That came out harsh. I've read Locke, I'm aware that to understand anything novel we have to find some point of overlap between the new experience and our own. I also get that narcissism is an occupational hazard for professional culture consumers -- Hey! this stuff is like me, look at it! -- and that the more fabulous critics make allowances for this phenomenon, while enjoying speaking from a situated self it provides with an illusion of stability.

I know I like what at least partly reminds me of me, whatever that means.

That said, I also know that I'm much more likely to pay attention when a new experience isn't a subset of my experience -- that is, when I have to work a little to process what's going on. That's what I'm looking for.

Of the Poles in the current number of Lyric, I was most surprised by Andrezej Sosnowski and his ten- to twenty-line sentence impressions of Ashbery -- from here they sound better than most Ashbery after '75:

School is particular. The transcript says: you have gone through
a red cloud of pain, fine, but this doesn't mean
that the pain will bear interest, because the colors experienced
may disappear in a trice as at the touch of winter,
becoming a transparent non-luminous icicle
or an oceanarium of silence, an unspoken climate
like the vanishing trail behind a shark, where
it will be perfectly clear how very much your own
was the allegedly objective pain you received credit for
as an auditor, how little it had in common
with the actual choice of subject and degree of difficulty,
how when it came down to it you stood firmly in place on earth,
not looking for your cloud but bearing it within you
from the legendary beginning, the way an October sky
hides November up its sleeve, and only from time to time
lets it float sleepily out to arm's length,
like someone letting their partner out for a discreet test,
wainting to see for a moment how others see her,
how she sees others in the little mirror on the electric leash
known as desire. And then you sucked her into your mouth again
like a bubble of raspberry flavored gum,...

(from "Zoom")

Red herring intensifiers such as legendary crack me up, but what gets me here is that Sosnowski is applying the Ashberyan shaggy-dog mode as Ashbery originally applied it, that is, in an apparently serious attempt to identify sublime aspects of ordinary experience while preserving them in context. I really love that non-luminous icicle, that trip to the oceanarium. In the larger carbon dating environmental testing scheme of things, I get from this poem that wistful American anti-individualism is exactly as powerful as we think it is -- the results are reproducible, in fact, the invader may thrive in other habitats. (Nice turnabout for having to stagger through Milosz's work and its clotting effects in the reviews here all these years.)

Other names to look for: Ewa Sonnenberg, Dariusz Sosnicki, Jacek Podsiadlo, Marta Podgornik, Pawel Marcinkiewicz. I have a feeling Marcin Swietlicki may be as fine a writer as anybody since Charles Bukowski and Orhan Veli; the translations here aren't doing him any favors, though.