SOURCE: "Afloat," in Parnassus, Vol. 17, No. 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 40-51.

In the following review, Reilly offers tempered praise for Flow Chart. According to Reilly, Flow Chart represents "an endless flow of disrupted ruminations, literary fragments, pseudo-conversations, pieces of argument, and other language objects, inviting us to look for patterns but not guaranteeing that there are any."

At a time when all the big themes—the gods, the hero, the artist-hero, truth, the imagination, the past redeemed, the utopian dream—are definitely lowercase, it would seem to require a certain hubris to write a very long poem. Yet John Ashbery's new book-length poem, Flow Chart, fills its 216 pages unabashed. Innocent of themes and unencumbered by the mandates of coherence and unity, this poem can be accused, at most, of the quantitative hubris of a journal kept for decades. It is, in fact, characterized by a qualitative humility, if the Ashberyan...