For John Ashbery’s ninetieth birthday, the Guardian’s poetry critic reproduces and discusses this late-career poem of his:

Life is a Dream

I know I’ll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what’s called for, meanwhile.
It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things
definitely aren’t it. This gloved hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

******************

In her telling, it’s bristling with homophobia, Auschwitz, coming of age, and love; UD on the other hand reads it as a mildly anxious gloss on Yeats’s similar late-career poem, Circus Animal’s Desertion.

Both poems, IMHO, feature old poets reflecting on the process of aesthetic creation, on the way some people – people like them – are sort of both blessed and cursed with the ability to take the random broken stuff of the world and transform it into art. In Yeats, the poet mucks around in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Ashbery’s in the same trash- and lumber-yard:

A talent for self-realization
will get you only as far as the vacant lot
next to the lumber yard

Same point, no? A capacity for transforming the vague fallen dross of the world into meaningful formal beauty is only a capacity – all your poetic life you must try to get farther than the vacant lot (note the nice internal contradiction of that phrase, the word “lot” meaning not only enclosed place, but many – so again the rag and bone shop, the lumber yard, is full of things; there’s a lot in or near that lot; but since nothing has been done to transform any of its objects and make it meaningful, it is vacant, expressionless). The vacant lot is the abundant object-nothingness, the object-silence, of the world that confronts the poet again and again as he attempts to write a poem and give the world words. At this late stage in their poetic lives, both Yeats and Ashbery are feeling some degree of panic, let’s say, as their imaginative powers wane (What can I but enumerate old themes) and their profoundest images begin to look old.

Letters, being “read off,” the beginning of the line: The rest of Ashbery’s first stanza expresses – in his typical oblique vague dreamy way – the difficulty of beginning a poem — beginning an Ashbery poem, with a capital A. This poem self-reflexively elaborates upon the perennial gnawing anxiety of the poetic vocation, the creative imperative; and the surrealistic introduction of the nasty urging rodent-like man in the next stanza would, in this account of the poem, be the poet’s own anxious impatient self-punishing insistence on a life of continued artistic productivity: Don’t just muck around inside this dream, you fool – you’ve learned how to make anything “real” – that is, you’ve learned how to give anything persuasive aesthetic shape and life – and your vocation is to continue to do so. Take whatever you like from the lumber yard/rag and bone shop. Take

The corner of the stove,
a cloud of midges at dusk-time.

And fashion it into poetic form.

Or maybe Ashbery’s poem/poetic dream is the temporal inverse of Yeats’s – maybe this is the old Ashbery remembering himself as a young poet, a poet just beginning to be “schooled” in poetry. If so, his last stanza is the old poet reflecting on his subsequent decades of education in world-transformation:

I know I’ll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what’s called for, meanwhile.
It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things
definitely aren’t it. This gloved hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

What is life, and what is a dream? Both dream and life are dream, and if you are a poet “It was the dream itself enchanted me.” Dream is anything, but sly life slips in things that boast of solid empirical real life, like the sudden feeling in your hand of a gentle, guiding, and loving gloved hand that slips so easily into yours and seems destined to stay by you permanently — that’s a certain thing that definitely is not life. That is the poet’s writing hand gloved into a false comfort and ease which amounts to an evasion of the artistic imperative. Think of the complex invitations and evasions of the painterly hand that dominates Ashbery’s most famous poem; “Life is a Dream” is yet another enumeration of the theme of poetic consciousness and poetic procedure:

Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed […]
Something like living occurs, a movement
Out of the dream into its codification.