Everybody’s got Ashbery all wrong. He isn’t trying to complicate matters further. He explains life as it is: …It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension / To life, when life is precisely that dimension. We limit ourselves when we think that we know, and we leave ourselves open when we realize that what is true, is already dying.
Ashbery is a shock absorber—muting the specter of progress altogether. He does this with the same befuddled grace most of us exert while “wasting time,” which, for him, turns out to be the best use of it. You hardly notice it's happening until you’re inside weeping, wishing to get in-er, which leads nowhere but back out of nearness into vastness, or emptiness, what he calls the “Bushiness of Infinity.”
His poems are all-purpose acknowledgments ("like those stretch socks that fit all sizes") to all moods and relations with equal affinity—denying nothing—staking no great claim. To be always conscious of these multiple facets is to incarnate a dimensionless organism like the wind’s, a living concern that can know no rest, by definition: it is restlessness.
One tires of his tolerance and affection towards flux and chaos, but it’s only human nature to rebuff love. I don't blame you, but you are wrong. And I am wrong. So what. We must learn to live in others, no matter how abortive or unfriendly their cold, piecemeal renderings of us: they create us.
The people I’ve needed most turned out to be a letdown. Not Ashbery. I read his lines and for once this condition of eternal vigilance... somehow it would also mirror the peace.
He makes it OK for everything not to be.
-Lauren Shooster