In deciding to write a “response” to a book published within the last ten years, I landed on an enormously influential book in my own practice: John Ashbery’s 2015 collection Breezeway. Ashbery’s stature, of course, means that one need only to refer to him by mononym, like “Nicki” or “Taylor.”
Writing about Breezeway in the context of Ashbery’s vast body of work feels daunting (bonkers) for many reasons. First, it immediately feels sacrilegious to opine on the work of someone I—and virtually everybody else in the English-speaking world, it seems—admire. I’ve been called a “Fourth Generation” New York School poet by the likes of Denise Duhamel, Grady Chambers, and others. I do not wear this badge lightly, being aware of the reticence of original New York School members vis-à-vis using that tag as an organizing unit.
Second, it absolutely triggers a brain freeze when you attempt to write about something you visit and revisit with such shocking frequency. Consider your neighborhood bar—when asked to describe it, you may genuinely have a deer-in-headlights moment. Your failures echo and reecho, bouncing off the walls of your writer’s block. You remember the sense of comfort and familiarity the bar gives you;you know it “so well” but you simply struggle to describe it—the placement of chairs, where the fireplace is, in which direction the TV is mounted, and so on.
Third, I have found in conversations over the years that I am in a distinct minority (otherwise familiar territory for me) of poets who enjoy Ashbery’s late-stage work—beginning with 2002’s Chinese Whispers and beyond—and this unpopular opinion (or “hot take”) has led to some uncomfortable silences.
Admittedly, some of Ashbery’s later work misses the mark on originality. As Kenneth Koch said, the next line should always be a surprise, and Ashbery at times fumbled this. Given his decades-long career, it may just be that Ashbery had run out of things to say—that, being hyperaware of winding down his life and career, he had literally exhausted all opinions. The poet and critic Emily Skillings has testified in Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works that Ashbery would rate (rank?) his poems by scoring them with As, Bs, Cs, and the like. This was based on the relative merits of the poems, according to Ashbery’s own keen eye, but not dispositive in putting together a collection. That is to say, a collection would be well-served (balanced) by having a mix of As and Bs and Cs. It may well be the case, therefore, that Ashbery’s later collections simply had more Cs and Ds than his earlier ones.
In writing this note, I’ve taken the approach of the poet and essayist Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, meaning I’m paraphrasing and riffing from memory to give you a more honest and gestalt “take” on Ashbery. The process is similar to what most people would call automatic writing, with all the benefits and drawbacks associated with it. This, I figure, is how to arrive at my realest feelings. I have not consulted reviews of Ashbery’s work or topical texts to prepare this note. I apologize in advance for any errors in memory or judgment.
Now, to dive right into Breezeway, I would point to the most glaring shift in this collection versus those previous: the use of what I call “extremely current affairs.” Gone are the references of yesteryear like O’Hara’s Ginger Rogers and Kiss Me Deadly (though those, needless to say, were current to Frank’s time). Ashbery mentions the Kardashians along with a fabricated “Superstorm Elias.” Also purged, it seems, are the quips and observations from his favorite Turner Classic Movies. Batman and Peanuts (as in Snoopy) are still around, but those are, at least in the American imagination, effectively immortal references.
Another glaring shift is Ashbery’s reliance on shorter poems. Early Ashbery was famously verbose. Here, I detect a newfound lightness of hand, a joie de vivre. I find late Ashbery’s exuberance a refreshing change from early Ashbery, which sometimes offered the sensation of a pleasant drowning—soothing, but you’re still drowning. The shortest poem in Breezeway is perhaps six lines—Ashbery outdoes himself in 2016’s Commotion of the Birds, where the shortest poem “Who Will Do the Kissing?” is, if memory serves, four lines.
In that respect, Ashbery’s language in Breezeway feels more tailored, targeted, purposeful even—I’ve written in another context that Ashbery is best read high, that his writing is meant to be experienced– as it is unlike any other–that unique swimming in voluminous text and fascinating deluge of non sequitur. Here, I find Ashbery’s writing to be surgical, precise, a real gut punch that manages to be perfectly choreographed and timed.
Relatedly, in Breezeway, I get the distinct impression that reader fatigue was absolutely a consideration in putting this collection together. Totally absent is the sense that Ashbery wanted to throw the kitchen sink at readers because the actuarial tables predicted a limited number of projects in his future. Instead, this collection feels well-paced, and its page count would not make any reasonable reader blush. The poet and educator Dorothea Lasky has described her work as being part of a massive loom and her task in deciding where to snip. Across Ashbery’s bibliography, his track record on this (i.e., where to snip) has been mixed but appears to be mercifully corrected here.
This all leads me to wonder: is Breezeway representative of Ashbery’s oeuvre, or does it stand out as an anomaly? (To present an analogy: was the election of Barack Obama a breakthrough or an aberration?) Ashbery’s poems somehow always manage to rub against each other to create resonances across projects, decades, and the like. But I tend to think that Breezeway is its own beast, more in tune/alike in vibe with the poet Adam Fitzgerald’s two published collections (The Late Parade and George Washington, published in 2013 and 2016 respectively) than Ashbery’s previous contributions. There is certainly some cross-pollination there.
Breezeway’s brilliance lies in large measure in its being clever but not too clever—a fine balance that Ashbery has mastered with this volume. Like Fitzgerald’s texts, Ashbery’s Breezeway is wistful and whimsical, confident and multifaceted. It is a luxurious, erudite bath of references, philosophical yet banal, elusive yet revelatory. It is an invigorating effort, at once metaphoric and specific. As a poet, I find that it is a real Goldilocks dilemma when juggling wit, coyness, and surprise. It takes a practiced hand, a seasoned eye to entice the reader with sly intelligence—a nod and a wink for the reader to find their bearings, but also be ready and willing to take this leap with you.
Michael Chang
Michael Chang (they/them) is the author of Things A Bright Boy Can Do (Coach House Books, 2025) and Heroes (Temz Review/845 Press, 2026). They won the Poetry Project's Brannan Prize and edited Lambda Literary's Emerge anthology. Their work has appeared in such publications as AGNI, American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, and Poetry. They judged Cream City Review's 2025 Prize in Poetry. They lived in Shaker Heights from 2011 to 2014, and currently live in Manhattan.