And The Stars Were Shining: the Glitter and Menthol Cool of John Ashbery's Poetry

You can't get to John Ashbery directly, so I'm coming at him tangentially, like making fugitive eye-contact with a stranger on the London tube. Before I write, I need to assemble the things that bring me to where I am at this particular moment in time: a bottle of Boots anti-Bacterial Hand Gel, an Aspirin blister pack, a Nestlé four-finger Kitkat, a strip of four white 10mg Diazepam tablets, three purple Pentel Sign Pens, a twitchy cell-phone, the A4 Side Wiro Kraft Notebook in which I'm writing, and a Mac 182 Kabuki Brush to dust up the Studio fix powder, the closest to invisible foundation you can get if, like me, you're a man who wears makeup.

That's what I've got as personal assets on this leaf-mashed, showery November afternoon, with the lavender sky deepening over High Holborn, and the accessories live inside a vermilion zipper case in the black canvas shoulder bag given me by Su, logoed Newburgh Quarter Carnaby, which I've deposited on the chair next to mine.

John Ashbery's books have always been first-day-of-release purchases for me. I'm an Ashbery addict, and that doesn't mean I necessarily read whole poems. I may just go for arresting colour blocks of imagery, incongruously weird associations, free-floaters, or chop the thing up like DNA in the lab into ten or even twenty-five trillion pieces, a process called library construction. The thrill of reading Ashbery is that you can approach the work from so many different angles and always locate something that excites response, without even being aware you're reading poetry. It's more that once you've smashed the space-time window into Ashbery, you have the feeling you're attached to his thought-patterns as they're shaped by his directional flow. Now thought, like light, is essentially weightless. It's only words that make it stick like fingerprints. Words are to poetry like lube on a micro-thin condom.

Here is Ashbery in 'Grand Galop', one of the poems in his break-through volume Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), something I stick with and to, that's excerpted like film.

And I still have a sweater and one or two other things

I had then.

It seems only yesterday we saw

The movie with the cow in it

And turned to one at your side, who burped

As morning saw a new garnet and pea-green order propose

Itself out of the endless bathos, like science-fiction lumps.

Impossible not to be moved by the tiny number

Those people wore, indicating they should be raised to this or that power.

But now we are at Cape Fear and the overland trail

Is impassable, and a dense curtain of mist hangs over the sea.

I can relate to this stuff: that sweater (disappointingly, I am forced to imagine the colour), the movie with the cow in it, and the sudden colour-coding of a new, saturated morning coming up like a sci-fi concept, the people looking future-forward, and the whole landscape terminating in a sea hung over by dense, smoky mist. A lot of Ashbery's seventies' poems push their imaginative content to the sea's edge as vanishing point, like a clean, ambiguous dissolve. Once you've arrived there, imagination washes away like a smear into the big blue pond.

I like prolific poets, rather than the stripped book pros who give you a forensically work-shopped sixty pages every four years. Ashbery offers not only size, but continuous re-invention, a slab of work in which you map the reconstructions as part of the block. And part of his greatness is to liberate the reader from the preconceptions locked into what's expected of poetry, to discover a new place for its potential, accidentally, in the course of writing his way there. It seems to me that poetry, like Ashbery's, becomes interesting when the poet integrates rather than eliminates his peripheral distractions from the plot.

While I'm writing this, I'm as much involved in my distractions as the text. I'm sighting the skinny jeans' logos on two auburn-haired Korean girls leaving the lipstick-red painted ASSA restaurant next door - Guess and Lee - as well as the list of inviting bar cocktails - Slippery Nipple, Sex on the Beach, Strawberry Dykery - but I haven't let go Ashbery. A poem should do that too, and be multi-tasking with its divergent gossipy bits. Ashbery as good as tells us this in 'Grand Galop,' and that is how accidentals come to cohere in the always random present. In the poem, Ashbery's talking of waiting for things to fill in time, like I'm face-spotting out the window.

'The wait is built into the things just coming into their own.

Nothing is partially incomplete, but the wait

Invests everything like a climate.

What time of day is it?

Does anything matter?

Yes, for you must wait to see what it is really like,

This event rounding the corner

Which will be unlike anything else and really

Cause no surprise: it's too ample.'

It's this sense of continuous surprise about what will check in next that makes an Ashbery poem autonomously new, impersonal in that emotions are frozen out, and alien too because it lacks any motivating subject matter other than the imperative to connect one perception directly to the next. Ashbery doesn't write personalised poems for dead friends, messed up ones, emotional dumps, or specifically themed things; he just works like he's in on whatever's cool. Ashbery doesn't come at you telling you his blood pressure, medications, alcohol intake (huge), sexual tourism or habits, there aren't any admissions of fears, phobias, regrets, rejections, disappointments; rather there's this off-message, unstoppable flow-chart of immediacy. It's always the present in Ashbery's poetry, with (refreshingly) no reference to growing older or to the past as curative. It's rare for a poet not to succumb to that throat-gripping

Concentration on anything I write goes in and out. I'm quickly sidetracked into reading Keith Richards' recently published autobiography, when I should be doing Ashbery. Keith writes so quirkily that you feel he's frozen incidents from his past, cryo-preserved them, and returned to retrieve them with all their original, high-octane colouring, like cans left behind in someone's fridge in Mississippi. I'm also now sighting a Korean boy who has stepped outside Centre Point Food Stores opposite - black leather zipper aviator jacket and pre-faded jeans - to smoke a cigarette, each measured drag creating its own dusty lexicon of smoky exhalations.

Ashbery's sixteenth collection, And The Stars Were Shining, appeared in 1994, so it's well into his development, and as near right in tone as he has been since Houseboat Days (1977), which was in many ways his breeziest, bluest and most concisely perfected book. But it's the compacted allusiveness of the poems in And The Stars Were Shining that gives them an edgy, 6pm feel, like waiting for your first drink to arrive at the bar; and also a pronounced sexual ambiguity, like Ashbery's right on the edge of coming out, but leaves you to guess. Like their title, the poems have a cold, brilliant mineral glitter, a sparkle chased into the lyric like tonic into gin. In 'Local Time' Ashbery's sexual coding, apparently one of picking up without bonding, gets talked up the right side of indifference, but with just a downside of disappointment coming in to add flavour to the experience.

Tight boy,

you reminded me of dragonflies skulking,

of aromatic fires peaking,

and neither of us gets to know the other.

Next thing you know it's winter.

The skylight, now aproned with white,

is our bare harvest.

But there is good in reappearing:

the flame's roar, beaker of scotch, the old way

things were probably supposed to be all along anyway.

It's the time shift from casual acquaintance or sex to 'Next thing you know it's winter,' putting a whiteout on the whole affair that I so like, that quantum timeline that's really life, rather than linear fake, and that Ashbery pulls off so well. In the compacted unit of a poem you need to treat time as quantum, otherwise you end up provincial by trying to manipulate parallel world experience into linear narrative, something that gives a lot of mainstream poetry a village pond effect, like think local and stay there, rather than get radically off-world.

Poetry to me is about recreating the experience I target as its intended imaginative equivalent. It's like dying your hair a different colour, black to blonde, or whatever. A poem needs to have a convincing look; and Ashbery's all about style; the jacket suits the knitwear and shirt. When I saw Ashbery talking at the ICA in 1990, he was wearing a perfectly chosen mint green V neck jumper over an air miles blue shirt, casuals with aesthetic, like one of his poems.

'Works On Paper 1' from the same collection takes me, all senses alert, into the full-on Ashbery method of using bitty fragments of narrative to get a compelling mix, in the way that Ray Davies of the Kinks remembers 'an old trick - find a hook in the song that isn't the melody and repeat it,' as the winning formula for his infectious 1970 smash hit 'Lola.'

The poem too provides a hint of Ashbery's drink problem, quickly dispersed into impersonal quantum narrative.

'I never get hangovers until late afternoon

and then it's like a souvenir, an arrangement.

An old Dutch taxi takes us down to the sea

where other passengers are trying to change their reservations

but the great flummoxed geodesic dome won't let them.'

I didn't tell you that in the course of writing this I've walked diagonally across Oxford Street to meet my friend Bill Franks at Selfridge's, the concessionary high-end retail stack where Saudi black gold evidently strips the rails because Bill's looking for what he can't find: three-ply cashmere in pink, charcoal, teal or French blue. So now I'm at Selfridge's post-Bill sitting in their second floor Lab café, the Marble Arch crunch under my feet, the manual assault of foot traffic almost percussive, and I've returned to 'Works On Paper1.'

'I tell particularly a thousand pounds of dust I saw

interspersed between the benign mountain-shapes on the outskirts,

and how everyone was reasonably free to change. After all

we make no effort to distinguish ourselves.

Those who wish to remain naked are coaxed out of laughter

with tea and nobody's nose is to the grindstone

anymore, I bet, and you can figure out these shivering trees.

But the owner of the bookstore knew that the flea was blown out of all proportion,

with September steps to go down in passing

before the tremendous dogs are unleashed.

This is an odd mix: from a thousand pounds of dust to the ordinariness of being ourselves, to the enigmatic owner of a bookstore, chunky September beach steps to go down, and finally and menacingly and arrestingly, 'before the tremendous dogs are unleashed.' It's the random, almost cut-up method here, the sort of booze freed-up associations that belong to each other and don't that accelerate the rush forwards. I don't personally care what it means, but to me it's what I identify as poetry, whatever that is, other than that it programmes my neural networks to fire responsively to what charged language is doing with images. 

Of the writing process itself, Ashbery in a 1988 interview with John Tranter said, 'I postpone it as long as possible, which is probably why I write in the late afternoon. I also think that my mind in the morning - though it might be fresher and have more ideas in it - is not as critical as it is later on in the day… I also used to think that I had to wait until I was inspired, before I could write, and then I realised that I hardly ever was inspired, so that I'd have to come up with something…something else. So usually my poems, when I write, I'm just in a sort of everyday frame of mind. Which is all I know, really, I suppose.'

The reason for writing poetry, at least mine, is that the doing of it, like a drug, alters reality into an alternative and more exciting state, and I'd guess that's part of Ashbery's underlying incentive. People write poems because being in control they can adapt the universe to their own terms, rather than erroneously attempt to blame it for their injustices. You can do anything in a poem, slash the sky with hot raspberry, come out on top against the system, bash corporates and governments, infiltrate underworlds, win love back from loss, imagine yourself where you shouldn't be, reveal things you've totally repressed, share obsessions and submerged secrets, admit to things you'd never usually dare, and generally be free to do and say what you like because it's poetry.

Ashbery's tone is invariably quiet, self-referential, non-specific, and while his personality fills the poem centre-stage, the person is largely bleached out: Ashbery himself remains virtual. What he asks of the reader, and it's never an imperative, is that you take up with him wherever he's at, that you zone into the off-world weird that's usually the poem's starting point. In the poem 'Tower of Darkness' from the collection Can You Hear Bird (1995), he hits on alienation, for once, in an alarmingly personal way.

I cannot remain outside any longer

in the cold and persuasive rain.

I grab my crotch wishing for a ball of light

in the shaggy interior other people have.

I shall go away without fetching a grain

from the earth,

compact,

with the climbing design

we knew and hated so well, and when it was our turn

to die we just gave up, mumbling some excuse.

The admission, hangover-flat, dejected and offering no optimal alternative within the poem, gives you a feeling of Ashbery's morning-after blues, the Alka Seltzer glass fizzing, the day slicing the window, and the incredible ordinariness that depression brings to things excited into overdrive by alcohol.

Ashbery's a poet to read in bed for some stimulating space tourism, I never find myself reading him outdoors, but more in a comfort-zone, 11-12 pm, and for me his work will always belong by association to Compendium Books at Camden Lock, a pioneering counter-culture outlet. Long before Ashbery became an institution, it was the only London source importing his books, at a time when he didn't have a UK publisher, and most probably didn't care. He existed excitingly by word of mouth.

Bill phoned to say he thought his three-ply cashmere degraded in quality, and I've moved back to First Out café, encountering on the way somebody homeless and cold who needs drug money or tea money, and that little recognition of sharing hurt in the corners of our eyes alerts me to the recognition of the invincible indifference and meanness of crowds, and how my contact of giving is the starting-point for a poem I'll catch up with in thirty minutes. I leave him on Wardour Street, and I'm still thinking of Ashbery somewhere in the Soho mix, like a shocking pink stripe I saw on a jumper in Selfridge's.

First Out's busy now and I like writing directly into noise. The thirteen-part title poem 'And The Stars Were Shining' from the book of the same name hints at transient stabs at rent or male prostitutes, and the edginess attendant on offering care often where it's not wanted. The luminous late year cold frosting the sequence gives it a starlit glow, and Ashbery, in performing his usual trick of dispersing each new subject into a dissolve, stays long enough with the crystallized bits to offer clues. The sadness always compressed into Ashbery's writing comes up strong in this sequence, like it does when you realise life's running out without your getting what you imagined you wanted, usually love, sex, money or recognition.

'You get hungry,

you eat hot.

Home's a cold delivery destination.

The emphatic nose puts it on hold.

Clubs are full.

I kind of like the all-night dust-up

though I'm sworn to secrecy,

with or without a cat.

I let so many people go by me

I sort of long for one of them, any

one, to turn back toward me,

forget these tears. As children we played at being grownups.

Now there's trouble brewing on the horizon.

Somebody's in trouble here, a homeless boy picked up as the sequence alludes, hungry, desperate, and selling sex, only this is the Hudson and not Piccadilly Circus - 'You get hungry/ you eat hot,' Ashbery won't give him a name, Johnny, Jimmy, whoever, and with his life important to him as yours or mine, at this moment in time. When the heartbreak comes up, it's Ashbery's, realising as you do in a big city, all the missed chances that come of making eye contact with strangers in the crowd, and it's always the one who got away, knowing you'd never connect again, that so painfully, memorably hurts. In London you get so scarred by it if you're tuned into the emotional possibilities that like Ashbery in this elegiac sequence you could cry city-coloured tears.

Elsewhere in this charged-up suite of winter poems you get bits of personalised Ashbery versus his renowned abstraction. What he teaches me, the reader, is constantly what I wouldn't expect poetry to do, and that's to cut short the beautiful moment the instant it's realised. Reading Ashbery you can feel like a voyeur blacked out at the critical moment by a venetian blind run up in an apartment. You're almost there, and he changes the subject. You move with Ashbery, or rather follow him to places you didn't expect to go. I'm compelled by this place in V11 from the sequence and I'm clueless as to its physicals.

'The bug-black German

heels and black areas, the long tilted

cloaks for sale, the others - yes,

they're still here?

Something must be done about it

before it does itself. You know

what that will be like. The white tables with their

roses are so beautiful. It doesn't matter if the corn is faded.'

Where are we? In a department store? Or a restaurant, with roses grouped on white tablecloths? I don't know where this is, but I want to stay there a bit, and also view 'the long tilted cloaks for sale.' Ashbery suggests throughout his work that there are other places for poetry than the obviously recognisable ones that tend to endlessly repeat - nature, the domestic and the provincially compressed milieu - and worse still, those incestuously sticky workshops. I'd personally rather hang with his odd than be in the overworked familiar. Ashbery's so refreshingly free of poetic self-consciousness and of ticking all the right prize-winning boxes that he's a hero to anyone who thinks outside these things into odd.

I don't tend to know many poets, and one of the reasons I write is because there isn't any poetry like mine around, one that feeds off immediate sensation, so that everything that happens in the specifically London day gets metabolised into juice for poetry, whether it's a pink stripe in a charcoal jumper, the barcode on a Corona bottle, the inventive logo on a Camper shoes carrier, or, for high-voltage red alert on lips, a swipe of Estée Lauder Extravagant Red. And because I'm obsessive, I'll make a poem magnifying that singular detail, rather than integrate it into a more general theme, because I want instantaneous retrieval, whether it's a two-tone nail transfer a girl is wearing, or a guy's unrepeatable look coming up the stairs of the Broadwick Street toilets into the aqua winter light, November 2010.

I don't eat when I'm writing, only drink, but First Out offers Nachos Mexicana, Spinach and Mushroom Lasagne, Falafel, Spinach and Red Pepper Tortilla and Mezze with Baba Ganoush, houmous, spicy chick peas, broad bean paté, black olives and warm pitta bread. You notice how listing food it becomes like poetry, because the senses go on overdrive imagining taste. It's actually far moreexciting than a lot of poetry in its linguistic provocation, colour and nose. Ashbery also tells me of throwaway accidental menu choices in his poem 'Grand Galop.'

'And today is Monday. Today's lunch is: Spanish omelette, lettuce and tomato salad.

Jello, milk and cookies. Tomorrow's: sloppy joe on bun,

Scalloped corn, stewed tomatoes, rice pudding and milk.

The names we stole don't remove us:

We have moved on a little ahead of them

And now it is time to wait again.

It's the incredible sense of transience here. We've moved on ahead of the menu choices just by reading them, and that's a typical Ashbery trick, to get ahead and quickly delete the topic. Once Ashbery has mentioned something in a poem, he makes it very clear that it's now past its sell-by date in terms of personal interest, and that he won't be going back there again. It's the sort of risk that people who lack re-invention can't afford to make, but which he achieves so weirdly, laconically, as a slice of domestic news, take it or leave it.

That poetry continues to survive suggests it has become coded into resistant genes as a niche genre, an expression that connects with the few open to its frequency. Part of the disappointment that saturates Ashbery's writing is the realisation that poetry is so marginalised, something that seems all the more incongruous when you live in big cities like New York or London, where the crunch of hyped-up sensory experience would seem theoretically suited to tune into the compact minimal form the poem offers rather than the long-haul process of reading a novel. But it doesn't.

Poetry was always essentially intended to stay underground, whether it was the Elizabethans - Daniel, Drayton and Constable circulating their manuscripts for decades without thought of publication - or the aggressively prolific small press scene in the 1960s and 1970s that coincided with Ashbery's beginnings in poetry, when small, stapled chapbooks and inconsistently inked magazines, printed on confetti-coloured papers, usually with A4, silkscreened covers, appeared like money laundering to disrupt the mainstream. Ashbery was part of that piratical circulation - 200 copies largely given away to interested friends.

It was the publication of Houseboat Days (1977) that really set Ashbery up in force, following on from his award-winning Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror (1975). This is possibly the most toned-up lyrically of his books, and certainly the most allusively concentrated. It's in poems like 'Loving Mad Tom' that Ashbery gets to sound congrously like modern America - the affair's alluded to and submerged in a poetry that deliberately time-cuts dream with reality. Resignation and loss are all written into the poem - things never work out - which is why we write poems, but Ashbery colours up the end dramatically so you exit where you never expected, and you don't know what became of Tom.

A spear of fire, a horse of air,

and the rest is done for you, to go with the rest,

to match up with everything accomplished until now.

And always one stream is pointing north

To reeds and leaves, and the stunned land

Flowers in dejection. This station in the woods,

How was it built? This place

Of communicating back along the way, all the way back?

And in an orgy of minutes the waiting

Seeks to continue, to begin again,

Amid bugs, the harking of dogs, all the

Maddening irregularities of trees, and night falls anyway.

The reader just goes with the accumulative build, you can't turn loss back, but it takes you interesting places, like across America, all the way back to bits Ashbery remembers like a station in the woods somewhere, and the fact that in the end night falls anyway, the big dumbed-down block of indifference that leaves you done in and alone and writing a poem because nothing else attempts to make sense of it all.

That's one way of looking at it, because I don't suspect Ashbery intends meanings to his poems, but more possibilities of interpretation. The idea a poem has to mean is the product of criticism and not of poetry.

I'm getting all this into a First Out writing day, and to distract myself I've accidentally lucked on the perfect found poem on a Duckie club flyer, giving essential dress code for what seems to read like the amalgamated subjects of a typically compressed book of my poetry.

effeminate dilly boys

dusty dykes & divers

modest mods & retrosexual rockers

sister George and closet cases toffs and spivs

Belgravia brasses and married men

Jamaican sailors and ladies in tweed

& the criminal underworld

I've personally known the lot, and the typographical layout looks like a poem, and what's more it's rush hour, 5pm, that first drinks' hour I've been waiting for all day to do something about my shot-down nerves. Ashbery's probably been at the gin all day, and some of his later work, particularly the epic Flow Chart (1991) reacts drunk, which in turn gives the work that blank, no-colour, no-time feel you get in the anodyne amnesia of an aircraft cabin when disconnect takes over.

Flow Chart, two hundred and sixteen pages of submerged discursive narrative blocked into post-modern abstraction, breaks every rule in signposting the existence of poetry as something like re-purposed architecture slung up in the big city sky, where buildings and clouds adopt the same off-white, off-greycolours in a spatialized architectural dissolve. There's a passage on p. 134, and I don't know who's captivated Ashbery, but it has tearjerker sustenance.

'I saw your face on some bookjacket. It looked beautiful. May I write to you?

I wouldn't really swallow poison if I was you. Meanwhile I have the rain

to experience with the others, each of us finding it uncomfortable though seldom

talking about it, as there are more important subjects. Fishing, for example.

I have to get home before the music disappears. I love you.

I thought I said never to come in this café?

I don't need to know where that fits, or what it's about, it just appeals on the level of falling in love with someone's photo on a bookjacket, most likely flashy autumn rains drumming down for weeks in the rainy season, and the fear of personal rejection triggering the offensive, 'I thought I said never to come in this café?' 

Inside the rear flap of the Trevor Winkfield designed jacket to Flow Chart, there's a superb black and white author's photo of Ashbery by Anna Tomzcat. He's on the beach, tanned and wearing shades, linen jacket carried over his shoulder, but it's the patterned tie and button-down collar shirt open at the neck attract. The pastel coloured shirt has deep barrel cuffs - it's really the look, casually maintained, but impeccably aesthetic, even on the beach. It's that look that's built into Flow Chart; the inescapable likeness of being a poet. Ashbery, rather in the manner that I'm writing this, tells us in a 1982 interview of all sorts of random things that intrude on his writing. He'll write listening to a music station and when there are announcements or commercials, bits might get sucked into the poem, 'as do all kinds of things in my immediate environment: papers that happen to be on my desk at the time, or letters, stray books, magazines. I always answer the phone when I'm writing and frequently find it has helped me to forget an unprofitable line of thinking, or that whoever I'm talking to will say something that gives me an idea. These things are very important. They're the environment that we live in and there's no point in trying to pretend that it's different or should be different.' 

The process is all part of the poem absorbing its immediate environment, rather than excluding it, like picking up the accidental signals in a recording studio - the stuff that shouldn't be there and integrating it into the sound. Flow Chart's full of such accidents. The long lines engage in stories that are always incomplete, a continuously fragmented narrative, because life's like that; you remember excerpted bits and rarely the whole. Trying to think back even to last week's like a hundred years ago. People mostly tell you things about your life that you've forgotten, or only partly remember in a re-contextualized way. For Ashbery, everything's so inclusive that it's got down almost pre-empting conversion into lyric. Let me take, for instance, a passage from Flow Chart - it's on p 49 - I particularly like and return to, and yes, it's about clothes.

'I thought I should

sharpen my appearance, for that way lies light, lies life, and yes I am

talking about new clothes as well. He wore a black suit -

that's what image those threads project? Arts & leisure - 80 bucks!

As quiet as my

contentment is the voice at my shoulder: make it over. Perhaps not a total

from-the-ground-up rehab, perhaps only a few cosmetic touches

would have an earth-shattering impact, in this instance. It's what

you can do that matters

more than the whole picture, but the older we grow, the more

unused to the idea of dying -

and I'm sorry I brought the subject up - we become.'

Deceptively casual, Ashbery's flow diagram takes in the lot - the makeover a sharp black suit affords, the telling 'It's what you can do that matters more than the whole picture,' as the clue to his method of writing, and lastly the unacceptable idea of dying, more acute as we grow older and expand into life, than when we're nineteen and attracted to the idea of being a teen suicide to leave a perverse impacting mark on the invasive system.

Flow Chart's a book you can't ever really begin or end, or tell the bottom from the top, it's more that it sucks you into its weird, undemanding undertow of self-reflection, so that Ashbery's preoccupations push the poem forward like a river, not to an assumed end, but to a persistent current-driven flow. Reading it's sometimes as fluent as image-spotting out of the window. Flow Chart just takes you there, without the need to qualify its referentials, and without belonging to any time but the present, it's always modern.

It's impossible for me to imagine a world in which John Ashbery isn't writing, anymore than I can think of Oxford Street without the Selfridge's front, because his poetry always seems so much a part of the times, like the light-polluted sky, or pop, or the compacted surge of energy that hits you somewhere mid-city, like an iridescent boot in the brain centre, kicking the pineal gland. Odd things happen in cities, like making poems, and what I saw a few days ago in Soho, in a yard off Marshall Street, where a group of students had created pop-up cinema using an old projector and a sheet and were watching She-Devils on Wheels, a 1968 B-movie about a female motorbike gang, rapacious for studs, and had inventively turned a disused space into cinema in the raw shivery cold.

John Ashbery's most recent collection of poetry Planisphere (2010) is as compellingly re-inventive, stripped down, updated, cryptic and off-message as anything he's done, and bites on the moment refreshing as spearmint. He's pushing somewhere new again because he's always full on in the moment. If you're out of it you're in the past, and you can't connect to write poetry there. In 'A Penitence' Ashbery's full of brimming momentary upbeat dazzle.

'Diamonds for every budget

customize tattered spaces.

It's nothing more, nor less,

than a seeming apocalypse

air filled with air.'

That's city life and air smashed with diamonds: the poet watching light fill with time. Or are the two the same? They're both in your cells and you can't do anything about it, only stare off into the big blue indifferent sky window as a gateway into space. The other day when I was writing a poem called 'Russian Tea', I cut it thematically, by wondering at the time of writing what John Ashbery was eating for lunch, and speculating on possible choices as an image-cut into the poem's liberated field.

But I want to tell you something. The boy I gave the tea or drug money to, I saw him again, against all the improbabilities in a city choice of twelve million, in a doorway of course, in re-purposed St Anne's Court, back of Wardour Street, a smudgy drizzle coming on, and he said to me - 'You're a poet aint you,' and I said, 'how'd you know that?' and he said 'Coz you look like it.' I gave him ten pounds and said, 'Nobody else would ever say that to me, thanks, you've really made my day,' and hurried on towards Tottenham Court Road to catch a 24 bus still thinking of Ashbery.

' I never get hangovers until late afternoon

and then it's like a souvenir, an arrangement.

An old Dutch taxi takes us down to the sea

where other passengers are trying to change their reservations

but the great flummoxed geodesic dome won't let them.'

I didn't tell you that in the course of writing this I've walked diagonally across Oxford Street to meet my friend Bill Franks at Selfridges, the concessionary high end retail stack where Saudi black gold strips the rails, because Bill's looking for what he can't find - a three-ply cashmere jumper in charcoal, teal or French blue. So now I'm in Selfridge's post-Bill, sitting in their second-floor Lab Café, the Marble Arch crunch under my feet, the manual assault of foot traffic, almost percussive, and returned to 'Works On Paper 1.'

'I tell particularly a thousand pounds of dust I saw

interspersed between the benign mountain-shapes on the outskirts,

and how everyone was reasonably free to change. After all,

we make no effort to distinguish ourselves.

Those who wish to remain naked are coaxed out of laughter

with tea and nobody's nose is to the grindstone

anymore, I bet, and you can figure out these shivering trees.

But the owner of the bookstore knew that the flea was blown out

of all proportion,

with September steps to go down in passing

before the tremendous dogs are unleashed.

This is an odd mix, from a thousand pounds of dust to the ordinariness of being ourselves, to the enigmatic owner of a bookstore, chunky September beach steps to go down, and finally and menacingly and arrestingly, 'before the tremendous dogs are unleashed.' It's the random almost cut-up method here, the sort of booze freed-up associations that belong to each other and don't that accelerate the rush forward. I don't personally care what it means, but to me it's what I identify as poetry, whatever that is, other than it programmes my neural networks to fire responsively to what changed language is doing with images.

* 

Three poems by Jeremy Reed

Meetings with Francis Bacon

The dark room, Piccadilly Circus underground,

the rent boy subterranean subway bar,

ozone-whiffy, our recessed meeting-place,

an eighties niche for runaways who found

your hands-on patronage, those lumps of cash

dolloped to street-trash, I still see your face

peeling foundation, a Max Factor lick

like mine, constructed with a dusting brush,

tube-whine, the escalators' shuffling click

condensed into the station's ramped-up rush

above the hammered track. We met in there:

you on the concourse trying to turn a trick

and me available, the drenching rain outside

like streaming pear-shaped diamonds, your blue shirt

like blue pigment you mixed, the shock of us

impacting, like peeling open a hurt

from sticking plaster, random fugitives

making the moment pop like a hot jewel

caught in the pouring rain. We'd meet and talk

on/off for three years, and the best of it

hangs with the worst, euphoric drunk or dipped

into asthmatic burn-out, desperate

below the drink: you'd done it all and yet

everything comes too early or too late.

You brought your own wine, black solid Petrus,

uncorked in a Turnbull & Asser carrier

into the bar, your milieu, transient

lawless underbelly types, one mirror

breaking up the room: you talked age, not art,

and skinny boys dropped in, viral error

already in their cells. You'd give me wads

to write and eat:' poets subvert systems

they'll always think you're fucking alien,'

and half the world poured out to Regent Street

or Piccadilly, didn't mean a thing:

we felt tube traffic vibrate through our feet.

You got ill, kept away: the rain today

bringing you back - I mean the kindness there

for beautiful losers who losing all

win the experience - I'll stay with them

as your uncompromising legacy -

'you always face forward back to the wall.'

Thinking of Late Bowie

The suited David Jones gone puffy now

from medication, it's Atenonal,

no persona put out for hire,

the accent indigenous south Brixton

toasted by hot cigarette smoke,

the flat vowels level as the street

oikish with atonal cockney.

He stares out on Lafayette Street,

Nolita and Notto's lofted bankers,

buzz-cut lawyers playing scratchy guitar,

the dudes who wash their hands in liquid gold,

dollars stuffed into burger buns,

a red sun facing down his retro shades,

like a planet dancing on obsidian.

What's missing's subjectivity,

there's no-one in the songs, no personal admissions,

they're empty as growing stressed plants in space

on a service module, their clues cut-up

and scrambled into accidents.

Bowie's late shape's like a Viagra pill

a blue coated modern diamond

that does a nitric oxide surge

into spontaneous disconnect, a hard

that's really anyone's.

Death's not an option, a slow boat to China's

not available, he's left to face it out,

the present, like a conical grey cloud

the colour of the building it crosses

tracking its slow shuffling way across the river.

Shad Thames Blues

A fuzzy smoked-out puffed hairdo,

damped, smudgy penumbra - Morrissey's quiff

put into a tumble-dryer,

it's that quirky fog regrouping

all over town today, a drenched

whiteout at St. Saviour's Dock,

grungy repurposed Shad Thames licked

by 3-D shadows, it's the blues

bongoed from the Pool of London

gets into us, dispersed skitter

of beats from a ghetto-blaster

lodged in a niche, and someone there

squat by the grey slinky water,

a ketamine-head fugitive,

off-message gangsta, post-hipster,

don't know or ever will ID

of someone snuck under a wharf

in their foggy reality

mid-afternoon October 3pm,

as a postmodern attachment to time,

we moving with the city's push,

its energies prevent you standing still,

do that a moment and you drop.

You're in from Porto Alegre

an abstract I know as Brazil,

walking the river's churning soup,

a luminous grey-eyed Aquarian,

no edgy compromise, our fit

right on - and it's a blown-in day,

powdery, atomised drizzle-carrier

floating us over bridges spooked

by distances and muzzy stuff

to a South Bank red LED display

bleeding into the big divide

like lipstick smeared on a tissue.