Selected Poems

by John Ashbery

From the early virtuosity of Some Trees and The Tennis Court Oath through the triumphs of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror to the brilliance of A Wave - each collection of John Ashbery's verse has broken new ground. Now, from the whole range of a lifetime's work, Ashbery has chosen his own selection of 138 poems, including short lyrics, haiku, prose poems, and many of his major long poems. Seeing these great works together in one volume, readers will be able to savor a distillation of John Ashbery's work and appreciate fully how remarkable is his achievement.

Genres: Poetry, Literature, American, 20th Century, Classics, Canon, Fiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Formal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).

From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.

Reviews

[David M]

Okay, I'm going to mark this as read. I believe my eyes have passed over every line in the past few months, even if in some sense Ashbery remains permanently unreadable, unassimilable to the vanities of goodreads. I wonder if he and Captain Beefheart ever thought about collaborating on an opera (with help from Arvo Part?). Wouldn't that have been awesome? Too bad it never came to pass. RIP.

On that invisible terrain on the far side of pain, as it were.

*

Fed by our dreams, so inconsequential until one day
We notice the hole they left.

Meanwhile it is possible to know just enough, and this is all we were supposed to know, toward which we have been straining all our lives. We are to read this in outward things: the spoons and greasy tables in this room, the wooden shelves, the flyspecked ceiling merging into gloom - good and happy things, nevertheless, that tell us little of themselves and more about ourselves than we had ever imagined it was possible to know.

*
The appeal of Ashbery is that he writes one continuous poem, sort of a confession, but not a personal confession. What appears on the page are just the snatches you happen to overhear. The downside of this - well, he really can be a pain in the ass.

[Timothy Muller · Rating 2 out of 5]

William Logan has said of John Ashbery: "Few poets have so cleverly manipulated, or just plain tortured, our soiled desire for meaning. He reminds us that most poets who give us meaning don't know what they're talking about." This is probably as good a guess as to what Asbery is up to as any.

The mind searches naturally for meaning. Most people glom onto to some dogma very quickly in life and remain there. But then someone, let’s say a poet, comes along and attempts to convince us that the meaning we have constructed is not viable and in this attempt heaps upon us a combination of apparent meaning and unintelligibility. What are we to do?

The first thing is to acknowledge that the poet has a point. Our constructs of reality are generally inadequate if not downright ridiculous. The list of inadequate dogmas is very long, whether religious, philosophical, political, economic, or whatever.

Secondly, we must decide whether the messenger has something further to convey to us; that is whether or not (in this case) the poet, having disabused us of our simplemindedness has some better mode of apprehending reality, or is merely telling us that there is no meaning to be had.

If the former, then we should sit up and listen. Maybe this peddler of insight has something to tell us.

If the later, perhaps the poet should sit down and shut up. The dissolution of invalid approaches to meaning can only be a way station. If there is nothing further, the poet, to the extent he keeps on writing, is no more than a pseudo-sophisticate of the kind we see so much. In the last analysis, such a poet unwittingly (or not), leaves his readers to corporate advertising techniques and values.

One does not expect from a poet what is expected from Buddha, or even Plato. One does not expect a cosmology or a guide as to how one should conduct one’s affairs. When these are offered by a poet (Milton e.g.) the poet tends to lose credibility in proportion to how hard he presses his doctrine. And how a poet “means” would be much too long a long discussion for this short review.

But when we read the first line from Ashbery’s “Pyrography:”

Out here on Cottage Grove it matters

we don’t believe it; that is we don’t believe it matters to Ashbery. But it does matter. It does matter.

Today almost nobody takes poetry seriously and no one thinks of the poet as having any social responsibility; but I believe that when the religious frauds leaders have nothing left in their arsenal and when the poets cannot fill in the blanks, and apparently pride themselves on not having a clue, then our corporate masters are left to do the job of defining reality; a job for which they are willing and, in lieu of any resistance, have proven entirely able.

[Emily Wood]

A lot of straight, old, literary guys don't like Ashbery and find him impenetrable, so the fact that i like him is both subversive and permissible

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first reaction to reading John Ashbery's poetry was to write a poem of my own, On John Ashbery (2016):

A poetry too far
ravenous for meaning
conceding shards
the grass ties loosely underfoot.

You are required to lecture
on the amorphous properties
of thorns and burrs, love
at its most prophetic.

This certainly attests to the poetry's capacity for inspirational stimuli, goes straight to the poet's peek-a-boo playfulness with meaning, its characteristically postmodern fragmentation and his penchant for exploration of sentiment. To quote the excellent Poetry Foundation article (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem... ):

In the New Criterion, William Logan noted: "Few poets have so cleverly manipulated, or just plain tortured, our soiled desire for meaning. [Ashbery] reminds us that most poets who give us meaning don't know what they're talking about." The New York Times Book Review essayist Stephen Koch characterized Ashbery's voice as "a hushed, simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent whisper with a weird pulsating rhythm that fluctuates like a wave between peaks of sharp clarity and watery droughts of obscurity and languor."
[...]
Ashbery's style—self-reflexive, multi-phonic, vaguely narrative, full of both pop culture and high allusion—has become "so influential that its imitators are legion," Helen Vendler observed in the New Yorker. Although even his strongest supporters admit that his poetry is often difficult to read and willfully difficult to understand, many critics have commented on the manner in which Ashbery's fluid style conveys a major concern in his poetry: the refusal to impose an arbitrary order on a world of flux and chaos. In his verse, Ashbery attempts to mirror the stream of perceptions of which human consciousness is composed.[...] My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life." His poems move, often without continuity, from one image to the next, prompting some critics to praise his expressionist technique and others to accuse him of producing art that is unintelligible, even meaningless.

This book contains a selection of poems made by the poet from books published up to 1984: Some Trees (1956), The Tennis Court Oath (1962), Rivers and Mountains (1966), The Double Dream of Spring (1970), Three Poems (1972), Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror(1975), Houseboat Days (1977), As We Know (1979), Shadow Train (1981) and A Wave (1984). Ashbery has continued to publish books at a brisk clip, his most recent being Breezeway (2015). The selection includes most of his best known or more polemical poems such as Some Trees, the witty Le Livre est sur la table, ”How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulchre...”, Rivers and mountains, one of the long prose poems/essays (The System) that make upThree Poems (1972), and his triple prize winning Self-portrait in a convex mirror (1975) to name but a handful.

Ashbery's poetry is not all equally unintelligible, as this Eliotesque riff from Hop O' My Thumb should make clear:

I remember meeting you in a dark dream
Of April, you or some girl,
The necklace of wishes alive and breathing around your
 [throat.
In the blindness of that dark whose
Brightness turned to sand salt-glazed in noon sun
We could not know each other or know which part
Belonged to the other, pelted in an electric storm 
 [of rain.
Only gradually the mounds that meant our bodies
That wore our selves concaved into view
But intermittently as through dark mist
Smeared against fog. No worse time to have come,
Yet all was desiring though already desired and 
 [past,
The moment a monument to itself
No one would ever see or know was there.
That time faded too and the night
Softened to smooth spirals or foliage at night.
[...]
There are still other made-up countries
Where we can hide forever,
Wasted with eternal desire and sadness,
Sucking the sherbet, crooning the tunes, naming 
 [the names.

Ashberry ranges across a wide spectrum of late twentieth century preoccupations, for example Decoy finds him, in an infrequent posture, protesting politically:

We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That ostracism, both political and moral, has
Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things;
That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,
For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a
Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval
And caught regression head-on. The descending scale does not imply
A corresponding deterioration of moral values, punctuated
By acts of corporate vandalism every five years [...]

He is better known for his reflections on the limits of language and poetry, as in his well-known What is poetry poem from Houseboat days:

The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? [...]

[...]In school 
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us -what?- some flowers soon?

He can delve even deeper. The System which is a long, extended and uncharacteristic reflective prose poem that can also be considered an essay on the nature of happiness finds Ashbery at his most philosophical as he muses on what is knowable about happiness:

Most people would not consider it in its details because (a) they would argue that details, no matter how complete, can give no adequate idea of the whole, and (b), because the details can too easily become fetishes, i.e. Become prized for themselves [...] with only an idolatrous understanding of the qualities of the particular detail. Certainly even this limited understanding can lead to a conception of beauty, insofar as any detail is a microcosmos of the whole, as is so often the case. Thus you find people whose perfect understanding of love is deduced from lust, as the description of the flower can generate an idea of what it looks like. It is even possible that this irregular but satisfying understanding is the only one really allotted to us...

From Self-portrait in a convex mirror, consider this rich allusive, self-mocking, lacerating, despairing metaphysical meditation, which abruptly and furiously lashes out at its own postmodernist frame:

Our time gets to be veiled, compromised
By the portrait's will to endure. It hints at
Our own, which we were hoping to keep hidden.
We don't need paintings or
Doggerel written by mature poets when
The explosion is so precise,so fine.
Is there any point even in acknowledging
The existence of all that? Does it
Exist? Certainly the leisure to
Indulge stately pastimes doesn't,
Any more. Today has no margins, the event 
 [arrives
Flush with its edges, is of the same substance,
Indistinguishable. “Play” is something else;
It exists, in a society specifically
Organized as a demonstration of itself.
There is no other way, and those assholes
Who would confuse everything with their 
 [mirror games
Which seem to multiply stakes and 
 [possibilities, or
At least confuse issues by means of an investing
Aura that would corrode the architecture
Of the whole in a haze of suppressed mockery,
Are beside the point. They are out of the game,
Which doesn't exist until they are out of it.
It seems like a very hostile universe.

Reading Ashbery can be very exasperating, he often rambles and meanders around and around pointlessly until you are abruptly rein in your distracted mind as you come up against the shock of an achingly beautiful line or metaphor in which you clearly sense hidden depths:

We live in the sigh of our present

[from Blue Sonata in Houseboat Days(1977)]

It is true, but underneath the talk lies
The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose
Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.

[from Soonest mended in The Double Dream of Spring(1970)]

Which can't stand still and the progress
Is permanent like the preordained bulk
Of the First National Bank

Like fish sauce, but agreeable.

[from Otherwise]

...all things have their center in their dying

[from Train Rising Out of the Sea in As We Know(1979)]

In time even the rocks will grow. And if you have 
 [curled and dandled
Your innocence once too often, what attitude isn't
 [then really yours?

[from Punishing the myth in Shadow Train(1981)]

...It was a conspiracy
Of right-handed notions...

[from Another Chain Letter in Shadow Train(1981)]

For all of his jocular incorporation of pop, Ashbery remains a difficult and uneven poet; who will continue to exasperate, drowse and jolt us wide awake by turns.

[Emily Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ecclesiast is one of my favourite poems in this anthology. I first read it while studying Authorship and Intentionalism in my philosophy course on Aesthetics. Ashbery was the professor's favourite poet, and quickly became one of mine. His work is infinitely inexplicable, and I like that. It seemed to capture something niche about that period of my life that I wasn't able to fully articulate;  "You wake up forgetting."  I can't claim to have any idea what Ashbery was thinking about when he wrote this poem. All I know is that reading it felt like sitting in a calm sunrise during that split second when everything is quiet and the world seems to click into place and you're washed over with a near unprecedented clarity. "Tomorrow you'll weep – what of it?"   There's this quality of confident nonchalance, and honestly,  I don't know if it exists in the words or if it's my own imposition, but it is soothing in an oddly existential way.

"There was a key to everything in that oak forrest
But a sad one. Ever since childhood there
Has been this special meaning to everything.
You smile at your friends joke, but only later, through tears."

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ahead, starting from the far north, it wonders.
Its radish-strong gasoline fumes have probably been
Locked into your sinuses while you were away.
You will have to deliver it.
The flowers exist on the edge of breath, loose,
Having been laid there.
One gives pause to the other,
Or there will be a symmetry about their movements
Through which each is also an individual.

It is their collective blankness, however,
That betrays the notion of a thing not to be destroyed.
In this, how many facts we have fallen through
And still the old façade glimmers there,
A mirage, but permanent. We must first trick the idea
Into being, then dismantle it,
Scattering the pieces on the wind,
So that the old joy, modest as cake, as wine and friendship
Will stay with us at the last, backed by the night
Whose ruse gave it our final meaning.

[Linn Ålund Thorgren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dikterna är som små vackra berättelser som man sugs in i.

[oliver · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took me about 18 months to read all the way through, despite only being a touch over 300 pages and not covering the last three decades of Ashbery’s career. Brilliant, dizzying - what a genius Ashbery was.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's often strange looking at a person's entire career and holding it in your hands. There are stretches of pages that I absolutely loved and would read again followed by stretches I wish I hadn't allowed myself to sit through. I guess Ashbery's a pretty polarising figure in poetry, so maybe this is a normal reaction to him, though I think people tend to hate or love. I find that I love him and I hate him, over and over.

Definitely worth picking up, though. There's a lot of great poetry in here.

[Ami Boughter · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Even if we had done the things we ought to have done it probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway as everyone always leaves something undone and this can be just as ruinous as a whole life of crime or dissipation. Yes, in the long run there is something to be said for these shiftless days, each distilling its drop of poison until the cup is full; there is something to be said for them because there is no escaping them."

[TC Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

pretentious gibberish.

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

a perfect collection, one of my very favorites. keeping this out to reference frequently, not putting it back on the bookshelf.

[Michael A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

ehhh

[Callie Weidman · Rating 5 out of 5]

March gave me this book last year and I read it as much as I can. These are some poems that I think best resonate with me in my first year post-grad:
- the instruction manual
- our youth
- how much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher…

“I begin to dream,resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out the windows a little… but I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual”

[Stuart Cooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basically, everything from Convex Mirror to Shadow Train is glorious.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.”

[Peter Crofts · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume contains selections from the first half of Ashbery's career.

Superb. Ashbery is perhaps the most French of post WWII American poets. Little to no confessional whining. A lot of his work seems to explode open rather than develop in any linear sense. He's also very funny. This is poetry as assemblage and pure artifice. If so, then why does it feel so very much more alive to me than much more "grounded" poetry? He'll lift your spirits, you won't be able to say why....

Here's the first part, of the first poem, on the first page.

We see us as we truly behave:
From every corner comes a distinctive offering.
The train comes bearing joy;
The sparks it strikes illuminate the table.
Destiny guides the water-pilot, and it is destiny.
For long we hadn't heard so much news, such noise.
The day was warm and pleasant.
"We see you in your hair,
Air resting around the tips of mountains."

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This thick volume of Ashbery's selected poems has sat on my bookshelf for years intimidating me. I picked it up a few times and could only get a poem or two into it before being frustrated by its complexity and opaqueness. This time I decided I was going to tough my way through the entire volume. Strangest damn thing - now I'm an Ashbery fan. . . As they say, familiarity breeds appreciation, and the more I got into Ashbery's work, the better I understood and admired it. I found he is at his best in his longer poems (and boy does he have some long ones). I still think he is definitely not an easy poet to read by any means, but now I've adjusted my opinion of him because he is well worth the effort.

[Andrew]

People call Ashbery a polarizing figure in poetry, so I'll be even more of a contrarian by saying that some of his work is an absolute revelation-- Self-Portrait is just as amazing as I remember-- and some is really just opacity covering up for a lack of ideas, his prose writing being an especially egregious offender.

But... Self-Portrait, and some of the early poems, like The Instruction Manual. Surrealism at its finest.

[Jennifer Juffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are few poets I enjoy more than John Ashberry.
The way he puts words to paper and transforms words to thoughts are eloquently beautiful and, at times, brutally blunt.
Nothing compares.
One just needs to read; open up a book of his, skim some lines, become engrossed. It's waiting, those words on paper.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 A8198s 1985

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Thoughts of a Young Girl":
"It is such a beautiful day I had to write you a letter
From the tower, and to show I’m not mad:
I only slipped on the cake of soap of the air
And drowned in the bathtub of the world.
You were too good to cry much over me.
And now I let you go. Signed, The Dwarf."

I passed by late in the afternoon
And the smile still played about her lips
As it has for centuries. She always knows
How to be utterly delightful. Oh my daughter,
My sweetheart, daughter of my late employer, princess,
May you not be long on the way!

--

Being the only Ashbery I've read (outside one or two, here and there, in anthologies) I can't full-stop recommend it over any given collection, but I can say that while what Ashbery is 'doing' is a matter best left either to figure out for yrself, or else to glean from reading his interviews, I CAN say that this compilation has as its merit the fact that Ashbery clearly tried, with each new book of his, to do something new or else change his style; hence, this collection rarely gets boring, since he's on some new vector each thirty pages, and you can watch him, almost as in a novel, try to redeem the mistakes of the previous sections' failed experiments.

For a good sampler, you can read his long poem 'Clepsydra'; the anthology favorite 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror' is also great but sees him in a slightly later phase, attempting (very like his comparable antecedent Wallace Stevens) a reconstruction of philosophic reality in his voice via Poundian/Moorean collage, and might not in isolation give off the clearest idea of his voice; and while I feel that in the 80s he seemed to have gone pretty awry with his attempts to reintroduce sentimentalism and action into his poems, the last poem in this collection, 'A Wave', is quite good, as is the Beckett-like prose poem 'The System'.

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve been working through this monster of a book for months now. I’ve learned that I’m not a huge Ashbery fan—I found him to be too long-winded. Any wisdom he imparted was swallowed up by the sheer amount of words per poem.

It didn’t help that this is probably the worst put-together “selected poems” I’ve ever read. Not only were there no dates indicating when the poems from each book were published, but there also wasn’t a bio of the poet? Not even a paragraph!

I think, as a poet, all poetry is worth reading (even the stuff that doesn’t connect with you). But I’m happy to be done with this one.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hefty arrangement of work from ‘Some Trees’ (1956) to ‘A Wave’ (1983), by way of the astounding (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, this volume clocks in at over 300 pages and contains work that is by turns inspiring, impenetrable, playful, pretentious, mind-bending and possibly even meaningless. What is beyond doubt is that Ashbery was a true original; it’d be difficult to imagine twentieth century poetry without him.

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poet was flagged up in my daily paper, I think, as a successor to TS Eliot. I can see why. It did take me a while to get into this, but ended up really enjoying these poems & his conversational style. Highly recommended, by me, at any rate.

[Rahiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful writing but some of these poems were just impossible !! And I know that’s the point (not that there is a point) but when the poems were good, they were GREAT and so when I didn’t vibe w some, my heart broke a lil

[Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saw him speak /read at Vassar. Great experience.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

Self Portrait gets 10/5

[WILLIAM SEATON · Rating 5 out of 5]

My essay on Ashbery's "For John Clare" is posted at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/20....

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult but rewarding. I much prefer his later poems, especially when they're shorter than 5 pages long.