It’s tempting to say that this fall marks John Ashbery’s moment. The Library of America recently released “Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987″ ($40), a volume that “inaugurates a collected edition of the works of America’s preeminent living poet.” And the poet, long a New Yorker, was honored by the first exhibition of his collages at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, a full-circle sort of gesture since the gallery published Ashbery’s first book, the slim “Turandot and Other Poems” in 1953.

Ashbery is the third living writer to be elevated to the pantheon of the Library of America. First was Eudora Welty, whose two-volume collection was published in 1998, three years before her death; then came Philip Roth, the subject of an eight-volume compilation of his fiction (and one memoir) that debuted in 2005 and has three volumes to go.

Yet Ashbery seems always to have had his moment. He was born, in Rochester, N.Y., in a propitious year for great poets, sharing 1927 with W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell and James Wright (who died in 1980, a generation ago). Poetry magazine accepted two of his poems when he was in high school.  When he was an editor of The Harvard Advocate his fellow editors were Kenneth Koch, Robert Bly and Donald Hall. His  first official book, “Some Trees,” was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956. He lived in Europe for five years and wrote brilliant criticism of contemporary art for ArtNews and The New York Herald Tribune.  By 1969, he is winning awards and fellowships and his books regularly win prizes. In 1976, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” wins the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is elected a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1982 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983. In 1985, he is awarded a five-year MacArthur “genius” grant. And so on, including being poet-in-residence for MTV in 2002. His seems a life (or at least a career) blessed with opportunities, accomplishments and rewards.

What is remarkable about Ashbery’s unparalleled success is that it builds upon a foundation of poems that are oblique, hermetic, goofy, surreal and sometimes downright incomprehensible. They can also, with all of that, be deeply moving meditations on the nature of mutability and mortality. “Some Trees” astonished readers at the time, and still astonishes, for its air of supreme self-confidence, a quality that extends to a majestic willingness to mystify and perplex; reading a poem by John Ashbery can be like working a Ouija with a lexicographer afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome. The first stanza of “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” one of the most celebrated poems in “Some Trees” is this:

Darkness falls with a wet sponge

And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch

In the pajamas. “Aroint thee, witch.”

Her tongue from previous ecstasy

Releases thoughts like little hats.

These lines set the tone for the rest of Ashbery’s life-work: Sentences that are perfect examples of grammar and syntax but whose sense borders on the absurd; pop culture exuberance wedded to oratorical intensity; dream-like leaps in consciousness and juxtaposition of images; the implications of vague menace and paranoia; a kind of dislocating cinematic montage effect. While Ashbery’s work has certainly darkened and deepened over the past 50 years,  and his ambition has grown, he remains now much the poet he was at the beginning, a magician whose mantra is not “All will be revealed,” but, as he says wryly (and ominously) in “And the Stars Were Shining,” from 1994: “Soon, all will be hidden.”

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On September 10, the Library of Congress is going to present, for the first time, an award for lifetime achievement in fiction-writing. The award will be presented in a ceremony to –

Well, wait a minute. Before I actually name the lucky author, let’s speculate on whom it could be. Let’s consider the obvious choices for a lifetime achievement award in fiction writing. Of course, one criterion is that the writer be, you know, living.

On with the thinking cap. Here goes.

John Updike

Joyce Carol Oates

Philip Roth

E.L. Doctorow

Toni Morrison

Anne Tyler

Thomas Pynchon

Don DeLillo

Ernest J. Gaines

Richard Ford

Reynolds Price

Cormac McCarthy

J.D. Salinger? (He’s alive. Or aliveish.)

Doubtless my literate readers will have other suggestions. Remember, though, that the award is for a lifetime of writing achievement, not for a few well-known books, so maybe Salinger doesn’t qualify. Don’t forget, Norman Mailer is dead.

So, while you’re placing your bets and trying to slake your anticipation, I’ll tell you that the winner of the first Library of Congress award for lifetime achievement in fiction is –

Herman Wouk.

You’re all smacking your foreheads and going, “Duh, well, yeah, of course, Herman Wouk. ‘The Caine Mutiny.’ ‘Marjorie Morningstar.’ ‘Youngblood Hawke.’ Those mini-series about WWII.”

Perhaps the intention is to present the award for longevity. Wouk, born May 27, 1915,  happens to be 93, which makes him 16 years older than the next oldest possibility, E.L. Doctorow (b. Jan. 6, 1931). In fact, the award could simply be made each year to the next author in the chronological line, eliminating the cheap and petty element of suspense. There wouldn’t even have to be a ceremony. A certificate could be emailed to the winner. In that case, the roster would look like this:

Wouk (May 27, 1915)

Doctorow (Jan. 6, 1931)

Morrison (Feb. 18, 1931)

Updike (March 18, 1932)

Gaines (Jan 15, 1933)

Price (Feb. 1, 1933)

Roth (March 19, 1933)

McCarthy (July 20, 1933, a big year for writers!)

DeLillo (Nov. 20, 1936)

Pynchon (May 8, 1937)

Oates (June 16, 1938)

Tyler (Oct. 25, 1941)

Ford (Feb. 16, 1944)

See, that takes care of the award for the next 12 years, assuming that these authors all live that long. Pesky ol’ Death. The Library of Congress people doesn’t even have to have another meeting. They should have called me first.

Walter Kirn certainly got up on the curmudgeon’s side of the bed the day he wrote his review of James Wood’s new book, “How Fiction Works” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24). The cover of The New York Times Book Review is generally reserved for raves, but on August 17, Kirn came out swinging. His disdain barely conceals his rage.  Que pasa?

This is the first review I have read in which the reviewer mocks the author of the book about literature and writing for being too well-read. Wood, a well-known literary critic, essayist and reviewer who writes for The New Yorker, mentions at the beginning of “How Fiction Works” that the books he cites (94 novels and a handful of short stories) are from his own library; he didn’t go to a public or university library or order anything from Amazon, a fact that seems to inflame Kirn’s sarcasm.  “Wood’s study must be vast, with well-stocked shelves, judging by [Wood’s] inarguable erudition,” he writes, making erudition sound like a particularly loathsome STD. Wood, says Kirn. “drops his quotations and references as copiously, easily and freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering cups of birdseed.” How one could compose a book about how fiction (or anything else) works without using quotations and references defeats my imagination, and I would certainly hope that the author of such a book knew what he was talking about and possessed the background in reading and thinking — call it erudition — to write convincingly.

Having “the whole Western canon at his disposal, apparently” and conveying a “tone of genteel condescension,” the “vicarish” and “sequestered,” Wood, who possesses “a donnish, finicky persona,” “flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic.” Ouch, talk about condescension! This is getting really personal. I Googled as hard as I could but I couldn’t find evidence that Wood, known for damaging reviews, attacked one of Kirn’s novels or dissed him personally. No, Kirn just freaking despises Wood and his book, and he makes no distinction between them.

Among Wood’s sins is that his author-heroes are “semimonastic introverts” like Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, writers who refuse to “let themselves be distracted and overwhelmed by the roar of the streets, the voices of the crowd,” in the way that one of Kirn’s heroes, David Foster Wallace, does (according to Kirn). I have to say that, having struggled through David Foster Wallace’s turgid prose and sophomoric satire, I think his writing bears as much resemblance to the authentic roar of the streets and voices of the crowds as Dr. Scholls does to Dr. Faustus. And what nonsense this is when Wood happily praises the exuberance of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, the sneaky wit of Jane Austen and Muriel Spark.

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Lydia Millet writes strange, provocative, disturbing novels that illuminate recesses of the human psyche most people would rather not have revealed. At the same time, her work is horrifically funny, profoundly satirical yet committed and compassionate. Such previous novels by Millet as “George Bush: Dark Prince of Love,” “My Happy Life” and “Oh Pure and Radiant Heart,” will remind readers of Melville’s full-dark mode of “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Billy Budd”; of Kafka’s short stories like “A Country Doctor” and “A Hunger Artist”; and Nathanael West’s bitter, incisive little novels, “Miss Lonelyhearts” and “The Day of the Locust,” all works that deal in different ways with isolation, alienation and loneliness, with complicated desires and quenched passions, with the weary workings of humanity worn down to an essential, terrifying nub, the locus where choices are extremely limited and profoundly inevitable.

With “How the Dead Dream” (Counterpoint, $24), Millet delivers a novel that strips a character of all pretense, custom, habit and certitude, even of personality, to leave an entity that moves blindly forward in a world of blunt instinct. Even as a boy, the novel’s central figure, T., loves money, examining the faces of the Founding Fathers depicted on currency to understand their characters: he admires Andrew Jackson because it seems as if “no passing insult could compel him to emote.” This slightly curious locution mirrors T’s own sense of formality and detachment; he requires neither friends nor praise, only the satisfaction and protection that success and money bring. Though a genius at business, he lives modestly, alone, but in the grip of a vision:

Currency infused all things, from the small to the monolithic. And to be a statesman the first thing needed was not morals, public service, or the power of rhetoric; the first thing needed was money. Because finally there was always a single answer. As there was only one intelligence residing in a self, as trees grew upward toward the sun, as women lived outward and men walked in insulation to the end of their lives: when all was said and done, from place to place and country to country, forget the subtleties of right and wrong, the struggle toward affinity. In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free.

Yet contingencies arise, cracking T’s world of purpose and discipline. First, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, T. hits a coyote; getting out of his car, stunned, confused, he sits with her as she dies: “the fullness, the terrible sympathy.” T.’s father unaccountably leaves his mother; she moves in with her son and gradually becomes obsessed, then eccentric, then demented. Improbably, T. acquires a girlfriend — “it was her self-possession that got him” — but there is a flaw in her heart, an unpredictable nick of the sort that doctors only know is there after a person inexplicably dies. Now T. begins to realize: “Authority was not all.”

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Despite the fact that for millions of Americans the juxtaposition Milton Pound might as well be the name of a rock band, two recent issues of The New Yorker devoted space to essays about English poet John Milton (June 2) and American poet Ezra Pound (June 9 & 16). The piece on Milton, written by Jonathan Rosen, was motivated by a roster of books published this year to mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of the author of “Paradise Lost.” The piece on Pound, by Louis Menand, takes impetus from the first volume of a new biography about the poet, essayist, editor and noted fascist.

Improbable as it may seem, Milton and Pound share some characteristics. Both were formidably well-read and learned, and their writings encompass an astonishing breadth of allusion. Both attempted to embody a world-view in an epic poem, Milton in “Paradise Lost” and Pound in “The Cantos.” Both were polemicists, leveling sharp critical prose at cultural, social and political concerns; the feverishly productive Pound issued hundreds of essays and pamphlets on myriad subjects including modern art and poetry (especially the necessity to “Make It New”) and dangerously crackpot theories of history and economics, while Milton is best known for “Areopagitica,” his brilliant defense of freedom of speech, “Doctrines and Discipline of Divorce” (he was unhappily married), and “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” in which he espoused the notion that power resides in the people.

Both Milton and Pound were considered traitors, the former for supporting and working for Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth for 20 years (Charles II was not in a forgiving mood when restored to the throne in 1660, and a warrant was issued for Milton’s arrest, and he went into hiding), while Pound, after spending World War II broadcasting anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda from Rome was captured by American soldiers in 1945, sent back to the United States and was committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, from which he was released in 1958.

Here’s another common bond: Outside of academia, neither Milton nor Pound is read today. Their voluminous writings are considered obscure and difficult (and in Pound’s case often downright crazy), reflecting cultures we no longer understand and that are completely irrelevant to the early 21st century, though surely Milton’s deeply liberal (if not libertarian) opinions on education, freedom of the press and the relationship between people and their governments are, during the tenure of George W. Bush in the White House, more meaningful than ever.

From the late 17th through the early 20th century, Milton’s name was synonymous with lofty locution and eloquence, with high seriousness in poetry. In fact, Pound was one of the “modernists,” along with his friend T.S. Eliot, who toppled Milton from his fusty pedestal. Pound, before he descended into paranoia and madness, was regarded as the progenitor of literary modernism, serving as editor for Eliot, champion for Yeats and Joyce and dozens of other writers, constantly cajoling, complaining, urging, arguing, hatching plots and schemes, founding or supporting little magazines and journals. Once he was considered the major influence on poetry in the first half of the 20th century; now Pound seems more than neglected, he seems ignored.

I realize that one person cannot turn the tide, but here’s what I propose, as my Mid-Year Resolution: To read, by the end of 2008, John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Ezra Pound’s “Cantos.” While “Paradise Lost” may be considered both sacrosanct and boring and the “Cantos” impenetrable and insane and boring, I, in the final analysis, will be the judge of that. To keep readers of this blog informed about my progress or lack thereof, I will post occasional bulletins, and while engaged in this pursuit, I will attempt to lead a happy, normal, productive life in all other areas.

You may say “Good luck” at any time here.

Julie Hecht’s collection of stories, “Do The Windows Open?” made my list of the best books I read in 1997. Here’s what I wrote in my end-of-the-year wrap-up:

If ever a book displayed impeccable tone, it’s Julie Hecht’s winsome, wry and steely “Do the Windows Open?” (Random House, $21). The nameless narrator of this group of connected short stories embodies a curious combination of fragile resilience and crisp, endearing wit. The world, demanding choices and implying judgments, is too much with her. Set mainly in East Hampton and Nantucket and heavily imbued with what the rest of us think of as Manhattanesque angst, the stories are, however, neither arch nor tedious; Hecht invests her narrator with such perfect self-effacement, delicacy and quirky intelligence that we trust her, if not love her, almost at first sight. Whether she’s trying to photograph an egotistical doctor with his dog or launching a quest to replace glasses frames from an optometrist she suspects of being a Nazi sympathizer, our narrator treads, in her sensible but pretty shoes, the touchy territory of hope and bruised innocence.

Now Hecht has published a second (and eagerly awaited by her coterie, which includes — included — me) collection of stories titled “Happy Trails to You” (Simon & Schuster, $24) and I am sorry to report that the book, far from exhibiting the impeccable wry, winsome, steely tone of its predecessor, is — and I never thought that I would write these words in a million years — petulant, aggrieved and wearisome. Quel disappointment!

The stories in “Do the Windows Open?” were gently satiric, verbally adroit yet oblique, resilient yet fragile, a constant weaving of optimism, pessimism and cluelessness. The stories in “Happy Trails to You,” on the other hand, have exchanged subtlety for complaint and quixotic punctiliousness for anger. The world is still too much with our still nameless narrator, but now she takes the situations she encounters personally and crankily. America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has become a different place from what it was when she was a child — quelle surprise! — and the blunt disgruntlement that fills these stories is depressing and narratively inept. Eleven years ago, the narrator’s nervous and neurotic nature seemed quirky and charming, almost a victorious function of her intelligence and privacy; now it seems querulous and ungracious and crippling.

She corrects people’s grammar in public. She explains things to people who don’t want things explained. She deplores “the horrible new century,” “this era of bad behavior” and “the new junk world of America,” and she remembers “an era of history and life that was so much more fun than the present one” and “the past decades of store service and just plain civility in America.” She points out “more evidence of the lack of education in the new, decadent, lazy generation” and “the new generation that knows only the music of the past couple of decades.” In two stories, she calls George Bush the “Alfred E. Neuman president.” In two stories she (being a vigilant vegetarian) mentions reading that a rabbi can ritually cleanse a stove upon which meat has been cooked.

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Well, let’s just dump out the entire wheelbarrow of book-reviewing cliches: “Wildly inventive.” “Rich with detail.” Verbally dazzling.” “Wise and insightful.” “Poignant and moving.” “You’ll laugh your guts out.”

These are the numb yet cogent terms that continually revolved in my mind — like airliners stacked in a holding pattern around a control tower — as I read “Dear American Airlines” (Houghton Mifflin, $22), the first novel by Jonathan Miles, cocktail columnist for The New York Times and book columnist for Men’s Journal, appropriate avocations for the author of a novel drenched in alcohol and bookishness. “Dear American Airlines” is, actually, rich and wild and dazzling and insightful and fall-on-the-floor funny and sad and tender, a first-person confession, mea culpa, erstwhile suicide note and epic letter of complaint to the airline in question for trapping its writer, Benjamin R. Ford, on the way to the wedding of the daughter he has not seen since she was a baby, at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Once he starts writing, fueled by anger, frustration, loneliness and cigarettes, be can’t stop.

Bennie Ford is a failed poet — “back when I was scramming delicious fellowships,” he says, “for the third-rate poems I was writing” — a failed lover and father, a failed person. “God, Bennie, that’s so like you,” says Stella, the long -absent mother of the long-neglected daughter. “Offering up the impossible. The stupid ideal.” Bennie views these impossibilities and ideals, likely gleaned from his suicidal, “artistic” southern belle mother, with a mixture of romanticism and cynicism, hates himself for not living up to any standard of responsibility and decency, his own or anyone else’s. He makes a resplendent addition to the legion of smart, sensitive, observant, egotistical, rueful, raging, self-destructive and well-intentioned drunkards — i.e., American men — with which American fiction is rife.

As the hours at the airport wear wearily on, Bennie plunges deeper into the chastening acid-bath of his sins, putting into his letter a catalog of gross (and often hilarious) misjudgments, misbehaviors and missteps; he may have been a drunk, but he was a drunk on a grand, operatic scale, and some of his antics make “The Lost Weekend” look like “The Good Ship Lollipop.” The device of the letter of complaint is preposterous, of course, but among Miles’ many virtues as a fiction writer is making readers believe in it the letter and believe in Bennie’s rampaging and doleful personality and the necessity for this great unleashing. Since giving up poetry, with a sense of relief, Bennie has made a living of sorts as a translator of modern Polish literature; he includes in his massive missive passages from his latest translation, a novel called “The Free State of Trieste” by Alojzy Wojtkiewicz. Its hero is Walenty Mozelewski, a hapless Polish soldier who loses a leg at the battle of Monte Cassino, boards the wrong train after his convalescence, and finds himself in Trieste. These digressions — “you’ll have to permit me my digressions,” Bennie says — not only do not detract from the enterprise but they develop, with lovely subtlety, a parallel between the aspects of alienation and longing that permeate the spirits of these two lost men, the fictional character and the fictional-fictional character.

“Self-mythologizing,” Bennie writes, “like drinking for fourteen hours a day, will eventually grind you into residue.” There’s the point. Fed a truckload of mythologizing by his mother, ruined by the grandiosity of book-reading (no one should encounter Holderlin at 16, as I did), Bennie perceives everything through the lenses of his crippling self-regard. We root for him because his recklessness is partially leavened by the agents of his self-deprecating wit, his mordant eye for absurdity (others’ and his own) and his verbal virtuosity. Miles smartly withholds solace and keeps us guessing: Will Bennie make it to his daughter’s wedding? Will humility finally strike him, like Saul on the road to Tarsus (though rerouted through Damascus with a layover)? Will he run out of ink and paper?

You’ll have to read “Dear American Airlines” to find out. It’s as exhilarating as flying First Class on frequent flyer points.

Jonathan Miles will be at Off Square Books in Oxford, Miss, Wednesday from 5 to 6 p.m. to read from and sign “Dear American Airlines.” Call (662) 236-2262.