Boo!
From Charles Mcgrath's review of Ashbery's new book in the NYT:
Ashbery has written more than 20 books -- most of them of consistently high quality, with the exception of the tedious ''Flow Chart'' -- and he has been around so long, reinventing himself over and over again, that the experience of reading him now is a little like re-enacting the central drama of most Ashbery poems: the experience of suddenly coming upon something that is both deeply familiar and more than a little strange.
I thought FLOW CHART was the bomb. I didn't think it was tedious or of less than high quality. Actually, it blew my mind. What do you all, all two of you, think of FLOW CHART? Tedious or not?
posted by Antoine at 10:22 AM
18 Comments:
Not tedious...stop reading NYT for poetry news.
Aaron is wrong.
Don't stop reading the NYT. Just don't let it be your only source for poetry news.
Ha. It's your funeral.
Or, to put it another way, uh...who cares?
Apparently you do.
Ah, you got me. I simultaneous care and don't care. My life in the bush of ghosts. Antoine, can't you block this kind of riff raff from your comments fields? He's junkin' the place up.
Callin me all wrong and that. That's junky. Take that junky mess to AWP biznatch.
I think someone needs to get himself a blog.
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My bad Mr. Wot-What.
Your blog is no place for this stupid spat. But if Aaron wants to read what I wrote please send him my comments. I ain't scared of no ghosts.
Life is too short to deal with negative people. Goodbye Aaron.
Amazing.
Wow. And people wonder why I went to law school.
Antoine, Flow Chart WAS the bomb; and anyone who likes anything from the J-to-the-A post, say, Hotel Lautremont has likely gotten as lazy as Ashbery himself.
There. I said it.
Oh, and congrats, Eduardo, on the Nation thingamajiggy.
But what was that crap about?
Oh, and the NYT is, of course, a wonderful source for poetry writing. And I'm not subjective at all.
Too, you should dip a finger in the New Yorker to figure out which way the po-biz current is running.
Hope all is well! (Did you get married? If so...congrats. If not, get crackin'.)
Fingers dipped in the New Yorker. Antoine married, happy. Hope you're well, too, Spence.
I forget these things. There's so much to remember, and most of us are familiar with just how much damage did to my frontal lobe in I.C.
Congrats. On the marriage. And on the Magazine thing.
Oh and just joking on the The New Yorker thing. Frankly, I don't even know where to go to find the "avant" or the "garde" in contemporary poetry.
Do you serve as a Don King-like promoter for these weblog slapfights?
FLOWCHART rocks. I found it very generative. Sometimes it gets hard to just walk around, so you do acrobatics to get from one place to another (e.g. Van Veen, Is that his name?) but it's no fun doing acrobatics (dizzying) if you can't walk around. And Ashbery can really walk around.
I was talking to Savitz last night and we both expressed how we didn't want to fuck around any more in our poetry writing and then we talked about how nice it was just fucking around when that was okay and then holding up a few lines and saying I AM A GENIUS. And so guess what we concluded?
You are geniuses, with a lot to learn?
You want to walk around?
It is still alright to fuck around?
I dunno. All three sound good to me.
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