From the New Yorker blog post, Notes on Distraction, as concerning John Ashbery's most recent collection, Quick Question:

Ashbery at once resists and accommodates our over-full lives. His poems demand a great deal from the reader (in the way of attention, patience, alertness, suggestibility), even as they cheerfully acknowledge that they are not the only pebble on the reader’s beach..... 

In Ashbery, pleasure precedes comprehension, and comprehension is always imperfect and incomplete. (In a way, never quite knowing what Ashbery is talking about, realizing the futility of attempting to “translate” his words into something more lucid and transparently intelligible, is part of the pleasure.) His poems—like all poems—slow us down, remind us that many of the most singular and important things in life cannot be readily assimilated. To call them a momentary stay against confusion (Frost’s phrase for the end of poetry) might be going a bit far, but they are a momentary stay against thoughtless consumption.