Though Ashbery and Oppen were writing at the same time, none of this elemental or vital contact with materials is available for Ashbery—there is no primary relationship to matter, no craft really. His matters are verbal, prefabricated, demotic; they are made elsewhere and by others, and what they offer to the intending consciousness is arrangement, not making. The sentimental, clichéd phrases and images that flash up in Ashbery’s poems are not merely objects of ironic ridicule, though they are ironic. They are literally what there is to say: they are the life we live, the general form of experience that we must fill out. Ashbery’s attitude toward these languages is a mostly loving one—no one has ever had a clearer sense of how a cliché can dawn like a revelation. His goal is to make this debased language come alive, not to replace it with a new language more erudite or more able to absorb the weight of past history, as with Pound or Eliot. As he says in an essay on the New Realists—artists such as Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and Raymond Hains—their attempt to “come to grips with the emptiness of industrialized modern life” requires them “to accord it its due.”12 The products of the age of mass production and consumption from which they construct their art “are a common ground, a neutral language understood by everybody, and therefore the ideal material with which to create experiences that transcend these objects.”13 What does it mean to treat mass-produced objects as a given? For one, it means the impossibility of imagining them as objects one might make. Such objects simply appear, prefabricated. If one has a responsibility toward them, it is only to move them around, administer and rearrange them, sort and inventory them. In other words, the attitude that Ashbery approvingly attributes to the New Realists belongs to those white-collar and service-sector workers who, rather than produce commodities, ensure that they arrive at their destination.