John Ashbery

"This volume brings to light collages, collage books, word poems, and altered comic strips that have been largely inaccessible or unavailable since their making. Originally published in small editions and hard-to-find journals, or made as singular artist's books, these works demonstrate the full range of Jess's extraordinary verbal and visual play."--Jacket flap.

Thrill of a Romance It's different when you have hiccups. Everything is—so many glad hands competing for your attention, a scarf, a puff of soot, or just a blast of silence from a radio. What is it? That's for you to learn to your dismay when, at the end of a long queue in the cafeteria, tray in hand, they tell you the gate closed down after the Second World War. Syracuse was declared capital of a nation in malaise, but the directorate had other, hidden goals. To proclaim logic a casualty of truth was one. Everyone's solitude (and resulting promiscuity) perfumed the byways of villages we had thought civilized. I saw you waiting for a streetcar and pressed forward. Alas, you were only a child in armor. Now when ribald toasts sail round a table too fair laid out, why the consequences are only dust, disease and old age. Pleasant memories are just that. So I channel whatever into my contingency, a vein of mercury that keeps breaking out, higher up, more on time every time. Dirndls spotted with obsolete flowers, worn in the city again, promote open discussion.

You meant more than life to me. I livedthrough you not knowing, not knowing Iwas living.I learned that you called for me. I came towhere you were living, up a stair. Therewas no one there.No one to appreciate me. The legality of itupset a chair. Many times to celebratewe were called together and wherewe 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"

A collection of poems by John Ashbery that address the themes of age and its inevitable losses, memories of childhood, and the transforming magic of dreams.

Girls on the Run is a poem loosely based on the works of the "outsider" artist Henry Darger (1892-1972), a recluse who toiled for decades at an enormous illustrated novel about the adventures of a plucky band of little girls. The Vivians are threatened by human tormentors, supernatural demons, and cataclysmic storms; their calmer moments are passed in Edenic landscapes. Darger traced the figures for his work from comic strips, coloring books, and other ephemeral sources, filling in the backgrounds with luscious watercolor. John Ashbery's Girls on the Run creates a similar childlike world of dreamy landscapes, lurking terror, and veiled eroticism. Its fractured narrative mode almost (but never quite) coalesces into a surrealist adventure story for juvenile adults.

Progressive awakenings occur in all these verses. Each sense is engaged, and there is a search for epiphanies of the spirit, too. We are in history but also in the present - in buildings, churches, homes, trains, and cars; then back in the open pursuing the course to Baltimore and Bucharest, to the zoo and the park, to the past and the future. The digressions are wily, heartbreaking, or vertiginous. The clock ticks on, yet the tactics of survival and enhancement set forth in these poems invoke an ideal permanence.

The Mooring of Starting Out demonstrates the early bravado and extraordinary development of one of America's most important contemporary poets. Spanning the first sixteen years of Ashbery's career, this volume begins with the stunning first collection, Some Trees (1956), which was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and hailed by Frank O'Hara as "the most beautiful first book since Wallace Stevens's Harmonium." This is followed by The Tennis Court Oath (1962) and Rivers and Mountains (1967), a National Book Award finalist. From the seventies, comes the lyrical The Double Dream of Spring (1970), and the highly idiosyncratic and much admired prose poetry of Three Poems (1972).

"Ashbery fans will welcome this collection of one hundred and twelve poems where the signature qualities of Ashbery's greatest work are on every page with a new intensity and power." --Publisher's description.

John Ashbery's sixteenth collection of poems, like all the others, strikes out into new territory and engages the reader in new and unexpected ways. With the exception of the title poem, which concludes the volume - a thirteen-part poem of exceptional grace and brilliance - the fifty-eight poems in this collection are mostly short; in their relative brevity they display all the valiant wit and rich lyric intensity which readers know from Ashbery's expansive longer work. The critic Harold Bloom has observed: "And the Stars Were Shining is one of John Ashbery's strongest collections, the title poem his most beautiful long poem yet. He helps to redeem a bad time when many among us have joined in a guilty flight away from the aesthetic.

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 Lautréamont alludes to the pseudonymous Count de Lautréamont, 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-Lautréamont. 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.

"Ashbery's art reviews for the Paris Herald Tribune, ARTNews, New York and Newsweek go beyond journalism. Generous, astute, never dull and possessed of catholic taste, this poet-critic shows us what is special about a Bonnard or a Grandma Moses. He especially admires artists who have undertaken individualistic, spiritual pilgrimages, like Marsden Hartley, Odilon Redon ("a kind of Cezanne of the unconscious"), Belgian fantasist Leon Spilliaert and undervalued American still-life painter John F. Peto. Nearly 100 reviews and essays are gathered here, amplified by 35 color and black-and-white reproductions. Topics range from Frank Lloyd Wright to Japanese folk art, from Jean Baptiste Simieon Chardin's timeless simplicity to Red Grooms's zany urban caricatures. Ashbery gets past art-world hoopla to reveal the substance, or lack thereof, in works and reputations discussed."--Pub. Weekly via amazon.com. "One of the pleasures of a fine dinner is the way in which each course adds its own special flavor to the overall meal. This collection of Ashbery's pieces of art criticism, written for such publications as ARTnews, New York, and Newsweek, is much the same; the reader can dip into the book at any point and come away with a morsel (or several) that is immediately satisfying. Ashbery's writing style is spare, smooth, and informative, and although many readers may not be familiar with either the exhibits or artists he mentions, one has a sense of having learned something--a feat many critics fail to accomplish. It is obvious, too, that Ashbery both enjoys and has a sense of concern for the art world; there is criticism here, but it is of the constructive sort rare in critics these days. For anyone who enjoys good critical work."--Lib. J. review via amazon.com.

The Best American Poetry 1988, the first volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by David Lehman and by guest editor John Ashbery, who chose one of his own poems among the group of 75. —Wikipedia