Ashbery

Reading Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorker article on John Ashbery as the climactic scene in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is playing out on TV in the background – the scene in which earth scientists and aliens play their electronic music back and forth trying to communicate. Somehow this seems to be an apt sensory analogy of what MacFarquhar is saying about Ashbery’s own sensory (and intellectual) experience of the world around him as well as poetry – how he reads it and how he writes it. And the visitors from outer space pick Dreyfuss’s character, the innocent, guileless, curious, receptive, unformulated linesman to go with them instead of the scientists, with their structured preconceptions (and pretensions). Ashbery is a pneumatic revelation.