Shadow Train

by John Ashbery, Unknown Author

A captivating experiment in traditional poetic form, from one of the most untraditional American poets ever to set pen to paperAt first glance, John Ashbery's "Shadow Train" seems to embrace the constraints of traditional poetic form--but closer reading reveals that this work is Ashbery at his revolutionary best. In fifty poems, each consisting solely of four connected quatrains, Ashbery apparently plays by the rules while simultaneously violating every single one. Over and over again, the familiar, almost sonnet-like sixteen-line form creates an outline of a poem within which, one would expect, poetry is meant to arrive--as a station waits for a train. And yet, as with many of the world's greatest poems, the act of creating poetry also relies on the reading and the reader--in other words, as this collection's signature poem "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" puts it, "the poem is / you." In "Shadow Train," Ashbery demonstrates how language influences our experience of reality, creating it and sustaining it while also remaining mysterious and constantly arriving, but impossible to catch.

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

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

[SB · Rating 4 out of 5]

john ashbery is one of my most favourite poets because he challenges me and my sensibility as a (very poor) reader of poetry. i still don't know how to read his poems because his poems don't continue with the poetic feeling that it started with. but, i believe that one has to be meditative to enter into the poetic universe of ashbery, but if you're familiar with american life, then you might find it very easy to get his poems and feel the atmosphere that he's created.

i read one of his books of poems this year ("a worldly country"), and it was one of the best poetry books i have ever read. so, when i pick this up, i had the same expectations (also because i love ashbery). but, i found reading this book very draining. each poems consist of four stanzas of four long lines. perhaps, it's an experiment from his side. i don't know, i have only read two of his books of poems. however, this book was deeply meditative of the details that ashbery provides with his poetic depth. ashbery writes about our ennui, and in this ennui, we miss appreciating the little beauties of our lives and our being alive. reading his poems is like a train halting at each stations, and your journey only finishes when the train stops at the last station where you have to get down. still, it was hard for me to grasp his poems completely.

[Jason Fickett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like stretching in the morning, I had to read these first thing each day (or not at all). I couldn't tell you what any of them mean, and my sense is that wasn't the aim. For me, it was either give up on meaning or quit reading. I had to read all of them at least twice - the first reading seemed almost pointless. But in re-reading them, I appreciated the movement of mind, like stretching my brain before getting started on my own writing.

[c · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yikes, what happened here? Ashbery doing a dire parody of himself. A poem called "White-Collar Crime" that actually appears to be concerned with its eponymous topic. "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" begins, "This poem is concerned with language off a very plain level" and ends, "The poem is you." "Indelible, Inedible" was another anemically titled poem that caught my attention—for foul reasons.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

Against what departure? Even a departure from the normal?
So we are not recognized, under the metal. But to him
The love was a solid object, like a partly unpacked trunk,
As it was then, which is different now when remembered.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was something of a relief to get to the end of this collection, google Ashbery, and discover that not even professional critics can decide whether his poems are 'about' anything (or whether that even matters).

When you don't have rhythm or rhyme, and you don't have meaning, you going looking for beauty - or at least I do. But I had trouble making my ear and eye fix on these poems - I kept skating to the end of the page, then having to haul myself back to the stop again, in case I'd missed anything.

This is the one I liked most (because the references to the Iliad gave me something to hold on to): 'Song Without Words'

Yes, we had gone down to the shore
That year and were waiting for the expected to happen
According to a preordained system of its own devising.
Its people were there for decoration,

Like notes arranged on a staff. What you made of them
Depended on your ability to read music and to hear more
In the night behind them. It gave us
A kind of amplitude. And the watchmen were praying

So long before rosy-fingered dawn began to mess around
With the horizon that you wondered, yet
It made a convenient bridge to pass over, from starlight
To the daylit kingdom. I don't think it would have been any different

If the ships hadn't been there, poised, flexing their muscles,
Ready to tak us where they pleased and that country had been
Rehabilitated and the sirens, la la, stopped singing
And canceled our melting protection from the sun.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

This one is taking some shelling in the reviews ok we have 50 four by fours. 50 16-line poems, four quatrains. How un-Ashbery! But we also find classics of the oeuvre here - Paradoxes and Oxymorons being The Obvious. Still it's fair to say so far as I'm concerned that it doesn't touch on some of his masterworks. A patchwork of glimmerings. It does seem that most are stumbling, as they tend to do, on his evanescence, his elusivity, his obliquity. A crab-poet. It seems to me John's approaching his sexuality a little more here, in his way. In interviews he does seem reticent to talk about this relationship between being gay & poetic complexity (perhaps a nod here to how I'm looking at queer aesthetics in poetry & aural complexity viz. GMH & Glasgow). But a little nod from the cave it seems

...and as I swear my eyes were in keeping
With the beauty of you as they saw it, so a swallow perpetuated
In dove-gray dusk can be both the end and the exaltation of a new

Beginning, yet forever remain itself, as you
Seem to run alongside me as the car picks up speed. Is it
Your hand then! Will I always then return
To the tier upon tier of cloth layered in the closet

Against what departure? Even a departure from the normal?
So we are not recognized, under the metal. But to him
The love was a solid object, like a partly unpacked trunk,
As it was then, which is different now when remembered.

[Judith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love John Ashbery’s use of language and his conversational tone - I feel as if he’s talking directly to me. But I cannot, honestly, claim to understand what he’s talking about. His poetry puts me in mind of a child’s kaleidoscope, the picture he creates is constantly shifting & changing. Ah well - something to be returned to, at some point.

[William Zhuang · Rating 4 out of 5]

That is like a screen sometimes. So many
Patterns to choose from, they the colliding of all dispirited
Illustration on our lives, that will rise in its time like Temperature, and mean us, and then faint away.

[Landon Kuhlmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A break from his longer works. The repeated formalism is comforting and Ashbery's enigmas can still be found within.

[Anders · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I'm just getting tired of Ashbery

[Daniel Hagedorn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice thin volume of poems, fifty in all. Having just finished Homer, I felt like something different. As well, I often turn to poetry in between reading big, heavy books. Reading poems helps me think about my own use of language, how I write, how I might think about something. It also exposes me, potentially, to new words, which is maybe the best I can hope for- because often reading poems in isolation misses on a lot of what's happening. I am not a good enough reader of poetry in that respect. I suppose, that's what I miss about not being in school. Sometimes I bring up that idea, and here I am, twenty five years removed.

Reading poems. I like how it triggers stuff in my head, gets me thinking about words, about language, and not so much meaning, but the pattern of the written word on the page, its rhythm and sound. Here I am, adding to my initial review now that I have this work again. And I must have liked something about it, because I've picked up another collection by Ashberry.

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Something of a low-water mark for Ashbery, published roughly between _Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror_ (1975) and _Flow Chart_ (1991), two unqualified triumphs. _Shadow Train_ (1981) has little of the gymnastic wit of the former and less still the febrile intensity of the latter. Some of the poems in this collection are among Ashbery's weakest ("Drunken Americans"?); others, however, feel fresh and relevant 30+ years on. The following lines, for example, from "The Image of the Shark Confronts the Image of the Little Match Girl" feel prescient in our age of Pepper-Spray-Cop memes:

...and sometimes

The voice of reason is heard for a hard, clear moment,
Then falls still, if for no other reason than
That the sheriff's deputies have suddenly coincided
With a collective notion of romance, and the minute has absconded.

[Michael P. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe this book is as good as others seem to think, but it sure isn't for me. I find nothing interesting in the language or in the ideas. I began every poem, but gave up on most half way through. I simply to not find them engaging on any level.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are sixteen-line John Ashbery poems, and that's really the only thing I remember about it.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

These poems completely eluded me.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A weaker effort from mid-career Ashbery.

[Mills College Library]

Coll.