Selected Poems

Selected Poems

Author: John Ashbery

Publisher: Carcanet Press Limited

Published: 1985-01-01

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9781857544121

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During his career John Ashbery has been hailed as the eminence grise of postmodernism, championed by W.H. Auden and has carried off every major literary prize. Drawn from the work he published up to 1984, this collection makes a wide range of this poet's writing available.


John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987 (LOA #187)

John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987 (LOA #187)

Author: John Ashbery

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2008-10-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1598530283

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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. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.


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).


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.


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"


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


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.


Wakefulness

Wakefulness

Author: John Ashbery

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2014-09-09

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 1480459127

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A collection of poems that recall, in their powerful transformations of language, the moment of clarity that arrives upon waking from a dream One of John Ashbery’s most critically acclaimed collections since his iconic works of the mid-1970s, Wakefulness was praised in 1999 for its beauty and alertness. In these pages, the great poet is at once luring the reader into a vivid dream and waking us up with a jolt of recognition. In poems such as “The Village of Sleep,” “Shadows in the Street,” and “Wakefulness,” dreams, sleeplessness, and other transformational and liminal states are revealed to be part of a ceaseless continuity of accelerating changes. Even the most seemingly familiar phrases (“stop me if you’ve heard this one”) are ever in the process of changing their meanings, especially in Ashbery’s hands. And distinctive new realities are created constantly by the power of words, in strange and beautiful combinations. With every word and every line, Ashbery questions the real and summons a new reality.


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.”


Quick Question

Quick Question

Author: John Ashbery

Publisher: Carcanet Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781847772282

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John Ashbery extends an invitation to readers to accompany him into the extraordinary worlds of the everyday, experienced through the box of tricks that is language. The author of over 20 volumes of poetry, Ashbery is the recipient of many honours, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a MacArthur 'genius' award.