The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry (Poetry pleiade) [Hardcover]

You're probably here because you've read some of Ashbery's poetry - if so, you can't help but have noticed that his approach to language is very different from many poets. (If you have never read any of his work I suggest you go to the poets.org website to take a look at the samples posted.) If you remain undaunted, and are now considering buying this compilation of the contents of his first five books of poetry, good! Here's why.

Ashbery's first five books bounced around in style and approach much more so than his recent work. This is not to imply that he has settled into one or another form - he remains one of the most inventive poets around; just be encouraged to experience the wild ride that his early creative career seems to have comprised. You will get a multifaceted view of his paths to the powerful creativity of his more recent work: the magnificent epic of "Flow Chart" and the sweep of "Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror."

Each of the five offers its own unique appeal. The poems from "Some Trees" show a range of experimentation unusual in a first book - a lot of people back in 1956 must have been wondering where Ashbery was headed. Then "The Tennis Court Oath" appeared and, I'm told, outraged the poetry establishment; its jarring `meaning-less-ness' apparently leaving some feeling they were being hoodwinked. In 1967 "Rivers and Mountains" demonstrated Ashbery's facility for the long poem with "The Skaters", and between that book and the following "Double Dream of Spring" can be found many of the works considered exemplary of his first 16 years. Finally, in 1972, came book number five, my favorite, "Three Poems." Diving deep into a Proustian, paragraphless prose form, these three reflections on the nature of things seem as heartbreakingly timely now as they must have been then.

The really nice thing about "Mooring..." is that you have all five books in hand at once. Notwithstanding their arrangement in chronological order, you can skip around. I'd encourage you to do so. Otherwise you risk a `big gulp' effect - a disorder of digestion that will come from trying to `get through' sixteen years of his writing in a few days. After all, readers of "Some Trees" back in 1956 had six years to await the `outrages' of "Tennis Court"; six years to read and reread. Why should you clearcut the sixty-odd pages of "Trees" in an evening or two? Besides, the book comes with a stylish yellow bookmark-ribbon (at least the hardcover does), that you can use to keep track of a less-than-linear stroll through the poems in the book.

I must admit that I found myself frequently flummoxed by John Ashbery's poetry over the past few years since I first discovered his "Flow Chart." I was, nevertheless, drawn like a moth to SOMETHING in there. Now you may be a more clever reader than I, but it took a few prostheses for me to figure out what was going on - to start to get an idea why I was drawn to the poetry and what I was getting out of it.

If that sort of push-pull relationship has brought you this far to take a peek at his early work, let me loan you my crutch. I discovered a copy of "Beyond Amazement", a book of essays about Ashbery's poetry, published in 1980 and edited by David Lehman. I found this book invaluable. Sort of like those hook-ish things rock climbers use. You might still find yourself swinging out in space, but one or another of the essays in "Amazement" will have offered a view of the nature of Ashbery's poetic quest that can serve as an anchor of sorts.

You may, like me, skip the few essays in "Amazement" which overdo the lit-crit crowing, but mostly they are helpful: quite frank in acknowledging the `problem' of meaning in Ashbery's poetry and quite insightful in providing conceptual anchors for his readers. And since these essays were published before Ashbery's big `hits' they tilt more toward the works collected in "Mooring."

With the help of "Beyond Amazement", I have come to a wider appreciation of the forms of meaning in Ashbery's poetry and to a more satisfying reading of "The Mooring of Starting Out." Explicit meaning can be seen as only a piece of what most of us seek in poetry or any art. Given the wordless form of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, would we deny its powerful effect on a listener as holding no `meaning.' For that matter, just think about all those pieces of popular music over the years which you hummed over and over but whose lyrics you never even understood - what was the "pompatus of love" that Steve Miller sang of? We seem to feel meaning tugging at us from unverbal or simply incomprehensible realms, whether in poetry or any other work of art.

John Ashbery has spent almost fifty years mulling the ability of words, word-sounds, and even word-absences to line up on a page and nevertheless chart the less-than-linear bridge to meaning. "The Mooring of Starting Out" offers a fine glimpse into his early efforts.