After Ashbery : THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1988 <i> edited by John Ashbery; series editor, David Lehman; (Collier Books/Macmillan: $19.95, cloth, $9.95, paper; 0-684-18983-6; 0-02-044181-9) </i>

The idea behind this book is an extremely good one--to display the full variety of contemporary U.S. poetry by arranging 75 poets in alphabetical order, each represented by work that had been published in 1987.

The career of each contributor is described in an appendix, and some of the poets supply helpful comments on their poems. It’s interesting to be told what magazines first published the poems, and aspiring poets will find it useful to have the addresses of these magazines supplied, together with the names of their editors.

Moreover, the table of contents promises great diversity--important figures like Robert Creeley, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill and Richard Wilbur, all very different from each other.

For the representation of poets like this, however, the policy of one poem each is a problem. These four all have short poems, and their presence is muted in this way--it seems hardly more than a token.

This is compounded by worse problems, which are connected with the choice of John Ashbery as the guest editor. Ashbery has admitted in interviews that he doesn’t read much poetry, and the anthology shows clear signs that he approached the task with too narrow a perspective.

Some of this might have been corrected by the series editor, David Lehman, who says in his foreword that he is “expected to support and assist the guest editor, in part by scanning the world of magazines and making preliminary recommendations.”

It would surely have been better if such a role had ben performed by someone as different as possible from Ashbery. That the series editor has also edited a critical book on the guest editor can’t have helped in this respect, nor that the series editor’s poems are influenced by the guest editor’s.

The worry this arouses about incestuousness is worsened by the alarming number of contributors who are associated in some way with Ashbery. John Ash is Ashbery’s principal British follower; Kenneth Koch is an old friend; James Schuyler has written a novel with Ashbery; David Shapiro has written a book about him. And so on.

It soon becomes clear, then, that this book’s eponymous boast (the “best”) is not going to be fully delivered.

There are definite biases of taste at work: There is much that is discursive and/or surreal and/or antic, much that has a New York style or setting, quite a few touches of highbrow camp. There is little that concerns itself with society or history, little that is narrative or autobiographical or realist.

Women’s poetry, too, is under-represented. Men occupy four times as many pages in the book as women.

In fact, perhaps the greatest value of “The Best American Poetry 1988” is really in what it says about Ashbery and his influence. And this is no small thing. His “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is one of the most important poems written in English in the last 20 years.

And the anthology shows that his influence can be invigorating. The long poems by Clark Coolidge and John Koethe that display it draw upon its characteristic resources--the ease with which it moves between abstract discussion and vivid (often surreal) imagery--to interesting effect.

This is a poetic that combines discursiveness with surrealism to enact the difficulties discourse faces--difficulties that arise because our sense of reality is compromised by the way our minds and our language turn it into fiction.

It gives poetic meaning to the old joke about a professor being someone who talks in somebody else’s sleep. These poems read like a philosophy lecture surreally displaced; this is from John Koethe’s “Mistral”:

What remains behind

Is a kind of feeling of contingency, a gradual

waning of the present

Into a mere possibility, as though it were a

dream

of the extent of life

In which there wasn’t a n y tangible

experience of

finitude, only a dull,

Unfocused anger as the words slide off the

page and

out of memory,

And the faces wash away like caricatures on

a wall,

and the sky fades.

The frequency with which writing of this kind occurs--and some of the other kinds practiced by Ashbery and the New York poets--exerts a pressure on the whole book. An Ashbery perspective seems to affect even some of the established figures.

In reading the contributions by Simic and Snyder, for example, I started to feel as if I had wandered into a work by Italo Calvino, as if the whole book was a verse “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” the editor’s poetic mating with the contributors’ and producing bizarre chimerae . There are, after all, important elements of parody in Ashbery’s work.

Admittedly, the only Ashbery element in the Snyder is that it’s a poem about New York, but this is surely strange enough. The San Francisco Beat poet more recently retreated to the High Sierra seems, in this company, a kind of Zen Crocodile Dundee.

Simic’s poem is also about New York and its surrealism alternates between the dark elliptical kind he usually writes and the urbane playful kind more associated with Ashbery.

Or maybe it’s just a gravitational pull exerted by the rest of the book that makes Snyder and Simic read like new recruits for the post-modernist Village People. A pressure that half-annexes them.

Fortunately, there are some poets in the anthology who resist this pressure with complete success. For example, the discursiveness practiced by Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass is quite different from Ashbery’s. These two are represented by quite long poems, as also is Marc Cohen, who has more of Hass and Pinsky in him that he has of the editor.

Most exceptional of all, however, are Philip Levine and Alan Williamson, whose presence--according to the introduction--seems even to surprise Ashbery, because of his bias against political poetry. They won him over, though, by seeming “fresh and newly minted.”

To come upon these poets in this context is almost disorienting, like putting down Derrida and turning on the TV news.

What distinguishes Williamson is his willingness to negotiate a public subject--nuclear weapons--and so risk painting himself into a cliched corner. What makes his “Recitation for the Dismantling of a Hydrogen Bomb” so effective are the techniques he discovers for defamiliarizing that subject.

He avoids the too-big gestures of the apocalyptic by the use of a quietly meditative tone, and by bringing as much intelligence to this subject as other poets in the anthology bring to their discussions of art, fiction and language. Valid and, at times, fascinating as the latter discussions are, there are too many of them in “The Best American Poetry, 1988”; and by contrast Williamson’s poem displays art, fiction and language put into (still sophisticated, still post-modernist) practice. Here, he is addressing the nuclear missiles:

We have seen you, as in the mirror of a shield,

suddenly standing tall on so many sides of us

like beautiful ghosts--able to hold completely

still on your columns of smoke, then making

a slight lateral tilt to take direction.

And then we realized--everything

standing, the rattled

watch on the table a-tick--we

were the ghosts,

and you, your power, our

inheritors.