John Ashbery
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Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems
John Ashbery
John Ashbery won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashbery reaffirms the poetic powers that have made him such an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. This new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been.
Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems
John Ashbery
His long-awaited volume, a new selection of his later poems, spans ten major collections by one of America’s most visionary and influential poets. Chosen by the author himself, the poems in Notes from the Air represent John Ashbery’s best work from the past two decades, from the critically acclaimed April Galleons and Flow Chart to the 2005 National Book Award finalist Where Shall I Wander.
While Ashbery has long been considered a powerful force in twentieth-century culture, Notes from the Air demonstrates clearly how important and relevant his writing continues to be, well into the twenty-first century. Many of the books from which these poems are drawn are regularly taught in university classrooms across the country, and critics and scholars vigorously debate his newest works as well as his classics. He has already published four major books since the turn of the new millennium, and, although 2007 marks his eightieth birthday, this legendary literary figure continues to write fresh, new, and vibrant poetry that remains as stimulating, provocative, and controversial…
A Wave: Poems
John Ashbery
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.
The Landscapist: Selected Poems
Pierre Martory, John Ashbery
Selected poems of Pierre Martory translated from the French by John Ashbery.
“After I began translating Pierre Martory, that is, after I began to realize that his marvelous poetry would likely remain unknown unless I translated it and brought it to the attention of American readers, I have begun to find echoes of his work in mine. His dreams, his pessimistic resumes of childhood that are suddenly lanced by a joke, his surreal loves, his strangely lit landscapes with their inquisitive birds and disquieting flora, have been fertile influences for me, though I hope I haven’t stolen anything—well, better to steal than borrow, as Eliot more or less said. All of which may be a way of saying that there is no very easy way to describe Martory’s poetry. It is sui generis and it deserves to be read. And reread.” —John Ashbery
Where Shall I Wander: New Poems
John Ashbery
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”
John Ashbery
Readers of John Ashbery’s recent book Flow Chart will find the continuation of its spirit, at once tragic and playful, dense and volatile, passionate and impersonal, in this extraordinary new collection of lyric poems. The title Hotel Lautreamont alludes to the pseudonymous Count de Lautreamont, a nineteenth-century poet remembered for his presurrealist epic prose poem, “The Songs of Maldoror”. Little is known about him, save that his real name was Isidore Ducasse and that he spent his brief adult life in various hotels in Paris, checking out of his transient existence in 1870 at the age of twenty-four.
Critics and readers have long appreciated Ashbery’s uncanny use of the cadences of colloquial speech (“plain American that cats and dogs can read,” in Marianne Moore’s phrase), but they have perhaps overlooked the equally important influences of such “outsider” French poets as Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, and Ducasse-Lautreamont. These sometimes forgotten presences are wonderfully alive in this superb new collection, which reaffirms Ashbery’s unique ability to transform remarkable psychic force into language.- 6 works
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