Word: poem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Schnackenberg exhorts us to value that golden thread: "But really you must admit/You're lost/ But really you must not lose the way," she writes of the human condition. This can refer to losing the "way" of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but the poem suggests a further, broader meaning: by losing the connection of poetry to history, we lose a vital way of understanding our past...
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...
This wish for privacy, for restraint, is most moving when the poems that express it are themselves restrained--either metrically, as above, or to two or three tones of voice or registers of diction, or, simply, by being short. As Helen Vendler has noted, the situations and contexts in an Ashbery poem relate not to one another but to the poem's (emotional) center. The poems are often strongest when some structural constraint adds to their centripetal force...
...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...
...most well-publicized of these was a remarkwritten on the Lamont Library poetry board lastyear. On a poem with an Asian-American woman'sname written under it someone wrote "Die, Chink...