Download or read book Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror written by John Ashbery and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).
Download or read book The Songs We Know Best written by Karin Roffman and published by . This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A biography focusing on the poet John Ashbery's early life"--
Download or read book A Wave written by John Ashbery and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Ashbery’s most acclaimed and beloved collections since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, filled with his signature wit and generous intelligence The 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.
Download or read book Where Shall I Wander written by John Ashbery and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2005-03-01 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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"
Download or read book Flow Chart written by John Ashbery and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quintessentially American epic poem that rewrites all the rules of epic poetry—starting with the one that says epic poetry can’t be about the writing of epic poetry itself The appearance of Flow Chart in 1991 marked the kickoff of a remarkably prolific period in John Ashbery’s long career, a decade during which he published seven all-new books of poetry as well as a collected series of lectures on poetic form and practice. So it comes as no surprise that this book-length poem—one of the longest ever written by an American poet—reads like a rocket launch: charged, propulsive, mesmerizing, a series of careful explosions that, together, create a radical forward motion. It’s been said that Flow Chart was written in response to a dare of sorts: Artist and friend Trevor Winkfield suggested that Ashbery write a poem of exactly one hundred pages, a challenge that Ashbery took up with plans to complete the poem in one hundred days. But the celebrated work that ultimately emerged from its squared-off origin story was one that the poet himself called “a continuum, a diary.” In six connected, constantly surprising movements of free verse—with the famous “sunflower” double sestina thrown in, just to reinforce the poem’s own multivarious logic—Ashbery’s poem maps a path through modern American consciousness with all its attendant noise, clamor, and signal: “Words, however, are not the culprit. They are at worst a placebo, / leading nowhere (though nowhere, it must be added, can sometimes be a cozy / place, preferable in many cases to somewhere).”
Download or read book Houseboat Days written by John Ashbery and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”
Download or read book John Ashbery and English Poetry written by Ben Hickman and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of how we should read one of America's most important poets
Download or read book Girls on the Run written by John Ashbery and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Ashbery’s wild, deliriously inventive book-length poem, inspired by the adventures of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls Henry Darger, the prolific American outsider artist who died in 1973, leaving behind over twenty thousand pages of manuscripts and hundreds of artworks, is famous for the elaborate alternate universe he both constructed and inhabited, a “realm of the unreal” where a plucky band of young girls, the Vivians, helps lead an epic rebellion against dark forces of chaos. Darger’s work is now renowned for its brilliant appropriation of cultural ephemera, its dense and otherworldly prose, and its utterly unique high-low juxtaposition of popular culture and the divine—some of the very same traits that decades of critics and readers have responded to in John Ashbery’s many groundbreaking works of poetry. In Girls on the Run, Ashbery’s unmatched poetic inventiveness travels to new territory, inspired by the characters and cataclysms of Darger’s imagined universe. Girls on the Run is a disquieting, gorgeous, and often hilarious mash-up that finds two radical American artists engaged in an unlikely conversation, a dialogue of reinvention and strange beauty.
Download or read book Selected Prose written by John Ashbery and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty years of writing on literature, film, and art by one of the most influential poets and critics of our time
Download or read book John Ashbery and You written by John Emil Vincent and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Ashbery and You approaches Ashbery’s critically neglected recent poetry with an ear to his use of the supremely elastic pronoun “you” and an eye toward his construction of his books as books. Together, these devices produce effects new to Ashbery’s oeuvre and offer readers new ways “in” to his work. John Ashbery and You argues that starting with April Galleons (1987), and reaching an apex in Your Name Here (2000), the poet has been paying increasingly keen and affectionate attention to his readers. Vincent tracks these techniques but above all offers his readers tools to reapproach a dauntingly difficult body of work. Some critics have suggested that Ashbery is producing books too quickly for criticism to keep up or that the later books represent, as Vincent summarizes it, “a kind of logorrhea . . . and therefore don’t really register as separate events as much as episodic eruptions of one big volcano which is the Later Ashbery.” Vincent contends that critics are not keeping up with Ashbery not so much because it is all of a piece, but rather because his work varies so much from volume to volume. Each of the volumes from the latter part of Ashbery’s career represents an individual and different poetic project, depending precisely on the unit of the book to produce its effects. By showing us that the entry point to Ashbery is not any given individual poem within a volume, but the entire volume, Vincent gives us a new and productive approach to reading the recent work of one of our most challenging poets.
Download or read book As We Know written by John Ashbery and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Parallel Movement of the Hands written by John Ashbery and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning collection of work from beloved poet John Ashbery, his first posthumous book Renowned for his inventive mind, ambitious play with language, and dexterity with a wide range of tones and styles, John Ashbery has been a major artistic figure in the cultural life of our time. Parallel Movement of the Hands gathers unpublished, book-length projects and long poems written between 1993 and 2007, along with one (as yet) undated work, to showcase Ashbery’s diverse and multifaceted artistic obsessions and sources, from children’s literature, cliffhanger cinema reels, silent films, and classical music variations by Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny to the history of early photography. Ashbery even provides a fresh and humorous take on a well-worn parable from the Gospel of Matthew. These works demonstrate that while producing and publishing the shorter, discrete poems often associated with his late career, Ashbery continued to practice the long-form, project-based writing that has long been an important element of his oeuvre. Edited and introduced by Ashbery’s former assistant poet Emily Skillings and including a preface by acclaimed poet and novelist Ben Lerner, this compelling and varied collection offers new insights into the process and creative interests of a poet whose work continues to influence generations of artists and poets with its signature intertextuality, openness, and simultaneity. A landmark publication of never-before-seen works, this book will enlighten scholars as well as new readers of one of America’s most prominent and celebrated poets.
Download or read book John Ashbery Collected Poems 1956 1987 LOA 187 written by John Ashbery and published by Hodder Christian Books. This book was released on 2008-10-02 with total page 1080 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive collection of works by the preeminent American poet.
Download or read book Your Name Here written by John Ashbery and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Wakefulness written by John Ashbery and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Some Trees written by John Ashbery and published by Yale Series of Younger Poets. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A capsule of the imaginative life of the individual, Some Trees is the 52nd volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Comparing him to T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Burt writes that Ashbery is "the last figure whom half of the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." After the publication of Some Trees, selecting judge W. H. Auden famously confessed that he didn't understand a word of it. Most reviews were negative. But in this first book of poems from one of the century's most important poets, one finds the seeds of Ashbery's oeuvre, including the influence of French surrealists--many of whom he translated--and abstract expressionism.
Download or read book John Ashbery and American Poetry written by David Herd and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discussion of the poetry of John Ashbery. Showing that a sense of occasion - the sense that the poem should be fit for its occasion - was a binding principle for the poets of the New York School, David Herd traces the development of Ashbery's poetry in the light of this idea. The book is a study of Ashbery's career and also a history of the period in which that career has taken shape. The development of Ashbery's poetic is set against such culturally defining issues as: the institutionalisation of literature; the rise and fall of the avant-garde; mass culture; Vietnam; the absence of a divine presence; the erosion of tradition; the growth of celebrity; and the emergence of AIDS. Ashbery's responses to such issues are set against the work of Lowell, Berryman, O'Hara, Koch, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Oppen and Larkin.
