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. 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.
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 Drafts Fragments and Poems written by Joan Murray and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Wave written by John Ashbery and published by Ardent Media. This book was released on 1985 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book John Ashbery and American Poetry written by David Herd and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 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 James Merrill written by Langdon Hammer and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2015 with total page 978 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A biography of the acclaimed poet James Merrill"--
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 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 Shadow Train written by John Ashbery and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating experiment in traditional poetic form, from one of the most untraditional American poets ever to set pen to paper At 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.
Download or read book Breezeway written by John Ashbery and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Quick Question written by John Ashbery and published by Carcanet Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 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 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 And the Stars Were Shining written by John Ashbery and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witty yet heartbreaking, conversational yet richly lyrical, John Ashbery’s sixteenth poetry collection showcases a mastery uniquely his own And the Stars Were Shining originally appeared in 1994, toward the midpoint of a startlingly creative period in Ashbery’s long career, during which the great American poet published no fewer than nine books in ten years. The collection brings together more than fifty compact, jewellike, intensely felt poems, including the well-known “Like a Sentence” (“How little we know, / and when we know it!”) and the lyrical, deeply moving thirteen-part title poem recognized as one of the author’s greatest. This collection is Ashbery at his most accessible, graceful, and elegiac.
