Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works

From Virgil to Nabokov, dead authors are often the most prolific. T. S. Eliot, who in his lifetime would put forth a slim volume every couple of years, has in the past decade become extravagantly productive, issuing thick volumes of letters and hefty installments of the collected prose at a pace that threatens to overwhelm both readers and bookshelves. The oeuvre of Elizabeth Bishop has grown posthumously several times in size, like Alice after she eats the cake, with much of the new work being material that this famously secretive perfectionist would have been dismayed to see in print.So it comes as no surprise that Ashbery, who died in 2017, should have a new book out. Somewhat more surprising is that Ashbery, whose fame is founded on the long poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” and who regularly published long poems throughout most of his career, should have declined, or failed, to bring to completion or publication the long-form works he continued to compose in the years before and after Girls on the Run, his book-length poem of 1999. Skillings, who has done an admirably thorough job of editing this volume, describes the works it includes as “suspended . . . rather than abandoned” (though one might recall Auden's dictum that a poem is “never finished, only abandoned”). While Ashbery revised his work a bit more than he at times liked to let on, he was hardly one of those poets, like Yeats, who struggled through draft after draft to realize his conceptions; perhaps the only unequivocal sign of the incomplete state of the work collected here is the failure of “21 Variations on My Room” to proceed beyond variation 18. Though unfinished, these works are thoroughly Ashberyan—no reader of contemporary poetry would have trouble picking them out of a lineup.I suspect this volume will have limited appeal beyond Ashbery completists; one must be familiar, and comfortable, with Ashbery's late style(s) in order to derive much pleasure from it—though the hardcore anti-Humanists who deplore what they see as the excessive sense-making of “Self-Portrait”–era Ashbery will likely applaud the poet's return, in The Kane Richmond Project, to the collage practices of his early 1960s work. These works differ noticeably from one another, with “The History of Photography” composed in long lines and extended paragraphs that recall works like Flow Chart, while “Parallel Movement of the Hands” constitutes a sequence of short lyrics, a page or two, the lines mostly occupying the space of an old-school tetrameter or pentameter; The Kane Richmond Project incorporates a good deal of prose. Nevertheless, readers familiar with Ashbery's later volumes will know what to expect here: syntactically complete sentences whose contents are out of kilter, or that take bizarre detours midway through; non sequiturs and pronouns without antecedents, frames of reference shifting or indeterminate, a mix of diction from the academic to the demotic.Much of the later work feels aptly characterized by Ashbery's own description: “poems [are] going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.” Aside from likening the poet disturbingly to one of the Fates, this account suggests an arbitrariness to the boundaries between one poem and another, and a concomitant refusal of what one might call the architectonic possibilities of poetry, its power of achieving an effect by slow accretion or a startling volta. All of Ashbery's work is characterized by vividly textured language and a consistent sense of defamiliarization; some readers may wonder whether that consistency, in the later books, becomes too much of, or too constant, a good thing, to the point where, to quote from early Ashbery, “mild effects are the result.” On occasion, though, in the steady hum of the Ashberyan language, a moment will stand out in stark relief, as when, for instance, the witches from Macbeth suddenly invade section 5 of “The History of Photography”: “three trancelike / sisters accosted me on the steep path,” one of whom asks, “Have you any money for the keeper, / the keeper down there, whose hoary seconds tick with a rage of time / like hailstones in your face . . . ?” I suspect that Ashbery's reputation will continue to rest largely on the poetry he published in the first three decades of his career, but the already committed will welcome this addition to the poet's oeuvre, which will surely provide dedicated readers with much to enjoy and ponder.