^* Sixty-five pages long, at midpoint “Litany” includes a dramatic cessation of the left-hand column for nearly two pages (30-31). This gap offers clear enticement for the reader to invest in the other uninterrupted column, to switch loyalties, as it were. Yet even there a haunting occurs : as the left column returns, the right opens the motif of a “Silver Age, which [is] ours” (31), which is subsequently echoed by the other column’s “‘Beautiful Lady’” who “Arrives to announce the Brass Age” (33). The polyphonic potential created by adjacent columns, in other words, begins to exponentially exceed the scope of the Joycean leitmotif, transferring it to another dimension. Instead of calling it abstraction, it makes more sense to refer to Ashbery’s cross-, inter-, and intratextual torques as distraction (to draw or set apart, subject to centrifugal force; rather than abstraction, getting away from). In general, Ashbery does not allow the reader to “get the point,” to glimpse a message, or assign intent—not, at any rate, without being uncomfortably reminded that these are the trappings of a melodramatic set piece.