John Ashbery

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 an opportunity to display his prodigious poetic gifts: the unerring ear for our evolving modern language and its ever-expanding universe of meanings, the fierce eye trained on glimmers underwater, and the wry humor that runs through observations both surprising and familiar. As the poem “The Path to the White Moon” has it, “We know what is coming, that we are moving / Dangerously and gracefully / Toward the resolution of time / Blurred but alive with many separate meanings / Inside this conversation.” The long title poem of A Wave, which closes the book, is considered one of Ashbery’s most distinguished works, praised by critic Helen Vendler for its “genius for a free and accurate American rendition of very elusive inner feelings, and especially for transitive states between feelings.” Winner of both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize, this book is one to be read, reread, and remembered.

Chinese Whispers is the British name of a game called Telephone in America. According to a certain "Professor Hoffmann" in his book *Drawing Room Amusements* (1879), "the participants are arranged in a circle, and the first player whispers a story or message to the next player, and so on round the circle. The original story is then compared with the final version, which has often changed beyond recognition." "Chinese Whispers" is also the superb title poem in this new collection of sixty-three poems by John Ashbery. In these works, as perhaps in much poetry, the verbal nucleus that is the original incitement toward a poem undergoes twists and modulations before arriving at its final form. The changes are caused not by careless listening to the speech of others, but by endlessly proliferating trains of ideas that a single word or phrase ignites in the poet's mind. These alter the face of the poem even as they contribute to it and become part of its fabric. As in a sea change the poem has been transformed, often into "something rich and strange," but the strangeness is that of thought being opened up, like a geode, to reveal unexpected facets of meaning. John Ashbery has been called "America's greatest living poet" by Harold Bloom. Now in his seventy-fifth year, he continues to write poetry that is dazzlingly inventive and original.

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 seemingly frivolous stuff of existence can be employed to express the deepest levels of feeling. Commotion of the Birds showcases once again Ashbery’s 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.

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 Mountains, his third published collection of poems, is now considered by many critics to represent a pivotal transition point in his artistic career. The poet who would gain widespread acclaim with his multiple-award-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) is, in this collection, still very much engaged in the intimate, personal project of taking his poetry apart and putting it back together again, interrogating not just the act of writing but poetry itself—its purpose, its composition, its fundamental parts. Nominated for a National Book Award by a panel of judges that included W. H. Auden and James Dickey, Rivers and Mountains includes two of Ashbery’s most studied and admired works. “Clepsydra,” which takes its name from an ancient device for measuring the passage of time, echoes both the physical form and the philosophical weight of a water clock in its contemplation of the experience of time as it passes. “The Skaters,” the long poem that closes the collection, was immediately praised as a masterpiece of modern American poetry, and is the work that perhaps most clearly introduces the voice for which Ashbery is now well known and loved: generous, restless, wide-ranging, and human.

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 one. Over and over again, the familiar, almost sonnet-like sixteen-line form creates an outline of a poem within which, one would expect, poetry is meant to arrive—as a station waits for a train. And yet, as with many of the world’s greatest poems, the act of creating poetry also relies on the reading and the reader—in other words, as this collection’s signature poem “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” puts it, “the poem is / you.” In Shadow Train, Ashbery demonstrates how language influences our experience of reality, creating it and sustaining it while also remaining mysterious and ineffable: constantly arriving, but impossible to catch.

John Ashbery’s first published book of poems, handpicked from the slush pile by none other than W. H. AudenAshbery’s Some Trees narrowly beat out a manuscript by fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara to win the renowned Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—after the book had been rejected in an early screening round. Competition judge W. H. Auden was perhaps the first to note, in his original preface to Some Trees, the meditative polyphony that decades of readers have come to identify as Ashbery’s unique style: “If he is to be true to nature in this world, he must accept strange juxtapositions of imagery, singular associations of ideas.” But not all is strange and associative here: Some Trees includes “The Instruction Manual,” one of Ashbery’s most conversational and perhaps most quoted poems, as well as a number of poems that display his casually masterful handling of such traditional forms as the sonnet, the pantoum, the Italian canzone, and even, with “The Painter,” the odd tricky sestina. Some Trees, an essential collection for Ashbery scholars and newbies alike, introduced one of postwar America’s most enduring and provocative poetic voices, by turns conversational, discordant, haunting, and wise.

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 prose poems is at once deeply familiar and startlingly new, something like encountering a collage made of lines clipped from every page of a beloved book—or, as Ashbery has also said of this work, like flipping through television channels and hearing an unwritten, unscriptable story told through unexpected combinations of voices, settings, and scenes. In Three Poems, Ashbery reframes prose poetry as an experience that invites the reader in through an infinite multitude of doorways, and reveals a common language made uncommonly real.

**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.

A mesmerizing, endlessly entertaining collection that shows John Ashbery at his most exuberant, honest, and inviting John Ashbery’s nineteenth original collection of poetry, first published in 2000, might be one of the “Ashberyest” of his long and varied career. In these poems, the slippery pronouns (who is speaking, who is being spoken to?), the high-low allusions (Daffy Duck, please meet Rimbaud), and the twists of context (where are we anyway, and what’s happening here?) that have long been hallmarks of Ashbery’s poetry are on full, rambunctious display. Beginning with the book’s very title, Ashbery invites the reader into the world of his poetry like never before; each poem can be read as a postcard to experiences that could be yours, his, or anyone’s. And yet the poems in Your Name Here are also personal and particular. The collection is dedicated to an old friend, and in the well-known “History of My Life,” Ashbery strikes a rare autobiographical chord. Some of the best-known poems of Ashbery’s later career are here, including “Not You Again,” “Crossroads in the Past,” and “They Don’t Just Go Away, Either.” Polyphonic, deeply honest, and frequently very funny, Your Name Here is both wonder filled and wonderful.