Volume 26, Number 21 & 22 · January 24, 1980
Sign Language
By Denis Donoghue
As We Know
by John Ashbery
Viking, 118 pp., $12.50
John Ashbery's new book is a collection of forty-eight poems, most of them fairly short, some as short as one sentence, the title and its completion in two lines. One poem, 'Litany,' is very long, several thousand lines, a double poem of two monologues running simultaneously down the pages. How you read it is up to you. The poem is divided into three unequal sections. On a first reading I read the left-hand monologue complete, all three sections, without even adverting to what was happening on the right-hand side of the page. Then the same for that side. On a second reading I switched from left to right at the end of each section. I can't report much difference. One can read each page as it appears, but that would be perverse, because the sentences rarely end with the page. The two voices are not as fully differentiated as the 'He' and 'She' of 'Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid' ' in Ashbery's House-boat Days (1977), but the differences are enough to show that B is more ample, more opulent than A, more explicit, more in command of the feelings. A and B are my names, Ashbery doesn't give the speakers any names or differentiating marks. The two speakers could be one, in different moods or phases, but I choose, not to think so.
Review, 3427 words
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