Flow Chart

by John Ashbery

"Reticent, shy, unfailingly modern, Ashbery is as unorthodox [as] any of the great twentieth-century Breton, Stravinsky, Picasso," observed Jeremy Reed in Britain's Poetry Review . "We are privileged to be around at a time when he is writing." Flow Chart , a book-length poem that first appeared in 1991, might be Ashbery's greatest a staggering and exuberant "torrent of invention [that] comes as close to an epic poem as our postmodern, nonlinear, deconstructed sensibilities will allow. . . . "

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century, American, Literature

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Formal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).

From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course it depends on your definition of poetry, but for me poetry is often the very lack of definition, though I tend to look for at least the appearance of definition… Anyway, we’re all looking for something to read, and Ashbery here gives us something to read, and it reads like slippery prose – Woolf of The Waves, de Chirico’s Hendomeros - which is to say it goes down easily but after a few draughts you wonder what you just took in. The point here, with Ashbery, is to just keep reading, don’t wait for your comprehension to catch up, not that Flow Chart is difficult to understand, but it’s a poem of pure addition that never really adds up, so no need to wait for the equals sign. Which is fine for this reader because, yes, I just want something to read; the reading of which keeps me reading. I am always looking for a flow of one kind or another, and Flow Chart flows. It is a flowing grab bag of (mock) journaling, (mock) autobiography, and just writing for the sake of writing - horror vacui (with an ironic grin). Ashbery is a fan of the commonplace book, a somewhat old-fashioned term for a personal book that compiles, in a casually haphazard way, all the things that one might need or want to know to go about one’s daily life. A scrap book, essentially. Flow Chart has a commonplace book quality. Not that it contains useful information pertaining to the mundane, but it is filled with mundane activities, and even slack, mundane language (an Ashbery specialty), and in lieu of any over-arching organization is organized as a moment to moment record of Ashbery’s poetical mind as he wrote it. Which isn’t to say that it is at all personally revealing, at least not in the “facts” contained within, though I do feel like I know Ashbery better after reading this, as I know the contours of his mind, as filtered through his playful aesthetics, better. Knowing shouldn’t have an end in sight anyway. Keep on readin’.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess I should admit I’ve read this since I have a poetry book coming out heavily engaging with it!!

[Adam Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I was depressed when I wrote that. Don't read it." -J.A

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the first few chapters I thought I'd found something that could legitimately be compared to the lyrical, almost mystical conveyance of personality found in Virginia Woolf's The Waves. But my appreciation--and connection--seemed to diminish with each passing chapter, if only because I found less and less to grab on to as the poem descended into itself (for over 200 pages!). Perhaps, in retrospect, my approach was wrong, that this is a work that shouldn't necessarily be approached as something to read straight through, front page to last, but returned to occasionally, when the mood strikes, savored in feverish outbursts...

So one can lose a
good idea
by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides
it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations
are terminated, speaks in the acts of that proginator and does
recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier."

-from "Flow Chart"

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

you don't have to read all of it but if you did you'd probably find your favorite part(s)

[Mills College Library]

811.54 A8198f 1992

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's fine but in the end a little frustrating. Flow Chart is one long poem by Ashbery written in his characteristic abstract expressionist style where familiar phrases or key images will get evoked but you the reader never quite get a firm footing on how it all adds up. His poem is a mood piece, basically, and you're on board for the mood or you aren't. Mostly I wasn't. I liked certain portions where the text is seeming to cohere around some central idea or theme, but the poem never holds there for very long. It's an ever moving river. Here is one passage, though, I quite liked, which in fact compares the flow of life to a river:

And the river threaded its way as best it could through sharp obstacles and was sometimes not there
and was triumphal for a few moments at the end. I put my youth and middle age into it,
and what else? Whatever happened to be around, at a given moment, for that is the best
we have; no one can refuse it, and, by the same token, everyone must accept it,
for it is like a kind of music that comes in sideways and afterwards you aren't sure
if you heard it or not, but its effects will be noticed later on, perhaps in people you never heard of, who migrated to other parts of the country and established families and businesses there. Yet sometimes too it'd seem like a moraine,
filled with rocks and bloom, a mammoth postscript
to whatever you thought your life had been before.
At no time did the music seem remotely interesting. You must always keep listening, though,
otherwise you might miss out on something.

A passage like this is beautiful, sentimental, platitudinous, but I think this is Ashbery at his best. When he is slipping around too much, I don't quite like the poem.

[Mark Babcock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long poems are difficult to read. This one, for some reason, was easy. Not that the meaning of it will come easily. You have to like poetry and specifically Ashbery to read this through to the end. But it's worth it.

[Thelonious · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are sublime passages, but almost nearly as many made me cringe. It’s also too long. It’s fine, I guess.

[A L]

It may be at the beginning of his late career but this felt like Ashbery's final challenge.

[danielle; ▵ · Rating 2 out of 5]

overall, not worth the effort; searching for beautiful turns of phrase required too much attention for there to be so little to stick to page after page

[Julie Bennett · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don’t care if you’ve won a Pulitzer Prize, it still does not mean we should publish your unedited, uninteresting stream of consciousness

[Joseph]

“And he said that’s the way it was, it was a tangle and will never be anything
more than a diagram pointing you in a senseless direction toward yourself.”

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have not yet read the volume of uncollected (& presumably, unfinished) long poems the Ashbery collective is posthumously bringing out, but this primes me for it -- a beautifully shapely, shapeless thing that, no Ashbery scholar, I take it is the second of three long (i.e., book-length) poems JA brought out: the serial Three Poems in prose; Flow Chart; and Girl on the Run, the book-length meditation on Henry Darger.

A well-joined schematic the only process of which is to get you lost, or as it culminates in the fifth part in the double sestina and its wake, asking how human activity organizes itself in relationship to our fundamental drives, e.g., love, between humans, some men, some women, some between, our presentiments of which is whomever we're with or why it could possibly matter. At times you will gather he finds a sublimity in it; in the syntax in lines of a sentence like this:

And so, though stalks heavy with the | mothy, mop-headed bloom may tremble next August, that is a thing of the past; the sun | purges its mind of all negative thoughts, granting | equanimity with the largesse of one who has too much, and | causes one to re-examine their attitudes. [the close of book five]

This gets at the para-psychological temporality of a project that could make much of presentiments of a ground, or home. Perhaps, you think, this was the project of 19th century novel (it's certainly Melville's fervency) and so Ashbery wants to hear in those conversations a gentler "mettle, whatever that is."

[Ami Boughter · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Meanwhile, over the scruffy skies of New York, a doubt hangs
like a jewel, a melancholy melon-color that could be the correct shade of mourning
in heaven, pitting all that we said against us. Why, it’s right there in the procès verbal,
only I don’t feel too good. I just want to be absorbed in countries you were never
allowed to develop a taste for, yet I have no reason to go anywhere,
to be at your side, every place seems as mortally insipid
as every other place, and I’ve got used to living, like a toothache; I can stand
what’s coming, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to like it. Some mornings are quite pleasant”

[Dean Kritikos · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always with Ashbery, this book was impossible to "understand." And thank goodness. Rather than bother with cohesiveness, he makes sure that reading is a pleasure of/in fits. Voices stray out from some non-existent center only to, on a dime, betray a half- or quarter-there unity.

Overall, what this book gets at is the absolute absurdity of the word "I." That, and the absolute beauty of (Ashbery's own) language.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

finished my first reading but intend to reread. in this long poem, Ashbery combines the mundane with the astonishing. his lines don't go together & yet they do in a type of coherence that transcends surface meaning in a delightful way. not to dismiss the meaningfulness of this work. a poem like this gives me permission to play.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

an inventive associative meditative long poem. i adore the rhythmic and syllabic playfulness. i like especially ashbery's juxtapositions of erudition and colloquialism. i like his glacier references. i like the chunk of sestina-influenced verse with the sunflowers and the dead. definitely a poem i'll have to reread several times over, and one that i'm sure i'll love more every time.

[C.S. Carrier · Rating 4 out of 5]

The double sestina at end of the book is so worth waiting for and is as a glowing orb that appears from out of darkness.

[Zoe]

Saw someone with this book at Stumptown Coffee. Skimmed through it and felt instantly inspired. Apparently it's quite hard to find?

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Totally incomprehensible as all Ashbery poetry, but, again, somehow and for some reason I think it was good that I read it. I laughed out loud at certain parts of absurdist humor.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our greatest living poet writes down a dream solid enough to hold in your hands