Word: poemes
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...also been known to party hearty, but in his soul he may be a wonk. He is no more afraid to be square in his musical taste (his favorite sax player -- Kenny G?) than Maya Angelou was to be passionate, politically correct and perfectly understood in her Inaugural Day poem. At 13 balls that night, Clinton was like the college grind who drops in on frat bashes the night before the exam to show he's one of the guys, then sneaks back to his dorm to cram. Perhaps there is as much Nixon in him (the ambition, the intellect...
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...
Cookies, crazily, "must" be passed; one must behave as if in a classroom, to be playful and attentive, for the other thing--the end we aren't ready for--will overtake us if we fail to maintain our childlike interests. (Ashbery's most optimistic poems usually take place indoors, in safety, in environments which preclude endlessness.) The same blending of the scholar's voice with the inquiring child's takes over in this book's most triumphant poem, "Notes From...