A Life of Beginnings

THE MOORING OF STARTING OUT The First Five Books of Poetry. By John Ashbery. 389 pp. Hopewell, N.J.: The Ecco Press. $25.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY poetry is a literature of beginnings, renunciations and restarts. Every major writer has had to forswear whatever looked ''poetic'' -- flowers, romance, pets, finer feelings, neatly laced quatrains -- as well as anything too self-consciously radical. (The conventionally avant-garde is only the mirror image of the conventionally conservative.) As John Ashbery once put it with offhand clarity: ''You can't say it that way anymore.''

For him, new beginnings are always moments of poignant self-awareness, of nostalgia as well as potential release, of time magically imbued with meaning before any action has occurred.

At 70, Ashbery is the writer who has most successfully merged two major lyric traditions: the line of verbal collage deriving from Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein and the discursive, meditative line running from Wallace Stevens. Although he has won almost every major literary honor, perhaps no other 20th-century American poet has been more subtly attuned to the dulling effect of canonization than Ashbery. For him, such prizes and fame seem little more than sweetly scented warning signs that his strategies have become too easily legible, that his poems are in danger of being embalmed as what W. H. Auden once called ''Poetry with a capital 'P.' '' Certainly no other poet has been more diligent about finding new ways of ''starting out'' again -- of continuously emerging from the shadow of his own previous work.

''The Mooring of Starting Out,'' a reprint of Ashbery's first five collections of poems (1956-72), demonstrates that almost all his writing from early to late looks like one enormously intricate effort at, in Stein's phrase, ''beginning and beginning and beginning.'' Often, Ashbery's overcoming of self has occurred with the help of complicated (and frequently arbitrary) formal schemes designed to set new poetic ground rules and to inhibit his straightforwardly personal utterances. In a poem such as ''Litany,'' for instance, the reader's eyes have to dart back and forth between two immense columns of writing that run side by side as ''simultaneous but independent monologues.'' And in the book-length ''Flow Chart,'' Ashbery beguilingly decided that he would write a poem of 100 single-spaced pages that had to be finished on his 61st birthday.

Ashbery's earliest work reveals a similar dwelling on self-evasion and self-renewal. ''Starting out,'' the present participle hanging there in a numinous state of open-endedness, is Ashbery's Americanized term for ''beginning.'' The phrase comes from his well-known meditation ''Soonest Mended,'' which he once called his ''one-size-fits-all confessional poem.'' Ashbery's lyrical credo here is that poetry should be a contemplative vacillation and nonintervention, ''a kind of fence-sitting / Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal.'' In this newly fertile and receptive state, ''action'' is merely ''this careless / Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow.'' (Here, as elsewhere, the subdued richness of Ashbery's language is wonderfully complex: ''careless'' itself fence-sits, meaning both artless and worry-free.) As the poem weaves characteristically to its end, ''starting out'' is revealed always to be ''coming back'' -- whether to be revitalized or newly disenchanted -- to one's original conditions, ''the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.''

In an almost purgatorial way, a poet like Ashbery is moored in, or tied to, the state of ''starting out'' -- bound, that is, to a practice of endless renewal. As he explains in his essay ''The Invisible Avant-Garde,'' all experimental artists must depart not only from tradition but also from their previous writing. They can no more conform to their established methods of experimentation than to the tradition of salon or academic art that they reject. (''To praise this, blame that, / Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where / We must stay, in motion,'' Ashbery writes in ''Houseboat Days.'')

The starting point, for him, is a moment of pure potentiality, a state of unsullied, dewy freshness of perception and inspiration, a time when, as the first lines of Ashbery's first book put it, ''We see us as we truly behave: / From every corner comes a distinctive offering. / The train comes bearing joy.'' In new beginnings, time is magically colored with meaning before any action has occurred. Even the famous obscurity of some of his poetry seems driven by this desire always to be seen setting forth; what is a hermetic idiom but the sign of a new language getting itself under way? Logic and syntax slide and slither in Ashbery's poems, narratives proliferate, and characters fade in and out. As if in homage to the bizarre realities of modern physics, there is no such thing as a straight line through an Ashbery poem; everything is tangential, zigzagging or oddly bent.

Tellingly, then, Ashbery's career seems to get going several times over. It is hard to locate the genesis of his characteristic poetic note: ''I was happy just bumming along, / Any old way, in and out, up and down,'' a voice remarks brightly at one point. His first volume, ''Some Trees'' (1956), is clearly a book of the 1950's -- the ''unendurable age,'' as one poem balefully puts it -- in its mannered reticence and devotion to some of the more intricate poetic forms: the sestina, pantoum and canzone. Many of the early poems have a delicately traced perfection of surface, while others maintain precarious fantasies of faraway places, such as Guadalajara in the famous poem ''The Instruction Manual.'' Over all, this initial book's subject matter seems almost deliberately conventional. The title poem, a love lyric, announces that ''soon / We may touch, love, explain.'' Ashbery later referred to this as ''my farewell to poetry as we know it -- it had a paraphrasable meaning.''

His next collection, ''The Tennis Court Oath'' (1962), whose title refers to the drawing by the French artist David, was truly a leave-taking. In retrospect, it is the kind of eruptive volume that one might have predicted from a young man who finds himself alone in a foreign country. Ashbery was now living in Paris, exposed to new traditions of linguistic experimentation in French poetry and to the anti-hermeneutic outlook of the 1960's. ''The Tennis Court Oath'' is explosively dadaistic in form. It establishes a dialectical relation to his earlier, more polished work, and is dominated by poems that are radically ''open'' and disjunctive. Words are spattered onto the page in a style full of wild leaps, discontinuities, fragments. Not all the poems are like this. The superb ''To Redoute'' looks forward to Ashbery's later, more reflective manner, and inaugurates the wistfully antiquarian tone that is such a pleasurable part of his mature writing.

But in general, chaos predominates. The apogee of this collage-based and aleatory phase in Ashbery's oeuvre is ''Europe,'' a veritable babel of different voices. In 111 variously-sized sections, the poem seems to describe some kind of revolutionary or artistic insurrection. Here is a sampling:

32.

The snow stopped falling

on the head of the stranger.

In a moment the house would be dark

33.

mirrors -- insane.

Ashbery has described this slightly glib ''cut-up'' strategy as a way of ''taking poetry apart to try to understand how it works.'' He was experimenting with poetry's limits, seeing how far the elements of a poem could appear unrelated and yet have some mysterious poetic and imaginative connection for the mind to trace out.

But having toyed with this deconstructive process, Ashbery changed direction again with his next book, ''Rivers and Mountains'' (1967), seeking, as he said, to ''fit'' poetry ''back together'' again. That sense of reconvergence is beautifully signaled in ''Into the Dusk-Charged Air,'' a kind of aria for the encyclopedia reader, in which 154 rivers (by my count) are mentioned in 150 lines of verse. Instead of the old fragmentation, the dominant experience here is one of enormous but placid interconnection, of a stately but unstoppable liquidity. The volume is much more conversational than Ashbery's previous work, and indeed, several poems seem cryptically to address readers for the first time, notably in ''A Blessing in Disguise'': ''And I sing amid despair and isolation / Of the chance to know you, to sing of me / Which are you.''

And yet, having broached this possibility of connection, Ashbery began ''The Double Dream of Spring'' (1970) by announcing, ''They are preparing to begin again,'' suggesting (perhaps too hopefully) that with movement comes a release from intimacy: ''A last level of anxiety that melts / In becoming. . . .'' This new trajectory leads away from the specific and circumstantial and toward the austere, glacial abstraction of ''Fragment,'' a love poem of 50 10-line stanzas, modeled on the ''fruitful monotony'' of the Renaissance poet Maurice Sceve.

BY now, many of what have come to be recognized as Ashbery's favorite tropes were crystallizing -- a strange, antic stoicism, amicable caprices, outre forms of lyricism and challenging goofiness. In the sestina ''Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,'' for instance, the stock types of the traditional pastoral are replaced by cartoon characters. But this, like all Ashbery's artistic strategies, was directed against the very notion of a consistent poetic signature.

Ashbery had also by now developed a startlingly mixed and comprehensive representation of contemporary language and tones of voice. ''Rather than be pure, accept yourself as numerous,'' he says to his many selves in one pleasantly sluggish poem, as he revises Whitman's egotistical ''I contain multitudes'' into a more understated, psychologized key.

''Three Poems'' (1972), the self-deprecatingly modest title of the final volume in ''The Mooring of Starting Out,'' represents another drastic departure from what had come before. This new book is written in a hovering, fluctuating, diluvian prose. Water has often provided Ashbery with images of personal and poetic transcendence. Although his later writing is exquisitely poised, the effect of reading his work in bulk is (as many critics have observed) to feel swamped and destabilized by an almost limitless energy, as linguistic tides, rushing in and out, erode one's familiar mental habits and connections. ''We must drink the confusion,'' Ashbery writes. And elsewhere: ''We are all characters in the opera 'The Flood.' ''

Four years later, Ashbery's most celebrated book, ''Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,'' would appear, fixing him in the poetic firmament -- a strange position for one so devoted to mobility and restlessness. From that point, even his best critics began to celebrate him in nakedly chauvinistic terms as part of an ''American'' line, stretching back to the Emerson of ''Circles.'' Ashbery, however, is as much a modern as he is an American, in dialogue with other equally profound but transnational aspects of contemporary experience. His, for instance, is the poetry of flickering consciousness in the modern metropolis, a place full of what the sociologist Georg Simmel called ''tremendous agitation and excitement.'' And it is also imbued with a desire, perhaps an especially important one for a homosexual writer, to ignore linguistic and social norms and to stand aside from prescriptive rules of ''development,'' whether poetic, logical or psychological.

In any case, ''starting out'' for Ashbery has never been the optimistically all-American experience that it was for Emerson: an easy sloughing off of a previous life, ''with no Past at my back,'' as Emerson writes blandly in ''Circles.'' Rather, like Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, Ashbery often seems to enter the future looking backward, harrowed by the past's debris, by fragments of memory, catches of old songs as well as ghosts of possible meaning.

Although the word ''mooring'' may gesture toward his obsession with flowing water and continual change, it also testifies to the looming prospect of stasis and extinction. ''Our daily imaginings are swiftly tilted down to / Death in its various forms,'' he writes.

So it is not because Ashbery is a ''strong'' poet (to use Harold Bloom's favored term) that his work remains so inviting. It is rather because he is, in a special sense, an exemplarily weak one, full of representative doubts and anxieties, fond memories, misapprehensions and fears. His poetry appeals not because it offers wisdom in a packaged form, but because the elusiveness and mysterious promise of his lines remind us that we always have a future and a condition of meaningfulness to start out toward. This book of beginnings takes us back to the mooring of John Ashbery's starting out, ''that day so long ago.'' It contains a poetry whose beauties are endless.