Last night I saw John Ashbery give a reading on campus. He opened with a daunting double sestina from Flow Chart — as if to remind us that he was once a virtuoso, that back in the heroic age of Secretariat and Seattle Slew it was he alone who had won poetry’s Triple Crown — and then read several poems from his latest volume. In the question-and-answer period afterward he was remarkably open and down-to-earth, and at the end he even signed autographs.

In person, Ashbery is a modest presence. When I first saw him twenty years ago he reminded me of a sedated Lee Iacocca; today he looks more like Q from the Bond films. Mild and obliging as befits his Olympian status, there is even a kind of Winnie the Pooh sweetness to him.

Donnish, heavy-set, hunched by age, his eighty winters showed in the huffing which the mike picked up before he began, and audience questions had to be repeated to him by a moderator stationed at his elbow. Ashbery has never been a great reader. He goes on in a flat, uninflected tone, a bit sheepishly and with a great deal of momentum. Seeing him read sends one back to the page with a new appreciation, where one is relieved to find his lines etched sharply on the creamy paper with an unmistakeable air of radiance.

It strikes me as a trap to either explicate his poetics or condemn them. Even describing the habitual elements of his poetry promises to be an unrewarding exercise. His poems have echoes of high poetic diction from the English canon circa 1800; lush, precise description and hyperperception; meta-narrativity, in which what is being described is usually the sense of a moment, a day or a season, of a life or of the age, as if momentarily aware of the river of time while resting on a sandbar; touches of 50’s genre camp and baroque parody; an urgent predicament all the more urgent for being unclear as in Kafka; wisdom of a sentimental, almost sunny tone, the counterpart and companion of an overall moroseness.

A feeling of climax is sometimes provided by direct address, or by the regular flashes and stretches of an almost too pure brilliance, a momentary coming into focus, and when the conclusion is explicit it usually resolves into a mood of melancholy over an irretrievable past, both the once-whole cultural past of English poetry and a lack of personal companionship at the moment of writing.

In the same way that Lichtenstein gave us blown-up comic strip panels, Ashbery gives us dim memories of a lost fairytale, the false or vanished innocence of youth. The speaker’s predicaments, while presumably epistemological or somehow related to the creative process, usually have the same inscrutable quality as the dilemmas that haunt the protagonists of a late Henry James novel. Invisible to the less sophisticated, these problems may only be phantoms or scruples of an overrefined sensibility.

These elements often seem thrown together, a meal made of leftovers and whatever's on hand. Sometimes this comes off as casual and posh but other times it gives the whole the dissociated and intimidating quality of a state of possession. In his best work one can just detect the shaping intelligence behind it. By subtle arranging he is making art from trash, from post-narrative cultural debris and his own nightly mental detritus. In their comic disjunctions, abrupt swerves and mundane deflations, his poems function something like grown-up Mad-Libs, but with the names of Renaissance painters instead of fart or booger.

His poetry does not lack meaning, only context. Propped up on its own, a simple question like “What were we doing there?”, with its suspended referent and a sense of urgency at once both general and personal, is already enough to give a taste of his poems.

Coyness is central to Ashbery. Reading him is like a game of Twenty Questions in which the answer is nothing, or changes as the game is played, or was not determined before starting. As his throwaway titles indicate, there is no subject or “about”, though on a deeper and less radical interpretation the assumed context will always inevitably be the movement of his mind, what he’s thinking about as he writes.

Ashbery made his name by finding a way to sell dross as lacework. He seems to leave the good lines where they fall with the elegant indifference of a doe walking away from its droppings. Tapping away at his keyboard, he no doubt sincerely believes he has tapped into something deeper than sense. Perhaps he and Kerouac belong to a bygone Age of the Typewriter, hypnotized by its humming and in thrall to the irrevocability of each letter strike, tossing type bars as if they were divining sticks.

While his work is considered difficult by his admirers, it is closer to being a lullaby. Listening to him one begins to feel safely ensconced in one’s own asubjectivity. The lush sonorousness induces a soothing relaxation of the understanding, like acupuncture releasing an involuntarily clenched muscle of meaning we didn't know we had. We feel the neurotic comfort of not being interrupted – nothing bad can happen while I am speaking since my sentence must end before anything else can begin – and the child’s comfort of drifting off to a parent's cooing voice.

Nine times out of ten Ashbery offers not poetry but the feeling of poetry, like a schoolgirl makeout session which draws you in an inch but no further. He is undoubtedly a linguistic phenom, an authentic prodigy worthy of Oliver Sacks' attention, and in fact as a teenager appeared on a national TV quiz show. At times he comes off as a savant, an eternal innocent like Chauncey Gardner, poetry’s answer to Warhol. In other moments the mask of the ingenue seems to drop and one is faced with a critical intelligence as shrewd as that of John Updike.

Ashbery is the last Surrealist standing, still on stage decades after the show folded. At the risk of being clever one might say the Godot he is waiting for is Breton. His poetry is the automatic writing of an intensely shy polymath with two degrees in English Lit, and its effect somewhat like overhearing a shellshocked Norton Anthology trying to calm itself with whispers in a rubber room.

An art critic, he writes in imitation of the ultra-aloof surfaces of modern art but still manages to crank out his copy at the pace of a journalist on deadline. All this is now as recognizably a shtick as Sid Caesar’s old double-talk gag. The suspense was always in how long he could keep it up, and it is clear now the answer will be right up until the obit. It has also long been clear that there is no key to the mysteries, that as intended no one “understands” his poetry or ever will. Different kinds of people react differently to incomprehensibility, some defiantly adopting it as their own, others docilely accepting it as not essentially different than any other form of authority imposed on them.

His poems do not submit to close reading. While the ordinary reader may submit to its anaesthetic spell or make an effort to glean the good lines and leave the rest, a critic can only evaluate their goal or describe their effect.

Judging by my bookshelf I was once something of a fan. I own not only his first book but several others including the hilarious and hard-to-find satire he wrote with James Schuyler, as well as multiple copies of “Three Poems” which I used to buy whenever I found it used. Someone should really scan in all the hilarious 70’s cover photos of him with his open shirt and tight pants; they are far from irrelevant to his reception.

I always loved his early poem “Some Trees” for its simplicity and yet trying to reread it I am totally lost by the third line. In college “Three Poems” meant a lot to me because I was hypnotized by its feeling of meditativeness. That was the way I wanted to write.

As with Whitman and Stevens, you feel every word is his own, idiosyncratically chosen out of a hundred thousand crackling at his fingertips. I guess I finally got off the Ashbery train after the disappointment of “Flow Chart,” which I had rashly paid full price for and couldn’t get into even after repeated attempts.

Undoubtedly the most influential poet of his generation, Ashbery’s influence is so broad that it would be hard to pin down its specifics. He is like a jellyfish whose long tentacles sting and paralyze some while only gently brushing against others, but almost no one passes completely untouched.

Ashbery, once a force, is now a fact. He has made himself central to the vanguard tradition which runs from Stein and Artaud through legions of nameless fallen Surrealists and up to Jorie Graham and Anne Carson, and quite amazingly done so while also becoming the Bloom-certified heap-top-sitting poet in captivity of the Establishment at the same time, an accomplishment which no doubt involves the ambiguity as to whether he is calling for the destruction of the old world or more conservatively lamenting it. Perhaps this liberation-or-lament polyvalence is fundamental to the whole project of postmodernism.

For me trying to read Ashbery is like watching money burn. He is dazzlingly talented and yet all that talent goes spectacularly to waste. His heroes are all minor and obscure: Raymond Roussel, John Clare, Henry Darger. One might say Ashbery himself is a minor poet inexplicably raised to major status, like the petty thief who impersonates a hero of the Resistance in Rossellini’s General della Rovere, or that he is a major talent who for unknown reasons chooses to confine himself to a minor mode.

For generation after generation America has been in the strange position of having anti-intellectuals serve as its intellectuals. For at least five decades our art has risked emptiness in the strange hope of being more open than its predecessors, of somehow paradoxically remaining open even after being finished.

The rise of theory was bad for poetry. It has resulted in a shift in the canon towards works requiring explication and a tendency to produce new works that are more approximations of theory in a loosely poetic form than poems as such. The hard empirical drudge work of criticism was soon left behind when a career could be made with a pocket full of pet themes applicable to anything at hand. Hyperbolic skepticism and lax despair masqueraded as scientific rigor, taking it on faith that a thorough study of linguistics had always and only revealed the final impossibility of communication. Meaning itself was seen as hopelessly sentimental; meanwhile fourth-rate poems were produced in volume in order to prove the point.

It is worth remembering that the sur in Surrealism did not mean sub but super; it was conceived as a “deeper” realism that explored the dreams and the unconscious, following Freud. For a species whose buildings rarely fall down of their own accord, it is remarkably common to find humans defending nonsense as the true reality. Always the same card is played as a trump: the old art merely reflected the external world while the new will explore that crazy place, the mind, always posited as a heretofore unexplored country.

In truth, every poem is open to interpretation, so there’s no need to redesign poetry to be more open. Trying to write an open poem is actually an effort to frustrate interpretation, to close it off for the sake of self-protection both poetic and actual. Every poet secretly wants to communicate, no matter what they claim. Otherwise they could just scrawl WAR AND PEACE across the cover of the white pages and call it a Dada day.

The old appeal of James Joyce was in part the unspoken promise that reading a single supreme work could allow one to achieve one-stop culture without having cultivated real appreciation. Its greatness had to be raised up until it was so unquestionable as to spare one debating it. An album called When You’ve Heard Lou, You’ve Heard It All makes the same kind of promise in a lighter vein. Today as always most people go to college not to read but to be done with reading, to settle their tab with culture, after which their bookshelves consist largely of trophies from that time, travel guides and the occasional well-meaning gift.

Max Beckmann dismissed the work of all his abstract rivals as merely decorative. Similarly what is called by the grandiose name of language poetry might more precisely be termed texture poetry, and usefully imagined as a group of people who gather in the back rooms of fabric stores to caress bolts of raw silk but turn up their noses at a warm jacket fashioned of the same stuff for sale in the shop next door. The dirty little secret of so-called experimental poetry is that it is merely today's academic poetry and that it is far more slavishly derivative and rigidly formulaic than even the most commercial conventional writing.

It is always hard to go back to the corniness of realism after soaring in the limitless stratosphere of theory. How painful to crash-land back on Earth with such meager tools at one’s disposal. One’s father, one’s hometown… Newspaper clippings, half-forgotten loves… Subject-verb-object, Roget’s Thesaurus…

As Ice T put it, don’t hate the player, hate the game. The problem is not Ashbery or his poems but what the poetry world does with them. His counterfeits are the bad money that drives out the good, chasing away or deforming young talent and discouraging a broader audience.

The cult of Ashbery can not be displaced by a new supreme who will slay the dragon of his poetics and become chief – Simic or Zagajewski come to mind as candidates, already a notable falling-off – but rather by the modest knowledge that there are many good poets out there each of whom has written a few decent poems or more, and that tastes vary.

The genuine and deliberate scandal of Ashbery will be swept under the carpet after his passing, as his more coherent works are favored over the more numerous less coherent ones. Imitation is the fate of every individualist. Likewise with Ashbery, who will be stripped for parts and junked, his remains mummified.

In the end, I find the accumulated mass of Ashbery’s work more repellent than not. It verges on the tragic to think of new generations being weaned on it, their minds prostrate before a false idol of spontaneity. What will become of the grublings who grew up during the superior-minded suspension of meaning, trained to consider themselves fortunate merely to eavesdrop on the simulated gibberish of another person's interiority? Will they be condemned to triviality and minor league mystery-mongering, unaware of what’s been lost? Every day I see them standing around milk-mustached, drinking from mugs of cream and thinking it’s the strongest coffee.