Flow Chart: A Poem

"Reticent, shy, unfailingly modern, Ashbery is as unorthodox [as] any of the great twentieth-century creators: Breton, Stravinsky, Picasso," observed Jeremy Reed in Britain's Poetry Review. "We are privileged to be around at a time when he is writing." Flow Chart, a book-length poem that first appeared in 1991, might be Ashbery's greatest creation: a staggering and exuberant "torrent of invention [that] comes as close to an epic poem as our postmodern, nonlinear, deconstructed sensibilities will allow. . . . "