A Wave by John AshberyThe Noonday Press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 1998 (Originally Viking, 1984)

I’m not opposed to feeling adrift when reading, but this book, on my first read-through of it, made me feel more than adrift: I struggled to find a way in, or anything to hold on to. I haven’t read much by Ashbery: before A Wave I’d only read Notes from the Air, which I remembered only dimly, and only as being difficult. (When I look back at what I wrote about it, though, I can see there were bits I liked, and I can see why I liked them.) I didn’t like this book much after my first read-through of it, but I think the final/title poem helps cast light on Ashbery’s approach: the last line of the book is “But all was strange.”—which is I suppose a bit of comfort to take into a re-reading. Also heartening was the first paragraph of Christopher Middleton’s 1984 review of this book in the NY Times, which starts like this: “Reading John Ashbery’s poems is a bit like playing hide-and-seek in a sprawling mansion designed by M. C. Escher.”

The book starts with uncertainty: the opening line of “At North Farm” is this: “Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,”—which I actually kind of love, how it’s very matter-of-fact language that nevertheless starts the book with questions and with motion. Each stanza of the poem, too, ends with a question, and the start of the second stanza is something of a puzzle, implying a question. Which is interesting, but I still get a little stuck on the vagueness of it. But OK: I kept reading. I quite like Ashbery’s rhyming rendition of this poem by Baudelaire, but I think the bits I like best of it are Baudelaire’s: images like “chimneys and steeples, those masts of the city.”

There are prose poems, too, like “Descriptions of a Masque,” which is several pages long and mostly bewildering to me except when there are flashes of brilliance. It features characters from myth, from film, from nursery rhymes, from literature, with this great conceit:

Then we all realized what should have been obvious from the start: that the setting would go on evolving eternally, rolling its waves across our vision like an ocean, each one new yet recognizably a part of the same series, which was creation itself. Scenes from movies, plays, operas, television; decisive or little-known episodes from history; prenatal and other early memories from our own solitary, separate pasts; events yet to come from life or art; calamities or moments of relaxation; universal or personal tragedies; or little vignettes from daily life that you just had to stop and laugh at, they were so funny, like the dog chasing its tail on the living-room rug. The sunny city in California faded away and another scene took its place, and another and another. And the corollary of all this was that we would go on witnessing these tableaux, not that anything prevented us from leaving the theater, but there was no alternative to our interest in finding out what would happen next. (27)

And this lovely sentence:

Mostly there were just moments: a street corner viewed from above, bare branches flailing the sky, a child in a doorway, a painted Pennsylvania Dutch chest, a full moon disappearing behind a dark cloud to the accompaniment of a Japanese flute, a ballerina in a frosted white dress lifted up into the light. (28)

There are poems in different traditional forms or variations thereof: haiku, and haibun, and a pantoum, and there are implicit and explicit references to writing, to poetry: I like this, from “Never Seek to Tell Thy Love”:

You can’t read poetry,
Not the way they taught us back in school.
Returning to the point was always the main thing, then. (56)

And then there’s “A Wave,” the long title poem, which seems to be about love and living and about writing, about how to love and live and write. The poem “demands to be met on its own terms now” (79) and “the issue/Of making sense becomes such a far-off one” (70): so maybe feeling adrift is fine. And there’s this: these are probably my favorite lines in the poem, almost my favorite lines in the book:

and we sit down to the table again
Noting the grain of the wood this time and how it pushes through
The pad we are writing on and becomes part of what is written. (73)