Ashbery's Building of Poetry

John Ashbery's poetry takes me just out of my comfort zone for explication. Not because his poetry is beyond my comprehension, but because it is not immediately accessible. With almost every other poet I've encountered, in any given piece there is something to latch onto that starts me on the path to (my own) understanding. I'm finding it difficult to locate that "in" in much of Ashbery's work. I'm taking this as a learning opportunity and will try to burrow into "These Lacustrine Cities," which I chose simply because I did not know what lacustrine meant. I know what it means now, and it really doesn't help. Here's my best educated attempt at getting to the heart of this poem.
He is comparing the building of a city to the creation of a poem, and the role of man (citizen of the city) with the role of poet. In both contexts, the individual must set aside all personal hopes and desires and focus all his energy on what is necessary for the good of the city/poem. Once the city/poem is complete, time and history will forever change it. This he tells us in stanza two where he says:

"...into the past for swans and tapering branches, burning

until all that hate was transformed into useless love."

The city/poem takes on a life of its own and the creator is left with nothing but himself, and all the personal desire that he set aside for the sake of his work returns with nowhere to go. This, Ashbery describes in the third stanza.

"Then you are left with an idea of yourself

and the feeling of ascending emptiness..."

Indeed, when the poem is finished and history (or the reader) has had it's way with it, only a memory is left; or in the case of a city, a monument is constructed. Even thought the city still exists, we only pay attention to the monument, to the more manageable representation of the city. Similarly, the finished poem is stripped of it's singular enormity, and banished perhaps to an anthology or other collection. Through this banishment (lines 16-20), the poet now gets caught up in time as his creation did. He is rendered incapable of anything other than "nursing some private project." The private project is almost certainly the next poem he is composing. The last stanza describes how, for the poet, every poem is akin to the rise and fall of a civilization; a monumental achievement that he knows will one day be relegated to a footnote in history.

"You have built a mountain of something,

Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,

Whose wind is desire starching a petal,

Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears."

For John Ashbery, the act of creating and finishing a poem is like turning a mountain into a mole-hill. A thought not dissimilar to some of his fellow modernists and post-modernists. It's too bad that they aren't able to see the universal transcendence to their private monuments.