SOURCE: "The American Sublime, C. 1992: What Clothes Does One Wear?," in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 31, No. 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 425-41.

In the following review, Blasing offers favorable assessment of Flow Chart. Drawing parallels to the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth, Blasing concludes, "Flow Chart is a very entertaining book, which moves us practically to tears."

Flow Chart is John Ashbery's latest experiment; he continues to do his thing, but he knows better than anyone that experimental techniques play differently in 1992 than in 1962, let alone 1912. "One is doomed, / repeating oneself, never to repeat oneself, you know what I mean?" states his predicament. His oversize, long-lined, book-length poem has all the "avant-garde" markings, but he has no illusions that its formal discontinuities represent cultural opposition:

    What right have you to consider yourself
    anything but an enor-
       mously eccentric though
    not too egocentric character, whose sins of
    omission haven't omit-
      ted much...