POEM OF THE DAY: from John Ashbery's Flow Chart

For today, a short excerpt from the very first page of John Ashbery's long poem Flow Chart (1991). While I certainly have to take my time in consuming this poem (only a few pages in one sitting, for the most part), there is a way in which Ashbery's language propels us forward and yet never overwhelms us with momentum––an impressive feat, and absolutely imperative to the success of a poem that demands of its reader 216 page-turns. It has something to do, I think, with the way his meaning is both completely obscure and perfectly, unflinchingly clear (but how does he do that??).

FROM FLOW CHART

Sad grows the river god as he oars past us

downstream without our knowing him : for if, he reasons,

he can be overlooked, then to know him would be to eat him,

ingest the name he carries through time to set down

finally, on a strand of rotted hulks. And those who sense something

squeamish in his arrival know enough not to look up

from the page they are reading, the plaited lines that extend

like a bronze chain into eternity.

It seems I was reading something;

I have forgotten the sense of it or what the small

role of the central poem made me want to feel. No matter.