Volume 25, Number 4 · March 23, 1978
Poet in the Wings
By Roger Shattuck
Houseboat Days
by John Ashbery
Penguin, 88 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Most of us, if we read modern poetry at all, approach it half in faith and half in fear. Faith that a self-represented craftsman in words may have found a new utterance to offer us, or at least reconstituted an old one in this world of fading palimpsests. Fear on two possible counts: either that we may miss the crucial clues that would tell us if a poem is moving or funny or dirty; or that, if we take seriously texts with little ascertainable meaning and none of the traditional characteristics of poetry, we are falling for a high-level hoax. There are few secure readers of modern poetry, and John Ashbery is not the poet to renew the confidence of the faint-hearted.
Review, 2766 words
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