Books like Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Well, I mean, GOD. You know? So beautiful. But also Ashbery sizing up the same kind of moral question over and over a dozen times in the space of a poem, and with dozens of poems (including the formidable and exhausting kind of index of ideas in the title poem) it just wrung me utterly dry. I could be completely wrong in my interpretation (Dana says: I could just be talking out of my ass) or doing the most pre-emptory surface reading. All this has happened before. (Particularly since Dana says that the first time she read this book -- at my age -- she sensed something very profound was happening but couldn't get a handle on what it was. And I'm all OH YEAH TOTALLY GOT THIS NO PROBS GUYS.)Still, Ashbery seems to be saying something authentic about the experience of being human--looking around at all the beauty, all the time, the most pedestrian obvious kind of beauty, the relentless surge of the physical world: dragonflies and tidepools and dirigibles and Queen Anne's Lace, all the time--and feeling suffocated. There's some essence, some meaning that just can't be sussed by the sum of all the world's physical parts. You're mired in all that gorgeous flotsam and jetsam, all those overcoats and scrambled eggs, beef and calico, but you can never get past it into something permanent that says ANYTHING about ANYTHING. "Are you sure this is what the pure day/ with its standing light intends?" Well sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it isn't, and sometimes it's all too much, but it is what it is. Thanks, John Ashbery, and goodbye.