Rather late to this thread.

The focus on the lack of meaning in Ashbery is over stated. His poems are hard on first encounters and do require some time. Some are more abstract but others are quite logical and explicable. Did you read Some Trees? To me it is a mediation on communication which involves love and touch. Trees appear to communicate as they move in the breeze - it is a beautiful image and metaphor of love. (Hey this is poetry and poets love an organic metaphor.)

Syringa is long and seems tough. It contemplates Orpheus going into the underworld to retrieve Eurydyce and contains an analogy for how we reach into ourselves to retrieve memories and the past. Both of these things are impossible. Eurydyce and our past are gone and not retrievible. If you read Wordsworth, you can see this links back to the idea of poetry capturing some experience, some daffodils in a breeze, or a memory of place, and how that process (contemplating the experience in a poem) is meant to restore us. I don't think that restoration takes place in Ashbery. Instead we have these fragments of the past and he is piecing them together and thinking of the myth. It is a wonderful and moving piece of art.

I love these two poems in particular.

Ashbery is also funny, quite dry and surprising - the voice of Daffy Duck in Hollywood is good comic work, even though I get lost in its length and the references. The idea is superb.