John Ashbery

Hailed by Harold Bloom as "America's greatest living poet," John Ashbery has won every major American literary award for his poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A beloved and gifted artist, Ashbery takes his place beside Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane in the canon of great American poets. With Quick Question, a new collection of poems published in time for his 85th birthday, John Ashbery proves that his creative power has only grown stronger with age.

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manuscripts, restores Murray's raw lyricism and visionary lines, while also including a good deal of previously unpublished work, as well as a selection of her exuberant letters.

After his spectacular early career, in which he became one of the best-loved and most controversial poets of his time, and his radical and productive middle years, John Ashbery continued effortlessly finding new directions in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, writing playfully, inventively. His language is exquisitely attuned to mundane reality, transforming it. Here in a single, substantial, authoritative, and helpfully annotated volume are seven complete books from this crucial period, starting with Flow Chart (1991), a tour de force that shows Ashbery's mastery of `the entire orchestral potential of the English language,' as Helen Vendler put it. It complements Ashbery's earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, offering a vision of the collective `dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.' The poems range across Ashbery's varied interests and obsessions - opera, film noir, French poetry, the visual arts. Everywhere is his boundless inventiveness, his pitch-perfect ear for American speech, his exuberant erudition. The book ends with twenty-six uncollected poems, among them `Hoboken', a collage that pillages Roget's Thesaurus, and much else.

For more than sixty years, the poems of John Ashbery have 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, and 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, his twenty-seventh collection, once again showcases 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.

The poems in Breezeway move lightly between the everyday world, with its pleasures and absurdities, and the worlds of literature and art, with theirs. John Ashbery’s poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing, the work of an old and always a new master with an uncanny understanding of our age, its fears and fragmentation, its fulfilments. Here is Mr Salteena and the station of the Metro, demystified Middle English mysticism and a peculiarly-paced samba, a drugstore, a supermarket, Batman and his dog Pastor Fido, all concluding in ‘A Sweet Disorder’, in which Herrick is decisively transformed: ‘Pardon my sarong. I’ll have a Shirley Temple.’

The companion volume to Collected French Translations: Prose, this book reflects John Ashbery's lifelong engagement with French poetry. From 1955 Ashbery spent almost a decade in France, working as an art critic, and formed a close relationship with the poet Pierre Martory. His versions of Martory's poems (published by Carcanet as The Landscapist), featured here, were a 2008 Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. This bilingual volume presents translations from twenty-four poets, among them Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, Paul Eluard and France's greatest living poet, Yves Bonnefoy. It also includes a selection from Ashbery's masterly translation of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, published to acclaim in 2011. The development of modern French poetry - through Romanticism, Symbolism, Dada and Surrealism - emerges chronologically through Ashbery's choices; as does the lasting influence of French poetry on Ashbery's own iconoclastic career.

Some Trees is a collection of poems by John Ashbery, published as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1956. The book contains 29 poems, many of which explore themes of memory, identity, and the nature of language. Ashbery's style is often characterized as surrealistic and fragmented, with an emphasis on the use of language as a tool for exploring the subconscious. The poems in Some Trees are marked by a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty, as Ashbery challenges traditional notions of meaning and representation. Despite this, the collection is widely regarded as a landmark in American poetry, and has been praised for its innovative approach to form and language. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

John Ashbery's "Collected Poems 1956-1987" contains the complete text of the poet's first twelve books, from "Some Trees" (1956), selected for publication by W. H. Auden, to "April Galleons" (1987), and including "The Vermont Notebook" (1975) with the original artwork by Joe Brainard, and "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1976), which won the Pulitzer Prize, together with a selection of more than sixty previously uncollected poems. To read Ashbery's work in sequence is to experience the magnitude of his presence in American poetry over these four decades, as innovator and influence. His poetry, 'an exuberant script for survival' (Marina Warner), 'light-footed and delectably irresponsible' (Alfred Brendel), fascinates with virtuosic complexity and delights with wry humour. A restless explorer of the modern world, alive to language and impression, Ashbery enlarges the possibilities of poetry. With a detailed chronology and notes on the poems, "Collected Poems 1956-1987" is an indispensable compilation of the work of one of the essential poets of our time.

Ashbery (f. 1927), Frank O'Hara og Kenneth Koch, utgjorde i mange år den såkalla New York-skolen (eit slags motstykke i lyrikken til maleriets abstrakt-ekspresjonistiske New York-skole). Ashberys dikt er både intellektualistiske og naivistiske, han har eit nært tilhøve til biletkunst og har også praktisert som kunstkritikar.

A bilingual anthology of 38 poems in honour of the 150th anniversary of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass from John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Mark Ford, Fanny Howe and many others. Selected, edited and translated by young French enthusiasts.

"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. The long title poem, a meditation on Parmigianino's famous self-portrait, has become Ashbery's best-known poem. It is accompanied here by a number of shorter pieces - playful, witty, elusive. The collection remains one of the most significant poetic achievements of our time.

Fifty years of writing on literature, film, and art by one of the most influential poets and critics of our time This third collection of internationally acclaimed poet and critic John Ashbery's critical writings dramatically expands the terrain covered by the first two, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987 and Other Traditions (first presented as the Norton Lectures at Harvard). These essays on writers, artists, filmmakers and the life of a poet provide insight into Ashbery's evolution as one of the major poets in English. Ashbery's criticism is as essential to the cultural history of the twentieth century as was that of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. His unique sensibility has had a profound impact on the literature and arts of our time, and his influence is certain to be felt for decades to come. Editor Eugene Richie's introduction provides a meaningful context for fifty years' worth of critical and creative prose by one of America's finest poets.

John Ashbery's new collection of fifty-one poems ends with the substantial piece that gives the book its title. Composed in stanzaic prose, it is a fine specimen of his distinctive courtship mode, wooing the language with language, teasing it and teasing out of it a Protean lover that loves Protean him back: a you, an I, in a wild variety of registers and postures. Throughout "Where Shall I Wander" the effable and ineffable are in dialogue; time ('then' and 'now') and the stable moments of the poem are within earshot of one another, but cannot ever quite touch hands. There are ghosts and presences, some unexpected like Ali Baba, Arabia Deserta (down to the turning spit and braised goat) and Mrs Hanratty's apron; others like Holderlin are more insistently entertained, in a poetry that fractures and reinvents syntax, cadence and our sense of beauty, this tribute informed by the terror of Holderlin's later world in which it is impossible not to share.

By the end of the book, Ashbery has laid out not only a course in contemporary poetics but a portrait of the artist teaching himself to become a thoroughly Modernist poet---in small bites, easy to savor, easy to digest.---Los Angeles Times Book ReviewThis is a marvelous book by one of our greatest poets. Reading John Ashbery's Selected Prose is like listening to a brilliant talker who not only keeps us entertained and laughing, but who also has wise things to say about all sorts of interesting subjects.---Charles Simic At last! Many of the fugitive pieces collected in this volume---on Gertude Stein, on Frank O'Hara, on Marianne Moore or Adrienne Rich---published as many of them were in out-of-the way places, have already become collectors' items, providing fascinating---and often startling--- assessments of their subjects as well as new insight into Ashbery himself. Now here they are between two covers, along with many hitherto unknown pieces on subjects ranging from Michel Butor to Mary Butts, Jane Freilicher to Mark Ford. For anyone who cares about the contemporary poetry/art scene, this is an indispensable collection.---Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University Selected Prose contains a broad selection of texts by internationally acclaimed poet and critic John Ashbery. This third collection of Ashbery's critical writings dramatically expands the terrain covered by the first two, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987 and Other Traditions (first presented as the Norton Lectures at Harvard). These essays on writers, artists, filmmakers and the life of a poet provide insight into Ashbery's evolution as one of the major poets in English. Ashbery's criticism is as essential to the cultural history of the twentieth century as was that of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. His unique sensibility has had a profound impact on the literature and arts of our time, and his influence is certain to be felt for decades to come. Editor Eugene Richie's introduction provides a meaningful context for fifty years' worth of critical and creative prose by one of America's finest poets.

For the first time, "The New York Poets" gathers in a single volume the best work of four extraordinary poets: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. By the early 1950s all four were settled in Manhattan, collaborating, competing and encouraging each other's radical experiments with language and form. Much of their work reflects their participation in the creative energies of the New York art scene, 'the floods of paint', to quote James Schuyler, 'in whose crashing surf we all scramble'. Believing that anything could be material for a poem, they transformed American poetry with their irreverent wit and daring. Mark Ford's anthology is an essential introduction to four poets whose work has influenced poetry around the world. It includes detailed background information and a substantial bibliography.

One of the greatest living poets in English here explores the work of six writers he often finds himself reading "in order to get started" when writing, poets he turns to as "a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down." Among those whom John Ashbery reads at such times are John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. Less familiar than some, under Ashbery's scrutiny these poets emerge as the powerful but private and somewhat wild voices whose eccentricity has kept them from the mainstream--and whose vision merits Ashbery's efforts, and our own, to read them well. Deeply interesting in themselves, Ashbery's reflections on these poets of "another tradition" are equally intriguing for what they tell us about Ashbery's own way of reading, writing, and thinking. With its indirect clues to his work and its generous and infectious appreciation of a remarkable group of poets, this book conveys the passion, delight, curiosity, and insight that underlie the art and craft of poetry for writer and reader alike. Even as it invites us to discover the work of poets in Ashbery's other tradition, it reminds us of Ashbery's essential place in our own.

Everyone wants to subscribe to a deed of heroism, especially if the risks are largely imaginary. The headline announcing a daring deed; in the tourist shop a poster promising a spectacular, sun-drenched corrida, and there is a space between the legendary bullfighters for one more sequined matador: '(Your Name Here)'. That is how the individual, whom Hardy declared must at heart remain 'unread eternally,' manages to read out of the isolated 'I' into other selves. It does not appropriate, it does not exercise negative capability, but rather attempts a kind of adventuring in voices, landscapes, loves and lives, and a coming back to - well, not precisely to oneself, because what, precisely, in the end, can one say is oneself? But coming back to a place that seems like home, where 'Your name' is naturally 'here'. The poems in Your Name Here were written before, during and after John Ashbery's rumbustious 'child sequence' Girls on the Run (1999); they are the innocent productions of the adult imagination following not Darger's weird pictorial narrative but the even weirder narrative of everyday life, everyday dreaming.

Passions, leaves, loves, flutes, insects, paintings, apologies, and partings, all feature in this collection of poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Ashbery.