Word: lyric
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First reactions are especially valuable in cases like this. Forget the furrowed brow and the repeated candlelight reading of the lyric sheet with a glass of cheap red beside the CD jewel box. Whenever a performer of Leonard Cohen's high caliber and even higher seriousness comes out with a new album, the instinct is to treat it as if it were an invitation to a semiotics seminar or a cryptogram from a reclusive shaman poet. But just this once, never mind all that. The Future is a record to get onto, like an express from the far side...
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...
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...
...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...
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...