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Wesleyan Poetry Program
The Tennis Court Oath
John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preoccupation arises a poetry that passes beyond conventional limits into a highly individual realm of effectiveness, one that may be roughly likened to the visual world of Surrealist painting. Some will find Mr. Ashbery's work difficult, even forbidding; but those who are sensitive to new directions in ideas and the arts will discover here much to quicken and delight them.
A 35th anniversary edition of classic work from a celebrated American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize, the national Book Award, and the national Book Critics Circle Award. John Ashbery's second book, The Tennis Court Oaths, first published by Wesleyan in 1962, remains a touchstone of contemporary avant-garde poetry.
A 35th anniversary edition of classic work from a celebrated American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize, the national Book Award, and the national Book Critics Circle Award. John Ashbery's second book, The Tennis Court Oaths, first published by Wesleyan in 1962, remains a touchstone of contemporary avant-garde poetry.
94 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
25 people are currently reading
737 people want to read
About the author
John Ashbery
290 books479 followersFormal 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews
January 20, 2008
2 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars When it's good, it's very very good. But when it's bad..., June 28, 2004
John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath (Wesleyan, 1962)
Reading Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath probably doesn't rank high on the list of many people's favorite things to do. But reading it while you've immersed yourself in a glut of Charles Simic is an especially bad idea. Simic is the quintessential surrealist writing in English today; Ashbery is sort of a weird, fuzzy cross between surrealism, dada, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E whose work is, by turns, incomprehensibly unreadable and quite good.
I opened the book to a random page and start quoting from the top left...
"You often asked me after hours
The glass pinnacle, its upkeep and collapse
Knowing that if we were in a barn
Straw panels would... Confound it
Te arboretum is bursting with jasmine and lilac
And all I can smell here is newsprint..."
("The New Realism")
Anyone who wants to take a stab at explaining that, by all means, go ahead. I cannot help but compare this stuff (as I did in a recent Jackson Mac Low review) to the work of John M. Bennett, which is completely nonsensical but SOUNDS like it shouldn't be. Reading John M. Bennett is like understanding how to read and pronounce a completely foreign language without understanding a single word; even when you have no idea what's going on, if you read it out loud, you can still do so smoothly and put inflections in all the right places to make it sound great. With this, the reader is reduced to stumbling through, trying to grasp some semblance of meaning in order to make it scan. (And we wonder why people ask "what does it mean?" when confronted with poetry. lord save us.)
But when Ashbery is on, he is quite on, and his work takes on a spectre of imagism; not enough to make the book worth buying, mind you, but enough to make it worth borrowing from the library. The more lucid sections of "Europe," for example, where Ashbery dispenses with the easy, wannabe dadaism and gets down to his subject (Beryl Markham), give the reader an idea of why Ashbery, not too long before this, was selected by the Yale Series of Younger Poets. But, as with many poetry collections, you wade through some swine to get to the pearls. In this case, they're often in the same poems. ** ½
February 19, 2009
This might be Ashbery at his best -- most of the poems leave enough low branches to get a toe-hold and start climbing, and even those that I couldn't access after several reads feel like they're worth exploring, with just a little boost. These aren't easy poems -- they're complicated and artful, but also full of passion. See my blog post for one example. Or look at one phrase mentioned there, "the thirteen million pillars of grass," which at once alludes to Whitman and Lot's Wife, and thus joy, regret, homosexuality, sodomy, and still more. Ashbery is the darling of academia for good reason: he's a poet to wrestle with forever. It seems you could write an entire dissertation on just a few lines, and I'm sure some people have.
January 26, 2017
Not a complete waste. "Faust" and "Idaho" adumbrate narratives; "The Unknown Travelers" might deploy a metaphor? "Europe" has ambition, and I almost enjoyed "Rain."
And yet, you would do just as well to cut up and re-assemble any favored lines scattered throughout the project, and in most cases would end up with a poem at least as coherent as any that those lines are removed from.
Maybe I lack the receptivity or preparation necessary to appreciate what's going on here, and I'm probably imagining things, but there are moments when even the poet seems to share my ambivalence about his endeavor:
"...the child's scream/Is perplexed, managing to end the sentence."
"...all was a bright black void"
"He had mistaken his book for garbage"
And yet, you would do just as well to cut up and re-assemble any favored lines scattered throughout the project, and in most cases would end up with a poem at least as coherent as any that those lines are removed from.
Maybe I lack the receptivity or preparation necessary to appreciate what's going on here, and I'm probably imagining things, but there are moments when even the poet seems to share my ambivalence about his endeavor:
"...the child's scream/Is perplexed, managing to end the sentence."
"...all was a bright black void"
"He had mistaken his book for garbage"
May 9, 2020
MY FAVORITE OF HIS BOOKS. VERY EXPERIMENTAL AND INVIGORATING
July 31, 2007
Great Ashbery book, with over-the-top poems like the Divine Sepulchre, an amazing sense of humor, and more drama than he evokes later on. Brilliant lines, almost every one of them would make a great jump-off point for another poem. Here Ashbery is bright-eyed, ready for anything, pure potential. No wonder everyone fell in love with him, he was a dazzling genius!
Read
November 21, 2022It seems morally wrong to write a rationalistic review of this book. So let me, instead, explain:
“There has been much less sacral artery; but now land-shells have been found in the few links, and such assuredly we do find – some more distantly, before mentioned that earth occasionally adheres useful their production. But on the view that species are only strongly: hence the length of the years. By small numbered letters in important characters, as we shall see in our chapter on Geographical Ants.”
[Phrases from The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, chosen at random.]
“There has been much less sacral artery; but now land-shells have been found in the few links, and such assuredly we do find – some more distantly, before mentioned that earth occasionally adheres useful their production. But on the view that species are only strongly: hence the length of the years. By small numbered letters in important characters, as we shall see in our chapter on Geographical Ants.”
[Phrases from The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, chosen at random.]
October 17, 2025
I got so excited about these poems that I wrote about them and sent to one nephew and one great niece. Neither of them responded. Maybe the words were too right brain in the poems, but I felt renewed just reading them.
May 10, 2013
For those that are facing Ashbery for perhaps the first time and coming away with not-a-lot, just go and read some Barthelme stories, and then come back and read Ashbery's "Faust" and "Idaho". The same zeitgeist-seeking ghost is reappearing in both mens' works.
~
Near the end: still ambivalent but better than before.
For maybe every five or ten lines that read pretty limp and 2weird4u ("lemons asleep pattern crying" ["Europe"]) are lines like
"My stick, but what, snapped the avalanche" ("The Unknown Travelers")
great lines that are poetic but more importantly feel real, reveal something of the nature of the sudden starting of an avalanche, however disjointed with the other lines.
~
The major poem in this collection is "Europe", and Ashbery makes his project clear here, thankfully. The poem wouldn't stand without the refueling paragraph. Does it reflect the nature of travel? I don't think so. So not very successful, although I've never travelled through Europe, so maybe they do things differently over there.
~
"Idaho" by far my favorite. The disintegration of the followable, although still eccentric narrative makes me reconsider how to read Ashbery's poetry, not as at-times seemingly random words strung together, but parts left over from a ravished, ravaged story. I suppose intuition plays a huge part in his work, but here it seemed to validate that view.
~
Near the end: still ambivalent but better than before.
For maybe every five or ten lines that read pretty limp and 2weird4u ("lemons asleep pattern crying" ["Europe"]) are lines like
"My stick, but what, snapped the avalanche" ("The Unknown Travelers")
great lines that are poetic but more importantly feel real, reveal something of the nature of the sudden starting of an avalanche, however disjointed with the other lines.
~
The major poem in this collection is "Europe", and Ashbery makes his project clear here, thankfully. The poem wouldn't stand without the refueling paragraph. Does it reflect the nature of travel? I don't think so. So not very successful, although I've never travelled through Europe, so maybe they do things differently over there.
~
"Idaho" by far my favorite. The disintegration of the followable, although still eccentric narrative makes me reconsider how to read Ashbery's poetry, not as at-times seemingly random words strung together, but parts left over from a ravished, ravaged story. I suppose intuition plays a huge part in his work, but here it seemed to validate that view.
Read
July 30, 2022I like looking over the Ashbery reviews because of the classic oscillation between complaints of 'too difficult' - the frustrated accusations of 'nonsense' and 'too far gone' - and adoration. Personally I'm a big fan of Rodney Phillips' review for this book which reads in its entirety: "MY FAVORITE OF HIS BOOKS. VERY EXPERIMENTAL AND INVIGORATING". Phenomenal Rodney I can tell we'd be friends.
This is a more challenging collection than Some Trees which is to say it's geometric it's probably more recognisably Ashbery! Which places it into the realm of the poetics of complexity. I'm looking to read it again. Incredible pieces in here ! of course! Especially the long poems America and Europe. It's an identity-sealer & a re-inventor in one
The missing letter - the crumb of confidence
His love boiling up to me
Forever will I be the only
In sofa I know
The darkness on his back
Fleeing to darkness of my side.
It is the time
We do not live in but on
And this young man
Like a soldier
Into the dust
Words drip from the wound
Spring mounts in me
of dandelion - lots of it
This is a more challenging collection than Some Trees which is to say it's geometric it's probably more recognisably Ashbery! Which places it into the realm of the poetics of complexity. I'm looking to read it again. Incredible pieces in here ! of course! Especially the long poems America and Europe. It's an identity-sealer & a re-inventor in one
The missing letter - the crumb of confidence
His love boiling up to me
Forever will I be the only
In sofa I know
The darkness on his back
Fleeing to darkness of my side.
It is the time
We do not live in but on
And this young man
Like a soldier
Into the dust
Words drip from the wound
Spring mounts in me
of dandelion - lots of it
July 6, 2017
Ashbery says that he is writing as Kandinsky paints. I disagree. Picasso through a child’s kaleidoscope perhaps. The froth of sea foam enshrined in the skin of a sanitarium.
If lack of form characterizes modern poetry—discipline dissolved—John Ashbery takes formlessness a step further in this book to embrace lack of meaning. With the dissolution of rhythm, he leaves us with a random jumble of dissonant words, as if presenting a local telephone directory and calling it art. Of course, the phone book would be closer to art; at least it has organization.
Perhaps he considers his work as Stravinsky did his 1913 ballet, The Rite of Spring, which was booed at its premiere, considered discordant to 19c ears. But Ashbery’s work is almost a half century old now—and it should still be eliciting boos.
If lack of form characterizes modern poetry—discipline dissolved—John Ashbery takes formlessness a step further in this book to embrace lack of meaning. With the dissolution of rhythm, he leaves us with a random jumble of dissonant words, as if presenting a local telephone directory and calling it art. Of course, the phone book would be closer to art; at least it has organization.
Perhaps he considers his work as Stravinsky did his 1913 ballet, The Rite of Spring, which was booed at its premiere, considered discordant to 19c ears. But Ashbery’s work is almost a half century old now—and it should still be eliciting boos.
July 25, 2020
Oh I get Ashbery a bit more now. It’s like difficult jazz or the ocean, where if you don’t enjoy this part of some maelstrom eventually it’ll eddy and there’ll be another part you like, another inlet, and maybe if I come back to it I’ll like more, but I also just liked what I saw this time so who knows when I’ll reread it. I’ve been thinking a lot more about rereading stuff. Reading stuff is all well and good. When do I reread it? Anyway, sorry this review isn’t very good. This book is free form poetry that sometimes breaks from sentence structure or meaning for like little fragments of speaking or other kinds of voice. I don’t think I understood all of it but I did like it!
June 16, 2012
When I read this many years ago when my mind was fresh and pliable, it was amazing. Now re-reading it it is barely comprehendible. He said writing like this is can come from exercising a muscle in your brain. But now I think reading it also requires exercising a muscle in your brain...getting older I feel simplicity can be just as complex.
Ashbery wants to make poems like paintings. The "Imagists" did it at like level 4. He does it at like level 10.
Ashbery wants to make poems like paintings. The "Imagists" did it at like level 4. He does it at like level 10.
February 5, 2020
Ashbery's second book of poetry. Made up of 30 poems. Ashbery has a reputation as being experimental\difficult and this is the book that gets held up to back it up. It definitely is a hard read and a bit too avant garde for my liking. Fortunately a gem like "a last world" and a couple others made it worth reading. Highlights ~ "they dream only of america" "two sonnets" "our youth" "an additional poem" "a last world" and "the new realism".
June 12, 2008
This book, Ashbery's second, is one of the most important books of the last half century (post-1950), and it remains influential. A hallmark of innovation and a new postwar tone that has come to be called the postmodern.
Read
October 12, 2020'And the day after tomorrow—but the day after tomorrow itself is blackening dust
You court obsidian pools
And from a tremendous height twilight falls like a stone and hits you.'
from A Last World.
You court obsidian pools
And from a tremendous height twilight falls like a stone and hits you.'
from A Last World.
July 25, 2007
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
June 22, 2008
Think this is the most difficult work I've ever read.
February 8, 2018
Ashbery's idea is to write like some painters paint. I would add some jazz to the mix. With this in mind it makes his poetry easier to digest.
July 12, 2018
first quarter: wtf
second quarter: wtf but I see where its going
third quarter: haha lol
fourth quarter: its genius--but really, did you have to make it this arcane?????
second quarter: wtf but I see where its going
third quarter: haha lol
fourth quarter: its genius--but really, did you have to make it this arcane?????
July 28, 2019
I don't get it but I kinda love it anyway. You knew the shadow in the trunk was raving but as you keep growing hungry you forget...
January 18, 2022
What had you been thinking about
the face studiously bloodied
heaven blotted region
I go on loving you like water but
there is a terrible breath in the way all of this
You were not elected president, yet won the race
All the way through fog and drizzle
When you read it was sincere the coasts
stammered with unintentional villages the
horse strains fatigue I guess . . . the calls . . .
I worry
the water beetle head
why of course reflecting all
then you redid you were breathing
I thought going down to mail this
of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard
you come through but
are incomparable the lovely tent
mystery you don't want surrounded the real
you dance
in the spring there was clouds
The mulatress approached in the hall - the
lettering easily approached along the edge of the Times
in a moment the bell would ring but there was time
for the carnation laughed here are a couple of "other"
to one in yon house
The doctor and Philip had come over the road
Turning in toward the corner of the wall his hat on
reading it carelessly as if to tell you your fears were justified
the blood shifted you know those walls
wind off the earth had made him shrink
undeniably an oboe now the young
were there there was candy
to decide the sharp edge of the garment
like a particular cry not intervening called the dog "he's coming! he's coming" with an emotion felt it sink into peace
there was no turning back but the end was in sight
he chose this moment to ask her in detail about her family and the others
The person. pleased - "have more of these
not stripes on the tunic - or the porch chairs
will teach you about men - what it means"
to be one in a million pink stripe
and not could go away the three approached the doghouse
the reef. Your daughter's
dream of my son understand prejudice
darkness in the hole
the patient finished
The could all go home now the hole was dark
lilacs blowing across his face glad he brought you
* * *
To true roses uplift on the bilious tide of evening
And morning-glories dotting the crescent day
The oval shape responding:
My first is a haunting face
In the hanging-down hair.
My second is water:
I am a sieve.
My only new thing:
The penalty of light forever
Over the heads of those who were there
And back into the night, the cough of the finishing petal.
Once approved the magenta must continue
But the bark island sees
Into the light:
It grieves for what it gives:
Tears that streak the dusty firmament.
* * *
And if h thought that
All was foreign -
As, gas and petrol, en-
gine full of speed, barking to hear the night
The political contaminations
Of what he spoke,
Spotted azaleas brought to meet him
Sitting next day
The judge, emotions,
The crushed paper heaps.
* * *
The worst of it all -
The white sunlight on the polished floor -
Pressed into service,
And then the window closed
And the night ends and begins again.
Her face goes green, her eyes are green;
In the dark corner playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever." I try to describe for you,
But you will not listen, you are like the swan.
No stars are there,
No stripes,
But a blind man's can poking, however clumsily, into the inmost corners of the house.
Nothing can be harmed! Night and say and beginning again!
So put away the book,
The flowers you were keeping to give someone:
Only the white, tremendous foam of the street has any importance,
The new white flowers that are beginning to shoot up about now.
* * *
Lugged to the gray arbor,
I have climbed this snow-stone on my face,
My stick, bu what, snapped the avalanche
The air filled with slowly falling rocks
Breathed in deeply - arrived,
The white room, a table covered
With a towel, mug of ice - fear
Among the legs of a chair, the ashman,
Purple and gray she starts upright in her chair.
* * *
The water began to fall quite quietly
As pipes decorate laminations of
City unit busses pass through.
A laborer dragging luggage examined
The wet place near a bug.
It sifted slowly down the sides of buildings flat
The permanent way to make a race.
So simple was the ally. Trying the lips
The spaced demons never breaking.
They imagine something different from what it is.
Just a fat man with sunglasses
Moving through shine - the uncle in the mirror -
As it is beginning again these are the proportions -
He lauds her with a smile.
Miles away in the country the performance included glue.
The abandoned airfield will have to gave the imagination now
To be august, gray, against oneself
These things that are the property of only the few.
the face studiously bloodied
heaven blotted region
I go on loving you like water but
there is a terrible breath in the way all of this
You were not elected president, yet won the race
All the way through fog and drizzle
When you read it was sincere the coasts
stammered with unintentional villages the
horse strains fatigue I guess . . . the calls . . .
I worry
the water beetle head
why of course reflecting all
then you redid you were breathing
I thought going down to mail this
of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard
you come through but
are incomparable the lovely tent
mystery you don't want surrounded the real
you dance
in the spring there was clouds
The mulatress approached in the hall - the
lettering easily approached along the edge of the Times
in a moment the bell would ring but there was time
for the carnation laughed here are a couple of "other"
to one in yon house
The doctor and Philip had come over the road
Turning in toward the corner of the wall his hat on
reading it carelessly as if to tell you your fears were justified
the blood shifted you know those walls
wind off the earth had made him shrink
undeniably an oboe now the young
were there there was candy
to decide the sharp edge of the garment
like a particular cry not intervening called the dog "he's coming! he's coming" with an emotion felt it sink into peace
there was no turning back but the end was in sight
he chose this moment to ask her in detail about her family and the others
The person. pleased - "have more of these
not stripes on the tunic - or the porch chairs
will teach you about men - what it means"
to be one in a million pink stripe
and not could go away the three approached the doghouse
the reef. Your daughter's
dream of my son understand prejudice
darkness in the hole
the patient finished
The could all go home now the hole was dark
lilacs blowing across his face glad he brought you
- The Tennis Court Oath, pg. 11-12
* * *
To true roses uplift on the bilious tide of evening
And morning-glories dotting the crescent day
The oval shape responding:
My first is a haunting face
In the hanging-down hair.
My second is water:
I am a sieve.
My only new thing:
The penalty of light forever
Over the heads of those who were there
And back into the night, the cough of the finishing petal.
Once approved the magenta must continue
But the bark island sees
Into the light:
It grieves for what it gives:
Tears that streak the dusty firmament.
- To Redouté, pg. 21
* * *
And if h thought that
All was foreign -
As, gas and petrol, en-
gine full of speed, barking to hear the night
The political contaminations
Of what he spoke,
Spotted azaleas brought to meet him
Sitting next day
The judge, emotions,
The crushed paper heaps.
- A White Paper, pg. 32
* * *
The worst of it all -
The white sunlight on the polished floor -
Pressed into service,
And then the window closed
And the night ends and begins again.
Her face goes green, her eyes are green;
In the dark corner playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever." I try to describe for you,
But you will not listen, you are like the swan.
No stars are there,
No stripes,
But a blind man's can poking, however clumsily, into the inmost corners of the house.
Nothing can be harmed! Night and say and beginning again!
So put away the book,
The flowers you were keeping to give someone:
Only the white, tremendous foam of the street has any importance,
The new white flowers that are beginning to shoot up about now.
- White Roses, pg. 35
* * *
Lugged to the gray arbor,
I have climbed this snow-stone on my face,
My stick, bu what, snapped the avalanche
The air filled with slowly falling rocks
Breathed in deeply - arrived,
The white room, a table covered
With a towel, mug of ice - fear
Among the legs of a chair, the ashman,
Purple and gray she starts upright in her chair.
- The Unknown Travelers, pg. 63
* * *
The water began to fall quite quietly
As pipes decorate laminations of
City unit busses pass through.
A laborer dragging luggage examined
The wet place near a bug.
It sifted slowly down the sides of buildings flat
The permanent way to make a race.
So simple was the ally. Trying the lips
The spaced demons never breaking.
They imagine something different from what it is.
Just a fat man with sunglasses
Moving through shine - the uncle in the mirror -
As it is beginning again these are the proportions -
He lauds her with a smile.
Miles away in the country the performance included glue.
The abandoned airfield will have to gave the imagination now
To be august, gray, against oneself
These things that are the property of only the few.
- The Shower, pg. 90
December 22, 2025
These poems test the reader's patience. We're forced to ask ourselves: "how much of the work must I do myself? the author obviously just strung random phrases together!" Occasionally, you can catch a glimpse of a reason why two or three lines are in sequence, but much of the time you could mix up the order of every line, hand it back to an Ashbery fan, and they'd like it just as much.
So, what is Ashbery doing here? Is he destroying poetry like Duchamp destroyed art? Is this a social experiment to see who converts perplexity into admiration, and who converts it into disgust? In other words, is he holding up a mirror, an ink-blot test, or is he actually writing poetry? What are the limits of poetry? How random can it get before it crosses the line from "experimental" and "avant garde" into "bullshit" and "a waste of my time?"
To be fair, I think that these are all great questions to ask, and it's ballsy of Ashbery to waste an entire book making no other point than asking these open-ended questions (which is why I gave it 2 instead of 1 stars). I have the feeling that he didn't intend any content, he just wrote first drafts and turned them in. It's impossible to imagine a sane person revising poems like these, but given how philosophically dense his later work gets, he's obviously both sane and very smart. So he knows what he's doing... but what is he doing? I personally think he's sitting back and reveling in the damage that one can do when words are in print: we assume that it made its way through editors and proofreaders and was financed well enough because people were impressed by it, but then we open it up and see disjointed phrases that aren't even as fun as the ones I can crank out at any time. So what gives?
Maybe all of modern art is a big prank, a hoax, a joke that we're not in on. Maybe it's really really really sincere, so shockingly sincere that it wraps around to the ironic. Maybe it really does just suck and I've been wasting my time. The reason why I think it might not have been a waste of time is the last poem, one which alternates between comprehensible prose and incomprehensible garbled jumbles. Perhaps he's commenting on the new information age, the entropy of meaning that's inevitable when we mix so many genres and tones and sources, or maybe he's just exploring limits, like I already outlined. Ultimately, there is no answer here, only potential questions, and maybe that's the post-modern lesson.
So, what is Ashbery doing here? Is he destroying poetry like Duchamp destroyed art? Is this a social experiment to see who converts perplexity into admiration, and who converts it into disgust? In other words, is he holding up a mirror, an ink-blot test, or is he actually writing poetry? What are the limits of poetry? How random can it get before it crosses the line from "experimental" and "avant garde" into "bullshit" and "a waste of my time?"
To be fair, I think that these are all great questions to ask, and it's ballsy of Ashbery to waste an entire book making no other point than asking these open-ended questions (which is why I gave it 2 instead of 1 stars). I have the feeling that he didn't intend any content, he just wrote first drafts and turned them in. It's impossible to imagine a sane person revising poems like these, but given how philosophically dense his later work gets, he's obviously both sane and very smart. So he knows what he's doing... but what is he doing? I personally think he's sitting back and reveling in the damage that one can do when words are in print: we assume that it made its way through editors and proofreaders and was financed well enough because people were impressed by it, but then we open it up and see disjointed phrases that aren't even as fun as the ones I can crank out at any time. So what gives?
Maybe all of modern art is a big prank, a hoax, a joke that we're not in on. Maybe it's really really really sincere, so shockingly sincere that it wraps around to the ironic. Maybe it really does just suck and I've been wasting my time. The reason why I think it might not have been a waste of time is the last poem, one which alternates between comprehensible prose and incomprehensible garbled jumbles. Perhaps he's commenting on the new information age, the entropy of meaning that's inevitable when we mix so many genres and tones and sources, or maybe he's just exploring limits, like I already outlined. Ultimately, there is no answer here, only potential questions, and maybe that's the post-modern lesson.
March 20, 2021
This is for sure the most confusing text we've done in my poetry module so far, but also I think it's by far my favourite. In many ways the difficulty in understanding this kinda takes the pressure off, especially when you get to the sprawling mess of Idaho, the final poem, not even Ashbery seems to know what's going on.
Instead I think the joy in this collection comes from the sounds and shapes of words, the barrage of images that are bizarre and unsettling and beautiful that just sear themselves on your brain. I really love the last line to 'A Last World', 'A little horse trots up with a letter in its mouth, which is read with eagerness / As we gallop into the flame.' It's just so eerie and beautiful and just not even trying to make sense. In the same poems there are lines like 'Naked men pray the ground and chew it with their hands' and 'Bananas rotten with their ripeness hung from the leaves' which just really get under my skin and are so unsettling. This is the kind of collection where every poem you read has a string of words that have probably not been put together before (the line 'comfort of your perfect tar grams nuclear world bank tulip' from 'Leaving the Atocha Station' stands out for me), and I don't really care if I don't understand ten percent of this, it's absolutely riveting writing.
Instead I think the joy in this collection comes from the sounds and shapes of words, the barrage of images that are bizarre and unsettling and beautiful that just sear themselves on your brain. I really love the last line to 'A Last World', 'A little horse trots up with a letter in its mouth, which is read with eagerness / As we gallop into the flame.' It's just so eerie and beautiful and just not even trying to make sense. In the same poems there are lines like 'Naked men pray the ground and chew it with their hands' and 'Bananas rotten with their ripeness hung from the leaves' which just really get under my skin and are so unsettling. This is the kind of collection where every poem you read has a string of words that have probably not been put together before (the line 'comfort of your perfect tar grams nuclear world bank tulip' from 'Leaving the Atocha Station' stands out for me), and I don't really care if I don't understand ten percent of this, it's absolutely riveting writing.
November 7, 2023
THE TICKET
The experience of writing you these love letters
Fences not concluding, nothing, no even, water in your eye, seeming anything
The garden in mist, perhaps, but egocentricity makes up for that, the winter
locusts, whitened
Her hand not leading anywhere. Her head into the yard, maples, a stump seen
through a gauze of bottles, ruptures-
You had no permission, to carry anything out, working to carry out the insane
orders given you to raze
The box, red, funny going underground
And, being no reason suspicious, mud of the day, the plaid-I was near you
where you want to be
Down in the little house writing you.
Though afterwards tears seem skunks
And the difficult position we in to light the world
Of awe, mush raging, the stump again
And as always before
The scientific gaze, perfume, millions, tall laugh
That was ladder though not of uncertain, innocuous truths, the felt branch—
To a ditch of wine and tubs, spraying the poster with blood, telegraph, all the
time
Automatically taking the things in, that had not been spoiled, sordid.
The experience of writing you these love letters
Fences not concluding, nothing, no even, water in your eye, seeming anything
The garden in mist, perhaps, but egocentricity makes up for that, the winter
locusts, whitened
Her hand not leading anywhere. Her head into the yard, maples, a stump seen
through a gauze of bottles, ruptures-
You had no permission, to carry anything out, working to carry out the insane
orders given you to raze
The box, red, funny going underground
And, being no reason suspicious, mud of the day, the plaid-I was near you
where you want to be
Down in the little house writing you.
Though afterwards tears seem skunks
And the difficult position we in to light the world
Of awe, mush raging, the stump again
And as always before
The scientific gaze, perfume, millions, tall laugh
That was ladder though not of uncertain, innocuous truths, the felt branch—
To a ditch of wine and tubs, spraying the poster with blood, telegraph, all the
time
Automatically taking the things in, that had not been spoiled, sordid.
October 23, 2021
I don't like this book. I don't recommend it.
Read it only if you must. Buy it only if you need it.
To anyone who actually reads and understands poetry, it's obvious what this book is, and why these poems are written this way. (I'm not trying to imply that people who like it don't understand poetry. We like what we like. However, this book is not a sublime work of high art.)
Still though, I have a reason for rating it three instead of one.
Read it only if you must. Buy it only if you need it.
To anyone who actually reads and understands poetry, it's obvious what this book is, and why these poems are written this way. (I'm not trying to imply that people who like it don't understand poetry. We like what we like. However, this book is not a sublime work of high art.)
Still though, I have a reason for rating it three instead of one.
January 28, 2025
“Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
The harbor cold to the mating ships,
And you have lost as you stand by the balcony
With the forest of the sea calm and gray beneath.
A strong impression torn from the descending light
But night is guilty. You knew the shadow
In the trunk was raving
But as you keep growing hungry you forget.
The distant box is open. A sound of grain
Poured over the floor in some eagerness—we
Rise with the night let out of the box of wind.”
The harbor cold to the mating ships,
And you have lost as you stand by the balcony
With the forest of the sea calm and gray beneath.
A strong impression torn from the descending light
But night is guilty. You knew the shadow
In the trunk was raving
But as you keep growing hungry you forget.
The distant box is open. A sound of grain
Poured over the floor in some eagerness—we
Rise with the night let out of the box of wind.”
September 26, 2017
Pretty good, you kinda need to know a lot of subtext to make sense of it though. Like this is book is dedicated to his Gay lover and the Algerian war for independence was in full swing.
Even with those though this book is not going to make sense for you, you will have to make sense for yourself in anyway you can.
Tip: Read the poems outloud and multiple times.
Even with those though this book is not going to make sense for you, you will have to make sense for yourself in anyway you can.
Tip: Read the poems outloud and multiple times.
March 28, 2023
ok tbh didn’t technically finish, but i rly didn’t absorb too too much anyways, so i might as well have the read the whole thing? or none of it? hm, who’s to say? i like ashbery best when i can tell he’s being wry & goofy & winking. lots of times i couldn’t tell anything, which i guess is neither here nor there…
December 4, 2020
I resembled this poetry collection to Turkish poet Ece Ayhan's "Bütün Yort Savul'lar" for its undisclosed meanings maybe. For the most part I did not understand all of the poems but it was kind of worth reading, especially the sestina and a few others.
March 9, 2022
No entendí, me gustó. No entendí pero me gustó. No entendí y por eso me gustó. No entendí y me gustó. No entendí porque me gustó. No entendí por qué me gustó. No entendí que me gustó. No entendí qué me gustó. No entendí si me gustó. No entendí cuando me gustó. No entendí cuándo me gustó.
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