FLOW CHART

First edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper illustrated by Trevor Winkfield. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt fresh, the contents, except for some light ink offsetting from a no longer present receipt to the front free endpaper, clean throughout. In the fine, bright dustwrapper. A lovely copy.

In 1987, Ashbery's friend, the artist Trevor Winkfield (who would eventually provide the jacket illustration), suggested to the poet that he write a one-hundred-page poem about his mother, who had recently died. Ashbery, according to John Shoptaw, later "recalled thinking, 'Say, that's something I haven't done before!', hasten[ing] to add, 'of course, it's not about my mother'." 'Flow Chart', Ashbery's longest single poem, was indeed originally written as a one-hundred-page, single-spaced typescript (this framework was deliberately obscured in the published version). Beginning on December 8, 1987, the poet decided in advance to finish the one hundred pages on July 28, 1988, his sixty-first birthday. An oblique elegy (complementing the earlier fifty-dizain 'Fragment' written in the wake of his father's death), the poem is also capacious and brimming with life, its long Whitman-esque lines exploiting the full span of the volume's large quarto pages. The poem has been compared to Wordsworth's 'Prelude', and the first page's "emptiness / so sudden it leaves the girders / whanging in the absence of wind" may recall the "gentle breeze" fanning Wordsworth's cheek having "escaped / [...] the vast city" (Ashbery, though, remains "in the published city", charting the flow). 'Flow Chart' is dedicated to Ashbery's bibliographer, lover, and eventually husband, David Kermani. (John Shoptaw, 'On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry' [Cambridge, MA: 1995].