin Ramke, Gravity & Levity

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Two Poems

Charles Bernstein, Reading Red

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Charles Bernstein, A Dialogue

Rosmarie Waldrop, Five Poems

Martine Bellen, Two Poems

Peter Sacks, Five Poems

Reginald Shepherd, Two Poems

Barbara Guest, Two Poems

Donald Revell, Two Poems for the Seventeenth Century

Paul Hoover, Resemblance

Elaine Equi, Five Poems

Norma Cole, Conjunctions

Jena Osman, Boxing Captions

Ron Silliman, Fubar Clus

John Yau, Three Movie Poems

Melanie Neilson, Two Poems

Robert Kelly, Orion: Opening the Seals

Nathaniel Mackey, Two Poems

C.D. Wright, From One Big Self

Peter Gizzi, Fin Amor

Carol Moldaw, Festina Lente

Charles Norton, Five Poems

Robert Creeley, Supper

Brenda Shaughnessy, Three Poems

Malinda Markham, Four Poems

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow

Nathaniel Tarn, Two Poems

Peter Cole, Proverbial Drawing

Fanny Howe, Splinter

Anne Tardos, Four Plus One K

Robert Tejada, Four Poems

Andrew Mossin, The Forest

Elizabeth Willis, Two Poems

David Shapiro, Two Poems

Camille Guthrie, At the Fountain

Susan Howe, From Preterient

Cole Swensen, Seven Hands

Susan Howe and Cole Swensen, A Dialogue

Keith Waldrop, A Vanity

Will Alexander, Fishing as Impenetrable Stray

Juliana Spahr, Blood Sonnets

Jerome Sala, Two Poems

Leonard Schwartz, Ecstatic Persistence

Catherine Imbriglio, Three Poems

Vincent Katz, Two Poems

Thalia Field, Land at Church City

John Taggart, Not Egypt

Renee Gladman, The Interrogation

Laura Moriarty, Seven Poems

Kevin Young, Film Noir

Jackson Mac Low, Five Stein Poems

Rae Armantrout, Four Poems

Anselm Hollo, Guests of Space

As daring as Ulysses Grant, as timorous as Tennyson, as bold as Beddoes, this tepid imbroglio of lukewarm vignettes, this rebarbative hymnal of blithe spirituals, never ceases to fascinate the "hypocrite lecteur" -- until, of course, it does.

Who would think that two experimental poets could write a comic novel without stylistic pretensions? There's nothing profound here, just a quick read with plenty of laughs. The title conveys the substance fairly well: Schuyler and Ashbery have created a cast of middle- to upper-class fools for whom they have little respect. This could, of course, be fairly tiresome ("aren't the bourgeosie so silly!"), if it weren't for the authors' keen sense of humor. Think of this as a detailed pitch for a good Woody Allen movie, or a Firbank novel for the mid-twentieth century.

Shoptaw has done an enormous amount of research for this book; information here about Ashbery's biography, publication history, and manuscript materials makes the book invaluable. It's impressively comprehensive for a study of a living writer.

The weak part is the argument that Ashbery's elusiveness derives from his homosexuality; Shoptaw seems not to have considered that most gay poets don't write this way. Also, it's hard not to wince at his description of Ashbery's style as "homotextual."

The range of styles surveilled in this anthology, chanted aloud, taps on the eardrum like some snooty, kibitzing skip-rope rhyme: from Flemish primitivism to Blakean theosophy to Japanese photography to Bulgarian art to Barbizon landscapes to Italian baroque to Francis Bacon's death-empty Existenz.... (And skip, and weave, and jump, and sashay.) Ashbery's weekly obligation to grind out art-gallery reportage takes the edge off his game (there is little zing and panache in these articles, surely not the Ashbery of 'Convex Mirror' or 'Wet Casements' or 'Tapestry'), but we can sense the poet assembling secret stanzas beneath the prim, deadpan facade, the lyrical footnoting of each gallery-critique with a submerged kabbalah of vision-forming events. Many of the articles seem like secret rehearsals for the sinuous liquid-measures that would shoal in on the melt-waters of Ashbery's passing-strange future verse odysseys. Being forced to *respond* to such a barrage of multicultural artworks, consistently and intelligently, may have been the excitant to desert-thirst Ashbery needed, an entry-burn to some exotic, chimerical, Parisian boot-camp of the Critical Eye set to hone his assimilative powers.

Here, his tone is light and disaffected, rinsed clean of resentment, of snooty ire (of polemic, in short). He smiles without mirth. He muses quietly on the splotched canvases and hieroglyphic streaks of pigment smeared straight from the tube. The painting glasses his eye, drizzling a cool rain on the transformative poetic pyre, surrendering the *gravitas* of the nipping stanza for the quiet, unassuming air of journalism and reportage. Admirers of *Flow Chart* or *Houseboat Days* or *Can You Hear, Bird?* must tune to a different wavelength, endure Ashbery's incognito for 400 pages of canny, priggish prose.

To his credit, however, Ashbery manages to clarify our confusion without diminishing it, allowing the painting or sculpture or collage to work its idiopathic design into the crawling hues of our ocular node, to extend its mesh of associations into us, to interleave its voice with the recessed intaglio of our deep painterly source-code, because the pattern gleams there, too.

Granted, all great love wants to *create* the beloved, and I may be over-subjectifying my experience of these essays. (Ashbery is, after all, no Arthur C. Danto, much less a Ruskin or a Pater.) Poems like 'Tapestry' taught me how and whom to love, and left me burdened with a programme for self-enhancement that would keep me howling to an inward moon for as long as I can read and write (silly pretentious tart that I am). If no such creature is ever sighted, we are resolved to create one in its stead. Likewise, whenever Ashbery's journalism disappoints us by not *attacking* these gallery-exhibitions with the same gold-standard inbreaking rush of poetic zeal we've come to expect, there is always the temptation to project our own cocksure aesthetic fantasies onto the stark-white glossy canvas of the not-quite-there.

'The conception is interesting: to see, as though reflected / In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through / Their own eyes....' --'Wet Casements'

Few people really care whether the canvases of George Mathieux really surge with polychromatic rhythms equal to the fin-de-siecle squiggling of France's post-Dada cabal, whether William Blake's illuminated epics prognosticate the kino-eye intensity of modern cinema, whether H.R. Giger's machine-world mechanosphere can help us de-romanticize the industrial megalomania that has dessicated the Earth, and our refusal to know is already part of the disaster. Ashbery's book stands a minor classic to help us bulwark the spelunking eye against an 'anything goes' contemporary art-culture that would lead us to believe that, well, anything goes....

Nobody seems to remember the utopian art-academies that John Ruskin or Walter Pater (or, heck, even Camille Paglia) bequeathed to us in blueprint, a god-revealing curriculum that combined Renaissance audacity with the semiotic motion-sculptures of modern cinema with the elite conceptual sonatas of post-Nietzschean tragic theater to tear modern culture a new one. Rather we have university arts programs that nurture aggressive extroverts in fashion-victim garb who wouldn't know the harsh, ascetic legacy of 20th-century modernism if it jumped up the wazoo.

A strong intertextual reading of *Reported Sightings* combined with Ashbery's collected verse will permit us something of the strong Wildean vision of *The Critic As Artist*, where the vanished statues and apocalyptic chapel-ceilings of Renaissance boldness will be put to work alongside the chemo-industrial landscapes of cyberpunk-capitalism and the world philosophical cinema that lights up our pain fibers at the vanishing point of the man-made horizon, that renews the exploratorium of the Ruskinian and Paterian world-artist in the machine-environments forced on us by exponential cybernetic influx and 24-7 media spamming.....[pause for breath].

Or something to that effect. Lemme work on it. Meanwhile buy the book.