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’.
