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024 Hammer, Langdon.  "'But I Digress,'" Rev. of Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems by John Asbery.  New York Times Book Review, April 20, 2008, p. 21.

Hammer begins this review by boldly stating, "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the last 50 years as John Asbery.  Yet he has never been easy to place.  Each of his first 12 books . . . was in some way different from what other poets were doing and from whatever Asbery himself had just done."  This collection, Notes from the Air," shows us what Asbery has been doing the last 20 years.  First we see that this later poetry is not accessible.  "The poems, always difficult, got more difficult in the mid-1980's and have remained so," Hammer says and goes on to declare them "disjunctive and unpredictable, often zany."  They are, however, more or less about specific subjects.  For example, there are some satirical poems which hilariously mock "folksy good feelings."  Other poems make fun of our "interest in writers' lives and habits."  Homer, Melville, Proust, and Agatha Christie are dealt with.  Hammer adds that whatever else Asbery is writing about, he is writing about writing.  The poems are full of quotations--not specific quotations, but untraceable borrowings from a wide variety of human speech such as family Christmas letters, office memos, and letters from consumers.  "No American poet has had a larger more diverse vocabulary," Hammer proclaims.  Although Asbery does at times write in forms like pantoums or sestinas, for the most part he writes free verse, and although their meanings are usually inaccessible, there is a sense of urgency apparent in them, as if the poems intend to mean that "we must make what we do and say, and therefore how we live, count." 

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