Tonight I’ll read an excerpt from the late John Ashbery’s book-length poem FLOW CHART, one of the great monuments of late-20th-century poetry. If you’re unfamiliar with Ashery’s poem, you’re in for a unique experience. It will certainly not bore you, but it might exhaust you with its unrelenting expression so that before long you’ll want to be lying down so you can close your eyes, calm yourself down, relax completely, and let yourself by taken off to sleep: literate sleep.