John Ashbery and English Poetry

John Ashbery and English Poetry

Author: Ben Hickman

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2012-03-07

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0748644768

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A study of how we should read one of America's most important poets. Ben Hickman argues that we must attend to Ashbery's radical conception of reading if we are to understand the originality of his writing. His study focuses on Ashbery's reading of English poets, including Andrew Marvell, John Donne, William Wordsworth, John Clare, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and examines Ashbery's writing in terms of an 'aesthetic of inattention'. Hickman critiques the Americanisation of Ashbery's work as well as common assumptions about his Romanticism, his avant-garde Modernism and his engagement with the historical present. He demonstrates that Ashbery's generosity as a writer is closely tied to his generosity, inattention and situatedness as a reader.


Drafts, Fragments, and Poems

Drafts, Fragments, and Poems

Author: Joan Murray

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2018-02-06

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1681371839

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The first appearance of this award-winning writer's work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray's striking poetry to its originally intended form. Though John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a key influence on his work, Murray’s sole collection, Poems, published after her death at the early age of twenty-four and selected by W. H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has been almost entirely unavailable for the better part of half a century. Poems was put together by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray’s mother, and when Murray’s papers, long thought to be lost, reappeared in 2013, it became clear that Code had exercised a heavy editorial hand. This new collection, edited by Farnoosh Fathi from Murray’s original manuscripts, restores Murray’s raw lyricism and visionary lines, while also including a good deal of previously unpublished work, as well as a selection of her exuberant letters.


John Ashbery and American Poetry

John Ashbery and American Poetry

Author: David Herd

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2024-07-30

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1526185806

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David Herd sets out to provide readers with a new critical language through which they can appreciate the beauty and complexity of Ashbery’s writing. Presenting the poet in all his forms –avant-garde, nostalgic, sublime and camp – the book argues that the perpetual inventiveness of Ashbery’s work has always been underpinned by the poets desire to write the poem fit to cope with its occasion. Tracing Ashbery’s development in the light of this idea, and from its origins in the dazzling artistic environment of 1950’s New York, the book evaluates his poetry against the aesthetic, literary and historical backgrounds that have informed it. The story of a brilliant career, and a history of the period in which that career has taken shape, John Ashbery and American Poetry provides a compelling account of Ashbery’s importance to Twentieth Century Literature.


A Wave

A Wave

Author: John Ashbery

Publisher: Ardent Media

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 9780140423433

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First published in 1984 and now appearing in a new edition, "A Wave is widely considered one of Ashbery's finest books of poetry. The 44 pieces collected here--particularly the long title-poem--find the poet applying his uniquely lyric, meditative, and often hilarious sensibility to the mysterious and incessant curves and crests of love, art, thought, experience, and selfhood. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.


Houseboat Days

Houseboat Days

Author: John Ashbery

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2014-09-09

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1480459151

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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 answer Remarkable 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. Houseboat Days begins with the moving, unforgettable poem “Street Musicians,” an allegory of artistic and personal loss that came ten years after the death of Ashbery’s friend and fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara. But while many of the poems in Houseboat Days are strikingly personal, especially when compared to Ashbery’s work from the 1950s and 1960s, the collection is less about the poet than about the act of writing poetry. In such widely anthologized poems as “Wet Casements,” “Syringa,” “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” and “What Is Poetry,” Ashbery embraces the challenge of his own ars poetica, exploring and exploding the trusses, foundations, and underground caverns that underlie the creative act, and specifically, the act of creating a poem. Marjorie Perloff of the Washington Post Book World called Houseboat Days “the most exciting, most original book of poems to have appeared in the 1970s.”


Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Author: John Ashbery

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1990-01-01

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 0140586687

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John Ashbery’s 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).


Selected Prose

Selected Prose

Author: John Ashbery

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780472031399

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Fifty years of writing on literature, film, and art by one of the most influential poets and critics of our time


Where Shall I Wander

Where Shall I Wander

Author: John Ashbery

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2005-03-01

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 0060765291

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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"


James Merrill

James Merrill

Author: Langdon Hammer

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 978

ISBN-13: 0375413332

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"A biography of the acclaimed poet James Merrill"--


As We Know

As We Know

Author: John Ashbery

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2014-09-09

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1480459054

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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 challenging of Ashbery’s career. Presented in two facing columns, the poem asks to be read as independent but countervailing monologues, creating a dialogue of the private and the public, the human and the divine, the real and the unreal—a wild and beautiful conversation that contains multitudes. As We Know also collects some of Ashbery’s most witty, self-reflexive interrogations of poetry itself, including “Late Echo” and “Five Pedantic Pieces” (“An idea I had and talked about / Became the things I do”), as well as a wry, laugh-out-loud call-and-response sequence of one-line poems on Ashbery’s defining subject: the writing of poetry (“I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well / But I was mistaken”). Perhaps the most admired poem in this much-discussed volume is “Tapestry,” a measured exploration of the inevitable distance that arises between art, audience, and artist, which the critic Harold Bloom called “an ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ for our time.” Built of doubles, of echoes, of dualities and combinations, As We Know is the breathtaking expression of a singular American voice.