Was it something in the water? Classifying artists by generation is an inexact science at best, but by just about any calculation it’s safe to say that the Prohibition years produced a bumper crop of major American poets the likes of which make practically any other epoch look like a dry spell. If it’s all but impossible to cram them all into one big tent, their clustered birth dates nonetheless seem to affirm that their times were ripe for letting 1,000 flowers bloom. And if their ranks have inevitably thinned of late, those who are still with us continue to serve notice that it’s premature to close the book on their estimable era.
Perhaps the greatest generation
John Ashbery, born in 1927, has been bewitching, bothering, and bewildering readers since the first Eisenhower administration, and he shows no sign of slowing down: A dozen new collections of his trademark cognitive dissonance have appeared in the past 20 years, in addition to such curatorial editions of earlier work as last year’s 1,000-page doorstop in the Library of America series. What’s the secret to his staying power? That’s anybody’s guess, but let’s just say that Ashbery’s brute productivity has done nothing to diminish his legendary inscrutability, nor sap his notorious zest for playing havoc with nearly every convention and fixed idea about poetry under the sun.
For all that, it’s hard to imagine Ashbery conjuring up anything that can really shock or surprise us anymore. His industrious longevity has by now made his subversive novelty feel all too strangely familiar, and the modus operandi that once seemed to personify willful obscurity has made a seamless transition to something approaching effortless artifice. No matter: There’s never been much middle ground when it comes to taking a stand on Ashbery, so while “Planisphere’’ isn’t liable to win him new converts, it surely won’t disappoint the faithful either.
Assembled alphabetically by title, from “Alcove” to “Zymurgy,” the 99 compact poems are laid out for inspection like a boxed set of embossed calling cards, the latest installment of a runic style that has long since gone viral but for better or worse unmistakably remains the original model. After all this time, nobody does meta better or makes word-happy mystification look half as fun.
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