For a number of years John Ashbery has been tackling the long poem…. [In] As We Know Ashbery has come up with his most original solution to this technical problem and one best suited to the idiosyncracies of his genius. The new book opens with "Litany," a 68-page poem printed in two separate columns; as the author's note puts it, "The two columns of 'Litany' are meant to be read as simultaneous but independent monologues." One reads a bit of one, then of the other, and every so often one stops to compare adjacent passages.

If I say this form is best suited to his genius, I do so because I believe it is the ideal transcription of Ashbery's sense of things: a mental space humming with signal and noise, focus and blur…. [Consciousness] is before everything else a continuous activity of decoding, one neither intense nor mild...