Background
John Ashbery was born n Sodus, New York, United States, July 28, 1927.
( This reissue of a book of thirty-nine poems, first coll...)
This reissue of a book of thirty-nine poems, first collected in 1977, reminds us of Ashbery's astonishing explorations (to use Donald Barthelme's words) of places where no one has ever been. "Wet Casements," "Syringa," "Loving Mad Tom," and the long "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid,'" which concludes the book, are among the riches in a collection of dazzling eloquence and power.
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( A bold, striking new collection of poems from one of Am...)
A bold, striking new collection of poems from one of America’s most influential and inventive poets. With more than twenty poetry collections to his name, John Ashbery is one of our most agile, philosophically complex, and visionary poets. In Breezeway, Ashbery’s powers of observation are at their most astute; his insight at its most penetrating. Demonstrating his extraordinary command of language and his ability to move fluidly and elegantly between wide-ranging thoughts and ideas—from the irreverent and slyly humorous to the tender, the sad, and the heartbreaking—Ashbery shows that he is a virtuoso fluent in diverse styles and tones of language, from the chatty and whimsical to the lyrical and urbane. Filled with allusions to literature and art, as well as to the absurdities and delights of the everyday world around us, Ashbery’s poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing all at once, the work of a master craftsman with a keen understanding of the age in which he lives and writes, an age whose fears and fragmentation he conjures and critiques with humor, pathos, and a provocative wit. Vital and imaginative, Ashbery’s poems not only touch on the “big questions” and crises of life in the twenty-first century, but also delicately capture the small moments between and among people. Imaginative, linguistically dazzling, and artistically ambitious, Breezeway is John Ashbery’s sharpest and most arresting collection yet.
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(John Ashberys most renowned collection of poetry -- Winn...)
John Ashberys most renowned collection of poetry -- Winner of The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award First released in 1975, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is today regarded as one of the most important collections of poetry published in the last fifty years. Not only in the title poem, which the critic John Russell called one of the finest long poems of our period, but throughout the entire volume, Ashbery reaffirms the poetic power that made him an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. These are poems of breathtaking freshness and adventure in which dazzling orchestrations of language open up whole areas of consciousness no other American poet as ever begun to explore (The New York Times).
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(In the thirty years that John Ashbery has been writing hi...)
In the thirty years that John Ashbery has been writing his acclaimed poetry, he has also been one of America's most important art critics--first for the "Paris Herald Tribune," then as executive editor of "ARTnews," next as critic for "New York," and later for "Newsweek." "Reported Sightings" is a generously illustrated selection of his best writings on art. This rich volume covers the wide range of Ashbery's interests--including Surrealism, nineteenth-century French art, Abstract Expressionism, architecture, and design.
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(The second volume of Library of America's definitive edit...)
The second volume of Library of America's definitive edition, including the modern classic Flow Chart in a newly corrected text. Published for his ninetieth birthday, Library of America presents the second volume of John Ashberys collected poems, spanning a crucial and prolific decade in the poets work. The volume opens with the indispensable Flow Chart (1991), in a complete text for the first time. The other collections gathered hereHotel Lautréamont (1992), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Can You Hear, Bird (1995), Wakefulness (1998), and Your Name Here (2000)show Ashbery perfecting the playful, cerebral style that has made his poetry a genre unto itself, highly influential and often imitated. Long an art critic and one of the shrewdest observers of the American art scene, Ashbery engages with the renowned outsider artist Henry Darger in the fascinating book-length poem Girls on the Run (1999), inspired by the exuberant, unsettling fictional universe Darger created. The volume concludes with a selection of twenty-six previously uncollected poems.
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( Thrill of a Romance It's different when you have hiccu...)
Thrill of a Romance It's different when you have hiccups. Everything isso many glad hands competing for your attention, a scarf, a puff of soot, or just a blast of silence from a radio. What is it? That's for you to learn to your dismay when, at the end of a long queue in the cafeteria, tray in hand, they tell you the gate closed down after the Second World War. Syracuse was declared capital of a nation in malaise, but the directorate had other, hidden goals. To proclaim logic a casualty of truth was one. Everyone's solitude (and resulting promiscuity) perfumed the byways of villages we had thought civilized. I saw you waiting for a streetcar and pressed forward. Alas, you were only a child in armor. Now when ribald toasts sail round a table too fair laid out, why the consequences are only dust, disease and old age. Pleasant memories are just that. So I channel whatever into my contingency, a vein of mercury that keeps breaking out, higher up, more on time every time. Dirndls spotted with obsolete flowers, worn in the city again, promote open discussion.
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(With this volume, published in 2008, John Ashbery became ...)
With this volume, published in 2008, John Ashbery became the first living poet to have his work collected in the Library of America series. Beginning with Some Trees in 1956, John Ashbery charted a profoundly original and individual course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, and alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language. This first volume of the collected Ashbery includes the complete texts of his first twelve books, including such groundbreaking collections as Rivers and Mountains, Three Poems, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975), and Houseboat Days. It also features an unprecedented gathering of more than sixty previously uncollected poems written over a period of four decades, a rare treasure trove for poetry lovers. This volume is a landmark portrait of a modern master.
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(Selections from the first three decades of the poetry of ...)
Selections from the first three decades of the poetry of John Ashbery, author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award The late John Ashbery was a poet whose teasing, delicate, soulful lines made him one of the most influential figures of late-20th and early 21st century American literature. (The New York Times) This important volume gathers work from his first ten collections of poetry, from Some Trees, which was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series (1956), to A Wave (1984). The 138 poems in this volume include short lyrics, haikus, prose poems, and many of Ashberys major long poems, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, offering a beautiful distillation of the first thirty years of his remarkable, groundbreaking work.
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(Widely considered the most important poet in America toda...)
Widely considered the most important poet in America today, John Ashbery creates collage both in his poetry and as visual art. This beautiful volume features Ashberys collage work in both media. John Ashbery is known foremost as a poet, but he has been creating collages for nearly as long as hes been writing poetry. He began working in the medium when he was an undergraduate at Harvard, more than seventy years ago. Now, for the first time ever, this volume compiles a comprehensive selection of Ashberys collage work, accompanied by a selection of collage-related poems. Like his poetry, Ashberys collage work combines art historical and pop culture references, creating often humorous juxtapositions. Ashberys approach to poetry and collage is quite similar and here, in an extensive interview with poet, critic, and longtime friend John Yau, Ashbery delves into his creative process and the parallels between creating in the two media. The subtitle They Knew What They Wanted is taken from one of Ashberys collage-poems, which is featured in this volume along with many others. With about seventy-five collages, exploring how Ashberys visual art has evolved over the years, this book is a must-have for the many lovers of Ashberys poetry, and for all those wishing to learn more about his creative output.
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(John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary A...)
John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preoccupation arises a poetry that passes beyond conventional limits into a highly individual realm of effectiveness, one that may be roughly likened to the visual world of Surrealist painting. Some will find Mr. Ashberys work difficult, even forbidding; but those who are sensitive to new directions in ideas and the arts will discover here much to quicken and delight them. A 35th anniversary edition of classic work from a celebrated American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize, the national Book Award, and the national Book Critics Circle Award. John Ashberys second book, The Tennis Court Oaths, first published by Wesleyan in 1962, remains a touchstone of contemporary avant-garde poetry.
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( A crackling, moving new collection from one of America...)
A crackling, moving new collection from one of Americas 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 seemingly frivolous stuff of existence can be employed to express the deepest levels of feeling. Commotion of the Birds showcases once again Ashberys mastery of a staggering range of voices and his singular lyric agility: wry, frank, contemplative, resigned, bemused, and ecstatic. The poet in this new collection is at once removed from and immersed in the terrain of his examination. Disarmingly conversational, he invites the reader to join him in looking out onto the future with humor, curiosity, and insight. The lines of these poems achieve a low-humming, thrilling point of vibration, a jostling of feathers before flight.
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( A masterful collection from the grand old man of Ameri...)
A masterful collection from the grand old man of American poetry (New York Times) You meant more than life to me. I lived through you not knowing, not knowing I was living. I learned that you called for me. I came to where you were living, up a stair. There was no one there. No one to appreciate me. The legality of it upset a chair. Many times to celebrate we were called together and where we had been there was nothing there, nothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely, leaving no stare. When the sun was done muttering, in an optimistic way, it was time to leave that there. --from The New Higher
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( This long-awaited volume, a new selection of his later ...)
This long-awaited volume, a new selection of his later poems, spans ten major collections by one of America's most visionary and influential poets. Chosen by the author himself, the poems in Notes from the Air represent John Ashbery's best work from the past two decades, from the critically acclaimed April Galleons and Flow Chart to the 2005 National Book Award finalist Where Shall I Wander. While Ashbery has long been considered a powerful force in twentieth-century culture, Notes from the Air demonstrates clearly how important and relevant his writing continues to be, well into the twenty-first century. Many of the selections found here are regularly taught in university classrooms across the country, and critics and scholars vigorously debate his newest works as well as his classics. He has already published four major books since the turn of the new millennium, and, although 2007 marked his eightieth birthday, this legendary literary figure continues to write fresh, new, and vibrant poetry that remains as stimulating, provocative, and controversial as ever. Notes from the Air reveals, for the first time in one volume, the remarkable evolution of Ashbery's poetry from the mid-1980s into the new century, and offers an irresistible sampling of some of the finest work by a poet the New York Times has called a "national treasure."
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John Ashbery was born n Sodus, New York, United States, July 28, 1927.
At Harvard he was encouraged to write poetry by Theodore Spencer and, later, by Kenneth Koch, both noted poet-teachers. After graduating in 1949, Ashbery settled in New York City.
He became a close friend of the art critic and poet Frank O'Hara, who helped to develop his interests in art, music, and literature. In 1955 Ashbery moved to France, where for ten years he wrote poetry and contributed art criticism to the Paris Herald Tribune. From 1965 until 1972, he was executive editor of Art News magazine. Ashbery's early poetry, sometimes thought to be the coterie work of a "New York School" poet, is playfully urbane, witty, parodistic. From Some Trees (1956), "The Instruction Manual" seems to mock the familiar stance of the Wordsworthian lyrical ego, poised before its "prospect": As I sit looking out of a window of the building I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal. His later work, notably Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Houseboat Days (1977), Shadow Train (1981), A Wave (1984), April Galleons (1988), and Hotel Lautréamont (1992), is almost devoid of "voice" (in a personal sense), of that identifiable area of consciousness from whose perceptions the events of the poem are to be viewed. The words seem to insist on expressing only what they mean, as opposed to those meanings supplied by formal structure, theme, voice, intention. The long title poem in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, considered by many his finest, achieves coherence primarily because Ashbery finds in the self-portrait of the 16th-century Italian painter Parmigianino an appropriate metaphor for his own obsessions with disorientation and reflexive (self-reflective) action. Lines like "The words are only speculation" (from the Latin speculum, mirror) show the poet "joining" the painter. Just as Parmigianino's convex-distorted portrait forms a visual dialectic between near and far, so the poem is a "bifocal" dialogue between the perspectives of past and present.
(Selections from the first three decades of the poetry of ...)
(John Ashberys most renowned collection of poetry -- Winn...)
(In the thirty years that John Ashbery has been writing hi...)
( This reissue of a book of thirty-nine poems, first coll...)
( This long-awaited volume, a new selection of his later ...)
(With this volume, published in 2008, John Ashbery became ...)
(The second volume of Library of America's definitive edit...)
(Widely considered the most important poet in America toda...)
( A masterful collection from the grand old man of Ameri...)
( A bold, striking new collection of poems from one of Am...)
( A crackling, moving new collection from one of America...)
(John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary A...)
( Thrill of a Romance It's different when you have hiccu...)