Ashbery in 1996. (Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)

When he was 8 years old, John Ashbery stopped writing poetry. He’d just finished a poem about the battle of the snowflakes and the bunnies. It rhymed. He was pleased enough with it to pound it out on a typewriter. His parents sent a copy of the poem to his mother’s cousin. The family lived on a farm outside of Rochester in a rural town so small that it didn’t even have a kindergarten. The cousin was married to the son of the famous mystery novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, the “American Agatha Christie.” Rinehart lived on Fifth Avenue and read the poem aloud at her Christmas celebration. It would not, Mr. Ashbery believed, get any better than this. He figured he’d quit while he was at the top of his game.

His retirement didn’t last long. In December, Ecco published Quick Question, his 26th book of original poems. In 2008, he was the first living poet to have his collected poems published by the Library of America. The first volume is a thousand pages long and only covers the years 1956-1987, the first three decades of Mr. Ashbery’s career; a second volume is in the works. He’s been called the greatest 20th-century American poet so many times that he’s been dismissed almost as frequently as overrated.

“Whole libraries have been written about John by now,” the critic Harold Bloom told me. “I find it just silly. It’s all devoted to this notion that he’s a French poet writing in English. Or that he’s a Language Poet. It’s all nonsense.”

“I don’t really feel like John should be pigeonholed into a particular school,” Alice Quinn, the former poetry editor at The New Yorker, said. “I think he demonstrates more what poetic thinking is. It’s both a jumble and coherent. He manages to capture a lot of the palpable feeling of being alive in his writing.”

His detractors say he’s too difficult. His fans say that the naysayers don’t know how to read poetry.

“I’m sure people do struggle with his poems,” the poet Paul Muldoon, Ms. Quinn’s successor at The New Yorker, wrote in an e-mail. “Why wouldn’t they? We struggle to give birth. We struggle to get born. We struggle to copulate. Some of us even have to struggle to die.”

Last month, I went to the Chelsea apartment where Mr. Ashbery has lived since the early ’70s. There were stacks of books and papers resting on every available surface, and the building’s old brick walls did little to keep out the sound from Ninth Avenue. I was greeted by David Kermani, Mr. Ashbery’s partner since around 1970, when Mr. Kermani was in his early 20s. He’s a small, spry man in his 60s, and he had helped set up the meeting, because Mr. Ashbery, who is 85, does not use e-mail much. Walking into a large living room, I could see the back of Mr. Ashbery’s head, a patch of messy white hair jutting out above the back of a recliner that faced the window. There were two walkers and a cane propped close by. A spinal infection that almost killed him in the ’80s left him with a limited ability to walk. He’d had a bad fall recently. He was wearing a button-down shirt and slacks and offered a sad smile when he said, “Forgive me for not getting up. I have mobility issues.” He spat out the last words like he held the diagnosis against his doctor. Outside it was drizzling, and he looked out the window at Manhattan as if he were sizing it up.

When I asked him what it was like growing up in the country, he said, “It was horrible,” and then groaned loudly. He’s always had a strained relationship with nature in his writing, a kind of anti-Romantic approach to the sublime that weighs more heavily on the side of terror—or at least an eerie melancholy—than of awe or beauty. In “At North Farm,” a modified sonnet from the 1984 collection A Wave, he writes:

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are busting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky.

He lived with his grandparents when he was young so he could attend school in the city. His grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester. He moved back in with his parents when he got a little older, but he was lonely on the farm. When he was 12, his younger brother died of leukemia. He spent most of his time by himself until a wealthy friend of Mr. Ashbery’s mother agreed to pay for him to finish high school at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.

“By that time I had already discovered modern poetry,” he said. “High schools used to have current events contests sponsored by Time, if the class subscribed to the magazine. They were quite easy. I won the prize of a book. Of the four that they offered, the only one I was vaguely interested in was an anthology of modern American and British poetry by Louis Untermeyer.”

He had a friend at Deerfield who stole his poems and sent them to Poetry magazine with his own name attached. (He apologized, but then did it again with the lower-grade magazine Voices.) The friend followed Mr. Ashbery to Harvard, but once the two drifted apart, Mr. Ashbery started hanging around with poets who didn’t plagiarize his writing. He worked for the Advocate, where he met Kenneth Koch and Robert Bly. For most of college, he knew Frank O’Hara only by reputation. O’Hara was publishing stories and poems in the Advocate and was a fixture at parties around Harvard Square, but was too intimidating to talk to. A few months before graduating, Mr. Ashbery went to an opening at Mandrake Books for the illustrator Edward Gorey, O’Hara’s roommate. He overheard O’Hara talking to a group of people about the composer Francis Poulenc and noted a similar northeastern accent. Mr. Ashbery had drunk just enough wine to go up to him and say, “Hey, you sound just like me.”

At Harvard, they’d share poems and spend afternoons messing around with a piano. O’Hara would play his compositions—which have all been lost—like his sonatina that lasted three seconds. Once O’Hara returned to New York after finishing graduate school at the University of Michigan, the two attended John Cage’s 1952 New Year’s Day concert put on by the Living Theater. Cage played “Music of Changes,” an atonal, rhythmless work for solo piano.

“I was completely taken by surprise,” Mr. Ashbery said. “It was just arbitrary bangs on the piano over quite a long period of time. And long pauses. I had been in a drought with my writing. I felt I hadn’t written anything good in almost a year. It really gave me ideas about how to write poetry again.”

IN NEW YORK, THE YOUNG Harvard graduates met the poet James Schuyler and John Myers, co-proprietor of the newly opened Tibor de Nagy gallery. The gallery had already given painters like Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter and Larry Rivers their first solo shows. Ms. Freilicher was Koch’s neighbor in a walk-up at Third Avenue and 18th Street. They shared a kitchen. Koch went on vacation and let Mr. Ashbery stay at his place. He remembers the “pretty and somewhat preoccupied dark-haired girl” who painted in the apartment upstairs. They were drawn to each other by a mutual shyness.

Ms. Freilicher used to call Myers “The Grand and Glorious, Gay, Notorious John Myers.” He had already dubbed the painters at Tibor de Nagy the “New York School.” He was also very literary and interested in publishing poetry. The New York School label was mostly good PR—it made the gallery the de facto center of a certain scene, even if its members were only loosely connected stylistically. Myers figured he’d give the name to the painters’ poet friends as well and sell pamphlets of their work out of the gallery.

“There was no money behind it,” Ms. Freilicher told me. “Everything had to be done on the cuff. There was no actual school called the New York School of Painting, just like there was no New York School of Poets. These things just happened to emerge simultaneously.”

What connected the poets was mostly superficial. Besides Barbara Guest, they were predominantly men from the northeast; they were all homosexual except for Koch; they had all gone to Harvard except for Schuyler.

“I didn’t really feel one way or another about it,” Mr. Ashbery said. “A guy wants to say I’m a member of the New York School, fine. Now we can’t get rid of it. Now I sort of regret it. People mention ‘New York School,’ and that’s the label, and it sort of means certain things and that’s it. They’re sophisticated. Kind of frivolous. Lots of word games and French influence. Then we don’t have to think about it any further.”

In 1953, the gallery published a pamphlet by Mr. Ashbery, Turandot and Other Poems, which included four drawings by Ms. Freilicher. It had a print run of 300 and didn’t exactly announce the arrival of a major poet. By 1955, Mr. Ashbery was still writing publicity releases for textbooks at McGraw-Hill. He refers to ’55 as “my year of almost not-winning things.” He was rejected for a Fulbright to France, only to get it when someone else dropped out. Then his first major collection, Some Trees, was rejected for the Yale Younger Poets prize, because it didn’t make it as far as the competition’s judge, W.H. Auden; when Auden did finally read it, he had the university publish the manuscript. There’s a pastoral strain that runs through the book, but the poems are more concerned with their own composition than with nature or any kind of poetic tradition. (Indeed, the highly casual phrase “some trees” is a kind of dismissal of pastoral tradition altogether.) The final poem, “Le livre set sur la table” (“The book is on the table”), extends the question of the fate of a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it to a book that is never cracked open:

The young man places a bird house
Against the blue sea. He walks away
And it remains. Now other
Men appear, but they live in boxes.
The sea protects them like a wall.
The gods worship a line-drawing
Of a woman in the shadow of the sea
Which goes on writing ...

Mr. Ashbery was already living in France when the book was published. He spoke little French at first, but decided to extend his Fulbright to a second year anyway. He wrote occasional reviews for ARTnews, and briefly returned to America intent on writing a dissertation on Raymond Roussel, but abandoned the idea and moved back to France. That was 1958. He didn’t return to America for five years.

“I didn’t want to write very much at all for quite a while,” he told me. “And then when I did, I wanted to write in a different way. So I did. I wrote very experimental collages, without ever thinking that they would see the light of day. The first book didn’t have much success, and I didn’t think I would ever publish another one.”

Eventually John Hollander at Wesleyan University Press asked him if he had material for a second book. Mr. Ashbery sent him what he’d been working on, which was published as The Tennis Court Oath in 1962. It is opaque, even by Mr. Ashbery’s standards. The poem “Leaving the Atocha Station,” partly inspired by a trip to Spain with O’Hara, is essentially formless, and filled with the prose equivalent of John Cage’s long pauses:

The worn stool blazing       pigeons from the roof
___________driving tractor to squash
Leaving the Atocha Station   steel
infected bumps the screws
__everywhere    wells
abolished top ill-lit
scarecrow falls   Time, progress and good sense ...

It reads as if certain words and phrases have been deliberately deleted, but Mr. Ashbery told me it was mostly random. The result is like being in a busy foreign city where you don’t know the language, and picking up bits and pieces of conversations. The book’s status has risen in recent years—the poet Ben Lerner named his celebrated first novel after “Leaving the Atocha Station” (he wrote in e-mail to me that the first time he read Mr. Ashbery, “It was like oxygen flooded the room”)—but the initial reviews of The Tennis Court Oath were uniformly negative. Famously, J.W. Hughes called Mr. Ashbery “the Doris Day of modernist poetry.”

“I’m not sure what I expected to happen,” Mr. Ashbery said. “I realized it was very strange and not like anything people construed as poetry.”

Just before the book was published, Mr. Ashbery visited the famous French astrologer Andre Barbault. He asked him if the book would be a success. Mr. Barbault looked at his charts and said, “Ce n’est pas le bon moment encore.” It’s not the right time yet.

IN 1963, WHEN HE RETURNED to America, everything had changed. For one thing, there were poetry readings everywhere in New York. The Beats had arrived, and were being lumped in with the New York School. Mr. Ashbery found that his stature had risen. On September 16, 1963, he gave his first reading at the Living Theater. Koch introduced him by saying, “He’s one of the best poets now alive. My own opinion is that he is writing the best poetry that anybody now is writing in the English language.”

He returned to France and started working on his first important long work, “The Skaters.” He composed it on a typewriter, which became his preferred method of writing. The poem’s lines were so long that he couldn’t remember the end of one by the time he got to it, but he could type faster than he could write longhand. In France, he was living with the poet Pierre Martory and writing art criticism for the International Herald Tribune. He was refining the style of The Tennis Court Oath, making poems that were about reading the poems in question. They were loaded with mysterious antecedents and elusive imagery, but the work also became very readable. (“The Skaters” has a hilarious moment of transition that acts like a kind of manifesto: “This city. Is the death of the cube repeated. Or in the musical album./It is time now for a general understanding of the meaning of all this.”)

By 1965, he was back in New York for good—against his will. He didn’t want to leave Mr. Martory, but his father had died and there wasn’t anyone to take care of his mother. He had written about Andy Warhol’s first show in Paris, and when he returned to America, Warhol threw him a big party at the Factory on 47th Street. Not long after he came back, in 1966, O’Hara died in an accident on Fire Island. Unlike Mr. Ashbery, he hadn’t lived long enough to witness his influence on American writing.

“Grove Press had let Meditations in an Emergency go out of print, and as soon as he died, they had rushed it back into print,” Mr. Ashbery told me. “What I’m saying is Frank had become well-known to a sort of smaller poetry public, but not until he died—tragically—did he become the kind of eminence that he is now. And when somebody dies tragically, somehow the legend becomes bigger. In fact, Brad Gooch’s biography seemed to imply his death was part of an inexorable fall from grace. That’s not true at all.”

Another reason Mr. Ashbery returned to the States was that Thomas Hess, recently named the editor in chief at ARTnews, told him he could have the executive editor gig at the publication. He went on to work as the art critic for New York magazine in the late ’70s, and then, in 1980, for Newsweek. This meant he was essentially creating a new American avant-garde in his spare time. He’d write lines like, “Why must it always end this way? A dais with woman reading, with the ruckus of her hair/And all that is unsaid about her pulling us back to her, with her/Into the silence that night alone can’t explain” and follow them up with a bitchy review calling William-Adolphe Bouguereau “the Pooh Bah of nineteenth-century academicians.”

“I got off some nice wisecracks once in a while,” Mr. Ashbery told me. “But it got really scary. I’d have to write an article that the next week would be seen by thousands of people about something that I really didn’t know anything about. So I was doing a lot of on-the-job training. I felt compelled to write about certain exhibitions that seemed important, even if I didn’t know anything. The worst one of all was a show at the Met of Chinese bronzes. I didn’t know anything about that, and I still don’t.”

He was also teaching in the creative writing department at Brooklyn College, and for the most part not enjoying it. At one point he thought he would have a nervous breakdown. In those days, before his 1975 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the National Book Critics Circle Award, he was still mostly obscure. One student asked him if he was the same John Ashbery who wrote about art. But at least one writer, John Yau, went to Brooklyn College in order to study with him. When Mr. Ashbery read his work, he said, ‘Oh, we have a live one.’

“I remember the first class,” Mr. Yau told me. “He said we should translate something. It’s always interesting to translate from a language we didn’t know, he said. So I thought we were going to do it by sound. You figure out what it sounds like and you approximate what the English word is. Instead, he handed out a couple pages of Egyptian hieroglyphics.”

Mr. Yau became Mr. Ashbery’s protégé. He taught Mr. Yau how to write poetry and brought him into the art world. Mr. Ashbery told him that you could praise an artist and be critical of him or her at the same time. He told Mr. Yau what O’Hara had told him, that you don’t use one artist to beat up another. He’d take him to openings and introduce him to David Hockney or Sonia Orwell. Mr. Yau said that discovering Mr. Ashbery’s poems in college was “like the first time you see a Godard movie when you’re 19. You just go, ‘Huh.’ And it never leaves you.”

MR. ASHBERY WRITES MOST of his poems in one sitting, but even the longer work is associative. He tries to write at least once a week, but it doesn’t always work out. He’ll begin by writing down words he’s been thinking about, or words that seem to have taken on a different meaning than usual.

“I basically start writing without any preconceived notion of what I’m going to do and then do it,” he told me.

This is how he ends up with lines that can be read again and again and still not give off any clear meaning. Here’s the ending of “If the Birds Knew” from his 1966 book Rivers and Mountains:

A leaf would have settled the disturbance
Of the atmosphere, but at that high
Valley’s point disbanded
Clouds that rocks smote newly
The person or persons involved
Parading slowly through the sunlit fields
Not only as though the danger did not exist
But as though the birds were in on the secret.

Every line is a clue leading up to a secret, but we’re never let in on what the secret is. His work is better read as a series of cascading images that fly by and disappear like scenery through the window of a fast-moving car. If the poems are “about” anything, it’s trying to understand the poems. This is particularly true of Three Poems, in which the subject of every anaphora appears to be the poem itself: “This is shaped in the new merging, like ancestral smiles, common memories, remembering just how the light stood on the ate that time. But it is also something new. Outside, can’t you hear it, the traffic, the trees, everything getting nearer.”

“We’re trained as kids to say, ‘What does this mean?’” said Daniel Halpern, Mr. Ashbery’s editor at Ecco. “John’s poetry is so beyond that. You’re in a place without gravity. You’re not earthbound. You’re free to move side to side and back and forth, and you’re not held responsible for what you’ve just done.”

He’s become more prolific with age. He’s already completed 20 poems for his next book. More importantly, the world seems to have caught up with even his densest work, like “Litany” from 1979’s As We Know, written in two columns that, according to an author’s note, are meant to be read simultaneously. He’s tired of being called “difficult.”

“T.S. Eliot would say that all great poets educate their audience,” Paul Muldoon said to me. “They modify the audience’s taste. They prepare the ground for their own work. That certainly is the case with Ashbery. We’ve learned how to read him in a way that would have been unlikely 20 or 30 years ago. If one had suggested 20 years ago that Ashbery would now be seen as the most influential American poet, one would have been committed.”

Now, Mr. Ashbery is one of the few poets who can sell out an auditorium, which he did at an event in December at the New School. After he read, the New School’s David Lehman asked him, “What do you think of the critical theory that your poems are full of crypt-words that can be decoded, or to use a word that I think neither of us likes very much, unpacked?”

“Oh, yes, I hate that word,” Mr. Ashbery deadpanned. “And I hate crypt-words, too. I don’t believe it’s true. No matter what you write, it sounds like it could be something else.”

HIS NEWEST BOOK, Quick Question, is dedicated to Jane Freilicher. The opening poem, “Words to That Effect,” first appeared in the Yale Review for Harold Bloom’s 80th birthday.

The drive down was smooth
but after we arrived things started to go haywire,
first one thing and then another. The days
scudded past like tumbleweed, slow then fast,
then slow again. The sky was sweet and plain.
You remember how still it was then,
a season putting its arms into a coat and staying unwrapped
for a long, a little time.

Mr. Bloom discovered Mr. Ashbery by accident when he was 26, in his second year of teaching at Yale, when he stumbled upon Some Trees in the university bookstore and read it straight through standing up in the aisle.

“I still have some of the poems by heart,” Mr. Bloom told me. “He’s always in my mind.”

“He always mentions the fact that he’s two years younger than I am,” Mr. Ashbery said.

The book is nostalgic, but most of Mr. Ashbery’s work is. In another poem, “Auburn-Tinted Fences,” he plays with the phrase “Le livre est sur la table,” recalling the closing poem of his first book: “When I think of the/motley we wore sometimes, I get all jizzed up, just for the sake of things,/or to thank somebody. And if that’s all you expect in life, good, so/be it, only don’t stop at the concierge’s loge on your way out. La/concierge est dans l’escalier.” (“The concierge is on the stairs.”)

He wrote that on the same typewriter he always uses, but he’s worried that the old machine doesn’t have much time left. He’ll write on it for as long as it lasts, though, the noise from the Manhattan streets below bleeding through the walls.

“Just look out the window at how gray and vertical everything is,” he said to me. “I guess I’ve spent so many years here and know the place so well, it’s almost dissolved into my past.”

mmiller@observer.com

Correction: Due to a transcription error, an exchange between John Ashbery and David Lehman at the New School was represented incorrectly. Mr. Lehman referred in his talk to "crypt-words"--not "quipped"--a phrase coined by the critic John Shaptow to describe words that are suggested, but not actually present, in Mr. Ashbery's poems. The article has been updated to reflect this.

Neil Young waged heavy bullshit in a memoir that spent all of a paragraph describing hanging out with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and the Manson family in favor of slinging hundreds of pages of PR copy about the new sound system Mr. Young invented. The masochist in me kind of liked this book, the same way I like the most pointless of Mr. Young’s guitar solos. Passages such as this are the prose equivalent:

A funny thing happened at Woodstock. I didn’t want cameras onstage distracting me while we were playing. I hated the showboating atmosphere that surrounded the filming and thought it distracted from our music. The music was between us and the audience, and anything that got in the way was taboo in my opinion...On the Woodstock record, Atlantic Records used a song of mine recorded months later at the Fillmore East in New York called “Sea of Madness.” That was kind of misleading.

Okay, grandpa. Thanks for lunch, but I really gotta get going now.

Pete Townshend turns out to be a better writer than ol’ shakey—he devotes quite of lot time in his book, Who I Am, to his career as an acquisitions editor at Faber & Faber, a job he took a few years after the death of Who drummer Keith Moon. It’s interesting, but not as interesting as, you know, getting into a fistfight onstage with Keith Moon or throwing televisions out of hotel windows, details that get shortchanged.

Of all the music memoirs this year, my favorite is the one by Rod Stewart, the hilariously-named Rod. Mr. Stewart positions himself as a stately, Evelyn Waugh-esque narrator. (The chapters all have headings like “In which our hero throws in his lot with the damaged remnants of the Small Faces and is reluctantly made alert to the perils of trying to run two careers at once. With sundry meditations on graffiti, Ronnie Wood’s hooter, and the wearing of velvet in hot rooms.”)

The worst book of the year—and possibly of the past several—is Say Nice Things About Detroit by Scott Lasser, an insulting and entirely misguided fictional account of my dear, troubled hometown that manages to make one of the most complicated and evocative places in the world about as interesting as a conference call.

The runner-up was Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie’s third-person memoir of the fatwa issued on him by Ayatollah Khomeini. I took less issue with the author—who lived under the titular pseudonym Joseph Anton during those threatening years—casually placing himself in a lineage with Conrad and Chekhov, as well as comparing his novel to Ulysses and Lolita, than I did with his numerous attacks, almost in the same breath, on the “majestic narcissism” of Padma Lakshmi, his fourth wife, whom he might as well just refer to as “dumb slut.” Mr. Rushdie uses the third person as if it protects him from the offhanded misogyny of his assaults, not to mention his own preposterous self-aggrandizing. There is also prose in the book that makes Top Chef look like Joyce:

His biggest problem, he thought in his most bitter moments, was that he wasn’t dead. If he were dead nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of his security and whether or not he merited such special treatment for so long. He wouldn’t have to fight for the right to get on a plane … He wouldn’t have to talk to any more politicians (big advantage). His exile from India wouldn’t hurt. And the stress level would definitely be lower.

Yes, because the worst thing about having an international hit put on you is that it’s just so stressful.

A superior memoir is A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, which includes this description of Berlin: “Cigarettes marked off the time. For the few minutes one lasted, you knew exactly what you were doing: you were smoking that cigarette. When it was done, you would figure out what to do next, or you would just light another.”

Toni Morrison’s uneven novella Home, about an alcoholic veteran of the Korean War trying to rescue his sister from an evil eugenicist, felt both overwritten and unfinished; Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan’s humorless, entirely unsexy novel about Cold War-era British espionage, made Moonraker look smart; and Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her was like a teaser for better things to come.

Of the year’s failures, Zadie Smith’s novel NW was at least a very interesting one. Ms. Smith can make the description of a dumpy office feel dire: “Here offices are boxy cramped Victorian damp. Five people share them, the carpet is threadbare, the hole-punch will never be found.” But the novel is less a narrative than an unwelcoming environment to move around in at random. She bogs down her writing with a disruptive and schizophrenic style.

Speaking of interruptions, Laurent Binet’s HHhH was translated into English this year, and is nominally about Reinhard Heydrich—Hitler’s “Butcher of Prague”—but is much more about the difficulty of trying to write a novel about Reinhard Heydrich, including various William Gass-like digressions from the author himself.

A (slightly) less-tortured historical novel was Hilary Mantel’s very entertaining Bring Up the Bodies, about Thomas Cromwell.

Katherine Boo’s amazing reconstruction of life in an Annawadi slum beat out another of Robert Caro’s minute-to-minute biographies of LBJ for the nonfiction National Book Award. Louise Erdrich deservedly won the NBA for fiction with The Round House, her novel about a violent rape on an Ojibwe reservation, though the award felt like it was retroactively awarding a mostly consistent 25-year career. Let’s not even talk about how there was no Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Metafictional winks—for example, an author naming her protagonist after herself and her supporting cast after her friends—have always seemed dubious to me, so I picked up Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? with apprehension. The book stars Sheila Heti and seemingly includes transcripts of Ms. Heti’s conversations with her real-life friends, though that might be a fictional ruse. Ms. Heti is thoughtful in her exploration of the thin line between fiction and reality, especially in her examination of the ways in which the two bleed together.

Chris Kraus, an antecedent to Ms. Heti, also wrote a small masterpiece this year with a novel about the Los Angeles art world, Summer of Hate.

I can’t think of a better work of nonfiction in 2012 than Mark Binelli’s Detroit City is the Place to Be, an antidote to Scott Lasser’s atrocity. Nothing has come as close to realistically documenting the wackiness of contemporary Detroit. At one point, Mr. Binelli sneaks onto the set of the remake of the communists-are-coming smut movie Red Dawn, which was filmed at the author’s old high school. The city had been plastered with fictional propaganda posters that say things like YOU DESERVE TO BE HERE. Mr. Binelli overhears a crew member talking about how much he loved filming in Detroit: “We were setting off major explosions in the middle of downtown! Seriously, man, there’s nowhere else in the country they’d let you do something like this.”

It was a good year for poetry. Maureen N. McLane (full disclosure: a grad school professor of mine) wrote a brilliant poem-memoir that attempted to answer the question, “Why poetry?” (The answers range from “Poetry is connate with the origin of man” to “I have wasted my life.”) Having Louise Glück’s collected poems in a single volume is a gift. Michael Robbins published the most assured debut I’ve read in a long time. And any year John Ashbery publishes a book is A-okay with me, especially one with the lines, “No one expects life to be a single adventure,/yet conversely, one is surprised when it turns out disappointing.” Also, Frederick Seidel’s Nice Weather included some of the bleakest imagery of the year:

This is what it’s like at the end
    of the day.

But soon the day will go away.

Sunlight preoccupies the cross
    street.

It and night soon will meet.

Meanwhile, there is Central
    Park.

Now the park is getting dark.

Oh, and speaking of bleak, Fifty Shades of Grey saved publishing.

mmiler@observer.com

Mr. Tyler.

Two summers ago, I went to a reading that the poet Paul Muldoon was giving in a black box theater on the third floor of a nondescript building in Hell’s Kitchen. He read from a galley of his 2010 collection of poems, Maggot, and marked copy errors with a pen as he went along. John Ashbery joined him, reading handwritten translations of Rimbaud scrawled out on a yellow legal pad. There were mice scurrying around and about 20 people in the room, who were polite and subdued. A month later I interviewed Mr. Muldoon, who has been The New Yorker's poetry editor since 2007, over the course of two days, at Robert Frost’s farm in Ripton, Vt., where he summers. On the second night, we attended a bluegrass festival at the foot of a mountain, which attracted the kinds of backwoods crowds that drive to concerts in beat-up RVs and all-terrain vehicles. We must have heard four renditions of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Mr. Muldoon heckled the bands by shouting, “Go electric!”

I was only vaguely taken aback, then, when I received an email from him in June that read: “I think we need to continue our tradition of going to cheesy shows. Aerosmith and Cheap Trick on July 24? P.”

I was aware of Mr. Muldoon’s penchant for what he calls “schlock rock.” After we’d parted ways in Vermont, he had driven to Saratoga Springs, N.Y., to attend a Bon Jovi concert. His poems are filled with as many allusions to pop culture as they are with memories of his native County Armagh in Northern Ireland. In “On,” for instance, a poem from Moy Sand and Gravel, his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection from 2003, he writes about sitting in a theater just before the curtain rises, a moment that makes a section from a Gaelic eulogy pop into the narrator’s head:

I make my way alone through the hand-to-hand fighting

to A3 and A5. Red velvet. Brass and oak.

The special effects will include strobe lighting

and artificial smoke.

 A glance to A5. Patrons are reminded, mar bheadh,

that the management accepts no responsibility in the case of theft.

Mr. Muldoon.

“Sleeve Notes,” probably his most famous poem, is explicitly about rock and roll, each stanza arranged like liner notes for a canonical classic rock album. Aerosmith does not figure in it, but Mr. Muldoon does address the sort of leveling that takes place at a stadium show, where the experience of seeing one band at its peak is not so different from seeing another one far past its prime:

U2: The Joshua Tree

“When I went to hear them in Giants Stadium

a year or two ago, the whiff

of kef

brought back the night we drove all night from Palm

Springs to Blythe. No Irish lad and his lass

were so happy as we who roared and soared through yucca-scented air. Dawn brought a sense of loss…”

ROLLING STONES:Voodoo Lounge

“Giants Stadium again …Again the scent of drugs.”

Aerosmith has sold tens of millions of records worldwide and has been making music for more than 40 years. I can’t say I’ve ever thought much of the band beyond believing “Love in an Elevator,” “Living on the Edge,” “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” and a variety of other “hits” were indefensibly stupid songs.

That said, the back-to-back albums Toys in the Attic (1975) and especially Rocks (1976) are underrated American rock albums, at least among those who were not yet born when they were released and have probably had no occasion to revisit them. Unlike a lot of what came before and after, neither album sounds like feathery versions of the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin. Released several years before Van Halen’s debut, and a solid decade before Guns N’ Roses, they nevertheless carry the black mark of having influenced a generation of terrible hair metal. By mere coincidence, those albums, along with their first album in 10 years, forthcoming this November, were produced by my editor’s father, Jack Douglas, who left Mr. Muldoon and me two backstage passes.

UNLIKE IN AEROSMITH’S younger days, the backstage experience now happens before the show rather than after it because they get tired. Around 7 p.m., we found ourselves in a narrow, white brick-walled, fluorescent-lighted hallway somewhere in the bowels of the IZOD Center in East Rutherford, N.J. We were introduced as “a reporter who works with Jack’s daughter” and “a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet,” a label the very humble Mr. Muldoon continuously blushed at. “It’s hard to explain to people that the Pulitzer doesn’t really matter,” he whispered to me. Mr. Muldoon is almost absurdly low key about his accomplishments—later in the night he told the guy sitting next to us that he does “a lot of things—I teach, I write some,” which seems to be roughly equivalent, at least in this scenario, to Steven Tyler saying, “I sing from time to time.”

Rick Nielsen, the guitarist from Cheap Trick, was wearing a black-and-white checkered bow tie and matching cap and handed us some guitar picks, which is his signature move at concerts; he throws handfuls of them out into the crowd. He also had sunglasses on, which, despite the hallway’s soft lighting, somehow felt necessary and appropriate. We were rushed to the catering room, where we ran into Darryl McDaniels—“D.M.C.” from Run D.M.C. He was so casual and friendly that we both felt comfortable right away.It felt oddly natural when he went right into talking very personally about how at age 35 he found out he was adopted. He had tracked down his birth mother—whom he praised for “getting me out into the world” (he said that with a forward thrust of both his hands)—but that his adoptive parents taught him everything he knows. He was wearing a t-shirt with Jim Morrison on it and looked much younger than a man approaching 50, and he seemed to register some level of disbelief that he was the same man responsible for “Tricky” and “My Adidas,” not to mention raising Aerosmith’s clout considerably by covering “Walk This Way,” a song he would join in on, onstage later in the night. When Mr. Muldoon’s Pulitzer was mentioned, Mr. McDaniels nodded solemnly and said, “Keep up the good work.” He grabbed Mr. Muldoon’s hand and told him “I need some of that poetic energy.”

Backstage.

Down the hallway toward the exit, Steven Tyler was standing near a doorway. He had on a sheer white blouse unbuttoned about halfway and low-waisted jeans that, when you followed the skinny length of his leg down to the floor, frayed out at the bottom revealing a pair of studded flip-flop sandals with socks underneath. The jewelry hanging from his neck jingled and clanged whenever he moved. This was his casual look.

When I was introduced (“This is a reporter who works with Jack’s daughter”), he said “Oh, cool!” with an enthusiasm that was either genuine or so perfectly rehearsed that I couldn’t tell the difference. He shook my hand and I noticed his nails were painted black. “Jack’s in Paris right now. You know, it was nice of our producer to tell us he was leaving the country while we’re in the middle of doing a record.” He smiled. For Steven Tyler, this meant that the bottom half of his face turned into a dark crescent shape.

“And this,” said the publicist who’d been introducing us, “is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.” I registered a slight grimace on Mr. Muldoon’s end.

“A poet, huh?” Mr. Tyler said, walking closer to him. “You’re kidding.”

As if on cue, the lead singer of Aerosmith began reciting the opening stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky:”

“‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the—”

He pointed at Mr. Muldoon to finish the line.

“Well,” Mr. Muldoon exhaled, “it’s: ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe; all mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe, or something to that effect.”

Mr. Tyler told Mr. Muldoon that he wished he had become a poet because he would have remembered more. “I don’t remember anything, man,” he said. But, he countered, he would have gotten laid a lot less.

“Not so sure about that,” Mr. Muldoon said. The two exchanged a look of intense—albeit brief—disagreement.

Someone further down the hallway shouted, “Steven, I want to introduce you to my friend”—and the person paused here for effect—“John Varvatos.”

“Excuse me,” Mr. Tyler said cordially and disappeared down the hall.

A ROCK CONCERT at a stadium is by its very nature populist, in the kind of accidental way that a poetry reading—even if its participants are two of the greatest living poets—is exclusive. All sports stadiums look more or less the same and there’s always the inevitable smell of a lit joint and cheap beer. What happens onstage is different each time, but the experience of watching does not change much. Everyone knows when to stand up and when to sit down, when to pull out a Zippo or a cell phone to wave in the air slowly to the rhythm of a ballad, when to stomp one’s feet for the encore, when to leave just early enough to beat the traffic.

Mr. Muldoon and I watched about five songs of Cheap Trick before retreating to get food from a lady who coughed wetly into her hand before serving us.

“So why Aerosmith?” I asked before biting into my room-temperature hot dog.

“I go to concerts instead of watching television,” Mr. Muldoon said. “I’ve always found stadium concerts to be fascinating.”

We heard the opening chords of “I Want You to Want Me” and ran to an entrance to listen, sang the words of the chorus along with everyone else, stamped our feet in unison with the crowd and then went back to talking. Next year, Mr. Muldoon will publish a book called Word on the Street, a collection of rock lyrics that will also be available as recordings made by Wayside Shrines, a band Mr. Muldoon helped put together. He’s no stranger to the form, having penned the lyrics for “My Ride’s Here” with his friend Warren Zevon. The song is like a structurally restrained version of one of Mr. Muldoon’s poems:

The Houston sky was changeless

We galloped through bluebonnets

I was wrestling with an angel

You were working on a sonnet

You said, “I believe the seraphim

Will gather up my pinto

And carry us away, Jim

Across the San Jacinto

My ride’s here.”

Aerosmith started right on time. The lights went down and a spotlight hit the stage. Mr. Tyler and Joe Perry, the lead guitarist, who has a conspicuously perfect silver streak in his hair, rose on a platform from a hole in the floor, back to back, Mr. Perry clutching a guitar, Mr. Tyler holding a microphone stand like it was a guitar. Earlier, backstage, I’d asked Mr. Tyler if he was excited to be on tour again and he’d said, “The two hours before a concert, I’m the most excited. I get to do my hair, try on outfits, put on some makeup.” He’d changed into white bell bottoms, a sequined shirt and a long, white, glittering coat with a voluminous collar. He made approximations of the fluid motions you’d recognize from the band’s music videos, but his movements were slower and choppy. They played “Love in an Elevator” and he walked to each of his bandmates, bumping them in the hip with his ass, catching the band’s second guitarist, Brad Whitford, off guard and causing him to stumble slightly. They both laughed. Two young women and a keyboard player, half-obscured by amplifiers, sang along with Mr. Tyler, whose 64-year-old voice doesn’t quite hit the high notes like it used to. There were two large fans at the base of the stage positioned just so and at any given moment at least one band member’s hair was wind-blown.

“I bet you’re wondering what we’ve been doing the last 10 years,” Mr. Tyler said between songs. “Were we busy getting fucked up?” A pause. “Or were we busy making another record? I think the latter is true!” The air around where Mr. Muldoon and I stood smelled like beer and pot. The stadium was cheering.

mmiller@observer.com

Earlier this month, I saw poets Paul Muldoon and John Ashbery read at a small, 60-seat venue in Hell's Kitchen called Medicine Show Theatre. I'd never heard of the place. There was no sign on the door and scaffolding shrouded the entrance. I paid $5 and sat in a room with about 40 other people as two of the great living poets read from their work.

Only in New York, I thought. But maybe not for long-as massive budget cuts threaten New York culture's beating heart.

The looming devastation to the city's arts budget is even more frightening in light of England's comparably anticlimactic cuts late last week. Arts Council England (ACE) announced it would be cutting just 0.5 percent of funding for each of the 808 organizations that it supports every year. This amount-far less than expected-comes as "a relief" for everyone, as The Guardian reported. It still means a £142,000 loss for the Royal Opera House and £80,000 for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The average cut was £2,000.

ACE's budget was £575 million for fiscal year 2009/10. It has been chopped by a total of £23 million this year. The cuts were mitigated using £9 million in the council's reserve funds; they're now at a relatively meager 0.5 percent across the board. These British institutions will stay in business, most with little change to the daily routine for now. New York should be so lucky. If the proposed cuts go through July 1, the New York State Council on the Arts will see a 40 percent decrease in its budget, from $41.6 million to $25.2 million. The Public Theater's city funding would drop from $700,000 to $450,000, forcing it to stage one less week of Shakespeare in the Park this summer, and possibly to consider layoffs. Brooklyn Academy of Music would lose $1 million-the largest single-year drop in funding in the organization's history. BAM has no plan in place, but such a drastic decrease will undoubtedly cause changes in programming and freeze positions within the organization.

And as for the far smaller Medicine Show Theatre? It receives roughly $10,000 annually from the Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council combined. If that money is cut back significantly, "I don't know what we're going to do," said Barbara Vann, Medicine Show Theatre's artistic director. "You either have to be rich or beg."

At the end of Mr. Muldoon and Mr. Ashbery's reading at Medicine Show Theatre, Ms. Vann made a plea for donations, lamenting the fate of the small performance space. A line from one of Mr. Muldoon's poems stuck with me as I walked out onto West 52nd street.

"It was too late to insist that the body of a poem is no less sacred than a temple."

Let's hope not.

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The 44-year-old has penned about 4,000 such honorifics, presented in elaborate calligraphy and gilded frames, to honorees ranging from comedic pianist Victor Borge to heroic firefighters.

“It’s a wonderful job,” said Mr. Alatriste, who earned an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University and named one of his twins after John Keats. “You recognize them publicly. In a sense, I am a public servant.”

But when it came time on April 5 to honor the poet John Ashbery, who happens to be one of Mr. Alatriste’s literary heroes, the task rose above the bureaucratic tipping of the hat to a markedly more expressive plain. He mulled over the right words for days—in his apartment on Bleecker Street, on the subway, everywhere—before jotting down his thoughts.

“As a poet, I felt it was essential that a poet write his proclamation,” said Mr. Alatriste, a somewhat jittery man with curly black hair and glasses.

On Wednesday, he wore a canary-yellow shirt, opal cufflinks and a gray suede vest. A Nikon d100 digital camera hung on a strap around his neck. In addition to his duties as the Council’s scribe, he is also its official photographer. It was in that latter capacity that he mustered the courage to approach Mr. Ashbery, who sat on a folding chair in the City Council’s chamber waiting for the ceremony to get started. It had been scheduled to begin at 1 p.m., and it was already 1:15. Mr. Alatriste took advantage of the delay to snap some extra pictures of the poet, who was wearing a tweed blazer, tie and navy V-neck sweater.

Mr. Ashbery’s smile exposed a gap between his front teeth. At 79, he has thinning silver hair, a consuming blue-eyed stare and a pronounced chin and nose. Mr. Alatriste bent down to exchange a few words with the poet and then walked quickly out of the room.

“That guy is trying to fetch me a copy of the text so that I can see what is in it,” Mr. Ashbery said in his soft, almost meek, voice. “I’m not sure exactly what is being proclaimed.”

Mr. Ashbery, whose honors include a Pulitzer and National Book Award and who was part of the New York School of avant-garde poets in the late 1950’s, had never before set foot in City Hall.

“David Lehman cooked up this Ashbery festival at the New School, and this was part of it,” explained Mr. Ashbery.

Mr. Lehman, poet and poetry coordinator of the New School’s graduate writing program, sat a seat away from Mr. Ashbery and next to Robert Polito, chair of the university’s graduate writing program, who looked bored in a grape-colored scarf. Mr. Lehman bent over Mr. Polito to explain where he got the inspiration for the award.

“My wife Stacey had the idea to ask the Mayor to declare April 7th John Ashbery Day,” explained the bespectacled Mr. Lehman. “It’s a good idea. He’s lived most of his life in New York.”

“Like so many others,” noted Mr. Ashbery, who grew up on a farm outside of Rochester. He said his father had always been against the idea of his coming to New York: “He had his own thoughts about New Yorkers—that they are all out to rob you.”

By 2 p.m., a handful of City Council members had wandered into the mahogany-walled chamber. Some of them exchanged backslaps and handshakes on the red-carpeted floor. Others withdrew to the stairwell, shielding their mouths with their hands while they whispered into their cell phones. Mr. Ashbery seemed to be growing impatient. The ceremony was now an hour and a half behind schedule. He folded his legs. He unfolded them. He folded them again. He ate a granola bar and playfully threw the wrapper at Mr. Lehman. Finally, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn arrived.

“I bet you didn’t know that because of the City Council, April 7 is John Ashbery Day in the City of New York,” said Ms. Quinn, who hurriedly called Mr. Ashbery up to receive his proclamation.

Mr. Ashbery shuffled to the center of the room. Mr. Alatriste positioned himself to take photos. But with each “Whereas” in the proclamation, he seemed increasingly moved by his own words. He lowered the camera from his face and listened to the Council’s baritone orator read how Mr. Ashbery wove “poetry into the flux and flow of life in order to get at the numinous core of what it means to be human” and pay tribute to the poet’s “vatic, colloquial, dissonant and lyrically direct” work.

“I’m tremendously dazed and grateful for this,” said Mr. Ashbery. “I’ve long had a love affair with New York. It’s nice to hear that it is requited.”

“I’m sorry, we’re a little bit delayed today,” said Ms. Quinn, racing on to the next proclamation, which honored the 10th anniversary of the musical Rent.

A few minutes later, Mr. Ashbery, visibly exhausted and accompanied by his two friends, reached the bottom of City Hall’s sweeping marble staircase.

“We got through it,” he said. “Somehow.”

It turned out that few of the City Council members had heard of Mr. Ashbery, but that’s not to say the lawmakers didn’t have a poem in their hearts. Asked to name their favorite poets, they came up with Robert Frost (“I love all the farms, trees, New England, stars,” said Democrat Gale Brewer of Manhattan) and William Ernest Henley (“‘Invictus’—it stuck with me,” said Democrat Leroy Comrie of Queens), among others. While Democrat Michael E. McMahon likes “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (“because that’s my whole political philosophy”), his fellow Staten Islander, Republican James Oddo, enthusiastically recited L.L. Cool J.’s “I Need Love”: “When I’m alone in my room / sometimes I stare at the wall / and in the back of my mind / I hear my conscience call / Telling me I need a girl who’s as sweet as a dove / For the first time in my life / I see I need love.” —Jason Horowitz

By the time the sun was setting on that massive rally, I found myself thrown against a wall and threatened by policemen a few blocks from the U.N. because I said "Fuck you!" to a belligerent doorman. I felt degraded and more than a little shaken up, but I also felt exhilarated. I turned 30 a few months ago, and I've always looked to my baby-boomer mentors-with their rent-controlled apartments, tenured jobs and memories of Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore East-with more than a little generational envy. Many of my fellow marching Gen-X'ers were similarly afflicted (and I was sure that 60's activists were not comparably fixated on the 30's). Nevertheless, I was proud to be initiated, boomer-style, as a dangerous rabble-rouser. Roughed up by the cops as an estimated half a million New Yorkers shut down the East Side, I had my leftist bar mitzvah. Decorated with buttons advertising my rabble-rousing cred with just a touch of postmodernism-a"NoBloodforOil"peacesymbol commemorating the date of the N.Y.C. rally, and a N.O.W. button with "Do Me" scrawled in the center-I fled to Le Bateau Ivre on East 51st Street, where the maître d' greeted me with a " bon soir " of solidarity, and where I downed a Muscadet while gaining sympathy from my fellow drinkers for the uncivil treatment of my civil disobedience. It wasn't exactly café society, but as the press corps scribbled and commiserated in a corner-the graying socialist from La Repubblica sniffed at the sprightly neocon from the New York Post -I was arguing a world of my own. I had press-comped my way through the Zeitgeist , flashing credentials and passing police lines to hobnob with the Radical Chic of the 21st century.

Compared to the radicals of the 60's, we were operating at broadband speed. It took about four years for the '64 signing of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to explode into the radicalism of '68. This time around, urban-unresters were hitting the streets faster than a Google search, protesting a war over a month before it actually began. The city's avenues were Dante-esque circles of activism, and I descended into their depths, past the rope lines and farther east into the bleeding heart of the left. The Village Voice did its reporting from Third Avenue, relegating all duties to one overworked staffer who had too many protest stories to cover to get into the tent behind the stage. (In days of yore, they would have sent 20 reporters to cover the event.) Many older lefties stuck on Third Avenue told me they saw mostly creaky Trotskyists old enough to remember the El. But if Third Avenue was for the AARP subversives, Second Avenue was for scrappy college kids, and First Avenue was for the diehards. And the stage and its makeshift tent was for the stars. What I saw in that V.I.P. section was a combination of young gate-crashers and a cross section of the new kind of black power, including Mos Def and groupies, Danny Glover and family, Harry Belafonte and entourage, Al Sharpton and image consultants. I warmed my hands on hospital-style complementary coffee and got a raspy laugh from Mr. Belafonte when I told him he could call Colin Powell anything he wanted. Octogenarian folk sage Pete Seeger told me he saw more black people in the crowd than he did at the March on Washington 40 years ago. Reporters stuck on Third missed out on that story, but then they couldn't be everywhere that day.

In a day that began with an A-list reception and ended with a very mild flirtation with police brutality, I had to be honest with myself and question whether I was in this for a political awakening or just to meet celebrities. What, exactly, was I risking? Was I really going to get an F.B.I. file for noshing on bagels with the co-star of Lethal Weapon ? Sure, I was against the war, but that was hardly a controversial view in this town. Most people I knew opined somewhere between David Remnick's reluctant liberal hawkishness and Noam Chomsky's conspiratorial lunacy. When even those counterculture icons Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore said we should give inspections and the U.N. more time to work, and should perhaps focus our military efforts on Al Qaeda, being against this war seemed pretty mainstream.

But then again, I'm not a foreign-policy expert. I identified with other literary folk who share my lack of Realpolitik , but who sign petitions and make proclamations anyway. Two days after that rally, I braved a torrential snowstorm to engage in more solidarity and stargazing at a Lincoln Center poetry reading sponsored by Not In Our Name, a group that made a little blip on the news crawl when the poet Sam Hamill was disinvited by Laura Bush from a White House–sponsored symposium on Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Mr. Hamill may have started a movement for a moment, and he received a standing ovation at Avery Fisher Hall for doing so, following it up with some enjambed ruminations about coffee-drinking and the plight of Palestinians. But there were some poets I actually admired at the event-especially Ann Lauterbach, Galway Kinnell and the splendid performance songstress Lee Ann Brown-and I wanted to know how a signature from John Ashbery on a New York Times petition could have really inspired George W. Bush to rethink his war plans. I posed this question while sitting in the green room with Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, in an exchange sort of like The McLauglin Group meets My Dinner with Andre . "Some people could see Ashbery's name and say, 'I love John Ashbery. This is like a friend telling me I should read more and think more about this subject,'" said Mr. Shawn. In that green room, I played piano with Odetta and sat between Arthur Miller and Stanley Kunitz as they reminisced about the last few times the world ended.

And if I make it that far, that will be me. I'll be that old man telling youngsters about my adventures in activism, remembering New York when it really sizzled, when the cops had me against the wall and I drank my vintage French fermentation like a tonic of activism. The truth is that if you're able to tell your tale of the apocalypse, it didn't exactly happen. The world did not end, and you survived to hold court with the young and the uninitiated and tell them tales of how it really went down. One cold day, the dawn of a new millennium brought a new war. Before the first bombs were even dropped, you went to a rally, hung with movie stars and folk singers and poets, and even ran into a little smidge of trouble. You felt invincible.

Yet now, a quarter-century after his death, Porter is coming to be recognized as one of the major figures of his American generation-as a painter, as a writer of art, and as an influence on other artists and writers. The process of rehabilitation is by no means complete, for his work has not yet been accorded a full-scale retrospective in a major New York museum. Which is itself a scandal when you consider some of the minor talents that have been the beneficiaries of such retrospectives in recent years.

Yet several current developments may hasten the day that a proper retrospective is undertaken. One is the publication of the first biography devoted to the artist- Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art by Justin Spring (Yale University Press, $35). And to mark the publication of this Life , the AXA Gallery in the Equitable Tower has mounted a small but excellent exhibition of his paintings that also contains some interesting documentation of Porter's career, and the nearby New York office of the Archives of American Art has supplemented this show with a survey of additional biographical and visual documentation. Clearly, the materials for a proper retrospective are readily available even if the will to produce such an exhibition in the city that was central to Porter's career is not yet in evidence.

The reasons for this are not obscure. About the paintings of Fairfield Porter people used to say things like: "An awfully good painter, but do you really think he was important?" Or: "Lovely paintings, aren't they? But what can it mean to paint like that in the second half of the 20th century?" Or: "Isn't that kind of thing sort of passé?" I knew what they meant, of course, and so did Porter. They meant that he wasn't avant-garde. And they were right about that.

It was an issue that worried Porter himself. When he was given his first solo exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1952, we learn from Mr. Spring's biography, Porter was concerned that his pictures "would look academic." Some of his friends were similarly worried. One of them, Edith Schloss, recalls to Mr. Spring, "I think most of us, including Bill de Kooning, loyal friends, tried to believe in this show but it was not easy. It was not that it was figurative when most work in those years was abstract, but that much of it was still awkward…. There was something blunt and brooding about these paintings, but most of all, something too rare in those times, they were very honest."

Some years later, as Ms. Schloss also recalls, "when it was clear [Porter] could perceive a scene and put it down and paint it allinonefluent whole-Bill and I were remembering that first show. We agreed it had been much better than we had secretly thought at the time…. It was we who had not seen this."

Meanwhile, Porter had begun writing art reviews for Art News magazine, and said of himself in this period that "I am much prouder of my reviews than of my paintings." He even went so far as to declare that "In fact I think I could be the best art critic not writing in English"-a claim that many readers came to agree with when he subsequently wrote a weekly art column for The Nation . A collection of his writings on art- Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935-1975 , edited by Rackstraw Downes-was published in 1979, and remains in print today. Then too, in 1955, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse accepted three of Porter's poems for publication. This is another aspect of his career that is still insufficiently known, though a volume of Collected Poems was also posthumously published and is still available.

In the exhibition that Mr. Spring has organized as guest curator at the AXA Gallery, we are left without doubt, however, that painting was the major achievement of Porter's career, whatever his excellence as a critic and poet may have been. From the portraits of family and friends in the 1950's-among them, Elaine de Kooning, Jane Wilson, James Schuyler and John Ashbery-to the large-scale indoor and outdoor figure compositions of the 1960's and 70's, Porter is again revealed as one of the master artists of his time. If only for this latter group of pictures- The Screen Porch (1964), Morning Landscape (1965), The Mirror (1966), Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969), Self-Portrait (1968) and The Tennis Game (1972)-this would be an exhibition that is not to be missed. With their echoes of Velázquez, especially the Velázquez of Las Meninas , and of Bonnard and Vuillard, combined with a very American fluency and frankness in their handling of the painterly medium, these really are among the masterpieces of late 20th-century American art.

My own experience with his work may be in some respects representative. On the occasion of the only full-scale retrospective Porter's work has been given-the exhibition called Fairfield Porter (1907-1975): Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction , which Kenworth Moffett organized at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bostonin1983-I wrote that "For myself, though as a critic I had praised Porter's work on a number of occasions during thelast20yearsand though I knew it well, I found I was not really prepared for what I found in this exhibition…. For a critic it is a very odd experience to praise an artist's work over a long period of time and then discover, as I did in Boston, that I had actually underrated it."

It is also worth recalling of that Boston retrospective that the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York had to be coerced into taking even a badly abridged version of the show, and then gave it an installation that was completely inappropriate to its spirit. Earlier in the 1980's, one of the curators at the Whitney, when invited to see a private collection of Porter's paintings, bluntly informed his host that Porter was far "too tame" for the Whitney. That, too, was a representative judgment of the time.

Never mind. While we still await a proper retrospective in New York, the exhibition at the AXA Gallery, 787 Seventh Avenue at 51st Street, remains on view through May 27. And the Selections from the Fairfield Porter Papers exhibition remains on view at the archives of American Art offices, 1285 Sixth Avenue at 52nd Street, through June 1.