Showing results for "john ashbery"

A provocative, challenging masterpiece by John Ashbery that set a new standard for the modern prose poem"The pathos and liveliness of ordinary human communication is poetry to me," John Ashbery has said of this controversial work, a collection of three long prose poems originally published in 1972, adding, " Three Poems tries to stay close to the way we talk and think without expecting what we say to be recorded or remembered."The effect of these pr...

A captivating experiment in traditional poetic form, from one of the most untraditional American poets ever to set pen to paperAt first glance, John Ashbery's Shadow Train seems to embrace the constraints of traditional poetic form—but closer reading reveals that this work is Ashbery at his revolutionary best. In fifty poems, each consisting solely of four connected quatrains, Ashbery apparently plays by the rules while simultaneously violating every single...

Witty yet heartbreaking, conversational yet richly lyrical, John Ashbery's sixteenth poetry collection showcases a mastery uniquely his ownAnd the Stars Were Shining originally appeared in 1994, toward the midpoint of a startlingly creative period in Ashbery's long career, during which the great American poet published no fewer than nine books in ten years. The collection brings together more than fifty compact, jewellike, intensely felt poems, including th...

A crackling, moving new collection from one of America's greatest living poets.In over twenty-six original books, the poems of John Ashbery have long served as signposts guiding us through the delights, woes, hypocrisies, and uncertainties of living in the modern world. With language harvested from everyday speech, fragments of pop culture, objects and figures borrowed from art and literature, his work makes light out of darkness, playing with tone and style to show how even the se...

In John Ashbery's haunting 1992 collection, just as in the traveler's experience of a hotel, we recognize everything, and yet nothing is familiar—not even ourselvesHotel Lautréamont invites readers to reimagine a book of poems as a collection of hotel rooms: each one empty until we enter it, and yet in truth abundantly furnished with associations, necessities, and echoes of both the known and the alien. The collection's title poem is itself an evocative ech...

In Ashbery's 1987 collection, ballads, folklore, and fairy tales mesh with the anxieties and idioms of modern lifeFor a book by one of the leading avant-garde poets of modern literature, John Ashbery's April Galleons is suffused with voices from the past. There are echoes of the Romantics in the elegiac "A Mood of Quiet Beauty" and "Vetiver," allusions to ballads and folkloric epics in "Finnish Rhapsody" and "Forgotten Song," and veiled references to legend...

A 1995 collection of poems that finds John Ashbery at his most conversational, funny, and surprisingIn Can You Hear, Bird, John Ashbery's seventeenth collection, language is both a plaything and a sandbox. The poems are arranged not in the order of their composition but alphabetically, by the first letter in their titles, like the neatly arrayed keys of some fabulous Seussical instrument. In line after line, Ashbery demonstrates his alertness to language as...

Is poetry the act of putting something together, or the art of taking something apart? Houseboat Days, one of John Ashbery's most celebrated collections, offers its own answerRemarkable for its introspection and for the response it elicited when it was first published in 1977, Houseboat Days is Ashbery's much-discussed follow-up to his 1975 masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and remains one of his most studied books to date....

From one of our most important modern poets comes an essential early collection, including the famous long poems "The Skaters" and "Clepsydra"When Rivers and Mountains was published in 1966, American poetry was in a state of radical redefinition, with John Ashbery recognized as one of the leading voices in the New York School of poets. Ashbery himself had just returned to America from ten years abroad working as an art critic in France, and Rivers and M...

Dating from one of the most studied creative periods of John Ashbery's career, a groundbreaking collection showcasing his signature polyphonic poem "Litany"First published in 1979, four years after Ashbery's masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the poems in As We Know represent the great American poet writing at the peak of his experimental powers. The book's flagship poem, the seventy-page "Litany," remains one of the most exciting and ch...

One of Ashbery's most important masterworks: Widely studied, critically admired, and essential to understanding one of the modern era's most revolutionary poetsThe Double Dream of Spring, originally published in 1970, followed the critical success of John Ashbery's National Book Award–nominated collection Rivers and Mountains and introduced the signature voice—reflective, acute, and attuned to modern language as it is spoken—that just a few years l...

One of Ashbery's most acclaimed and beloved collections since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, filled with his signature wit and generous intelligenceThe poems in John Ashbery's award-winning 1984 collection A Wave address the impermanence of language, the nature of mortality, and the fluidity of consciousness—matters of life and death that in other hands might run the risk of sentimentality. For John Ashbery, however, these considerations provide...