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Breezeway: New Poems
A bold, striking new collection of poems from one of America’s most influential and inventive poets.
With more than twenty poetry collections to his name, John Ashbery is one of our most agile, philosophically complex, and visionary poets. In Breezeway, Ashbery’s powers of observation are at their most astute; his insight at its most penetrating. Demonstrating his extraordinary command of language and his ability to move fluidly and elegantly between wide-ranging thoughts and ideas—from the irreverent and slyly humorous to the tender, the sad, and the heartbreaking—Ashbery shows that he is a virtuoso fluent in diverse styles and tones of language, from the chatty and whimsical to the lyrical and urbane. Filled with allusions to literature and art, as well as to the absurdities and delights of the everyday world around us, Ashbery’s poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing all at once, the work of a master craftsman with a keen understanding of the age in which he lives and writes, an age whose fears and fragmentation he conjures and critiques with humor, pathos, and a provocative wit.
Vital and imaginative, Ashbery’s poems not only touch on the “big questions” and crises of life in the twenty-first century, but also delicately capture the small moments between and among people. Imaginative, linguistically dazzling, and artistically ambitious, Breezeway is John Ashbery’s sharpest and most arresting collection yet.
With more than twenty poetry collections to his name, John Ashbery is one of our most agile, philosophically complex, and visionary poets. In Breezeway, Ashbery’s powers of observation are at their most astute; his insight at its most penetrating. Demonstrating his extraordinary command of language and his ability to move fluidly and elegantly between wide-ranging thoughts and ideas—from the irreverent and slyly humorous to the tender, the sad, and the heartbreaking—Ashbery shows that he is a virtuoso fluent in diverse styles and tones of language, from the chatty and whimsical to the lyrical and urbane. Filled with allusions to literature and art, as well as to the absurdities and delights of the everyday world around us, Ashbery’s poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing all at once, the work of a master craftsman with a keen understanding of the age in which he lives and writes, an age whose fears and fragmentation he conjures and critiques with humor, pathos, and a provocative wit.
Vital and imaginative, Ashbery’s poems not only touch on the “big questions” and crises of life in the twenty-first century, but also delicately capture the small moments between and among people. Imaginative, linguistically dazzling, and artistically ambitious, Breezeway is John Ashbery’s sharpest and most arresting collection yet.
151 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2015
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194 people want to read
About the author
John Ashbery
297 books482 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 33 reviews
December 10, 2015
I skipped Ashbery's last two books, which for me was significant, as I own and have read all his previous collections. But I was getting tired of him, or tired of what seemed like repetition, and there didn't seem to be any point in keeping up with him anymore. I was also dismayed by the quality of the books themselves. Cheap paper, poor bindings, and slender. Not worth buying in hardback and hardback first editions were all I wanted. So I figured I had read enough Ashbery, and wasn't he going to die soon anyway? Which question started the train of thought that led me to not wanting to miss buying his last book, so I kickstarted my Ashbery habit and bought his latest, this. In many ways it is typical kinda throwaway Ashbery, in that it does not radiate intensive labor as so much poetry does. But that doesn't bother me, in fact it attracts me. I sit in labor radiation five days a week. Do I really want the poetry I read to radiate the same? Maybe sometimes, but not usually. So "throwaway" is not a criticism, and in Ashbery's case the poetry is so suffused with an approach, a kind of living poetics, that embraces the ephemeral, the goofy, the nonsensical, as well as the entire history of the same in poetry and art, that "throwaway" Ashbery becomes a spontaneous record of the past one hundred or more years of art and a life lived as if it all mattered. But not too serious now. Nothing (except for love and friendship and the sadness of their absence, and living with things one loves) really matters, which perhaps opens the door for a lot more fun and silliness to enter, which then end up lifting life itself up a notch or two. And that certainly matters. And helps one go on. I still love Ashbery. I love that he's still writing (in his late 80's!) disjointed collage poems, and making slapdash collages (as seen on the cover of this collection), and still has a seriously silly sense of humor (as expressed in innumerable word groupings throughout (whoopee calendar, onion maze phase, pulled pork sliders clogged the glee gate, etc. etc.). What's it all mean? It means reading something one enjoys reading. Little pleasures can't be all bad. Or reading between the lines to learn how you too could one day be a playful octogenarian.
February 10, 2017
It should be 5 stars, but I'll take off a star as these poems were so over my head, they might as well have been birds. It's enough for any reader to render a handful of sideways thoughts, and as Ashbery is the supreme poet of slippery language, there is awe-back-ness in being thwarted by sentences where you understand all the words. I get the vibe that John is writing from some out-there audience on this one. A cosmic Jester? Frank O'Hara's ghost? Maybe this book is written for twenty-seven people and the rest of us lucky souls get to giggle at its otherwordliness.
If you've never read Ashebery don't start with this puppy, she bites.
If you've never read Ashebery don't start with this puppy, she bites.
January 1, 2016
What I hope for from an Ashbery poem is a certain edge, a capacity to keep its circularity within itself -- banked, and for the lyric to cultivate some self-care. You will be concerned with my own authorization to render such a judgment. Between 1985 and 1995, I read the first thirteen books, with some exception: I don't think I read The Vermont Notebook, and I don't remember a thing about Shadow Train and I haven't yet gotten through A Wave, though I have good intentions. Somewhere between And the Stars Were Shining and Wakefulness I gave up on trying to find the self-care, and I have to say I Loooove April Galleons to which I return frequently. But I haven't returned to the ongoing project since Girls on the Run -- until now. I think this is brilliant: the syntax is often jaggedly open, since all the pressure is on idiom, on Ashbery's really extraordinary ear for American demotic: "It's savory -- let's devour, | or do something about it, rusty at the bottom | before we came to this past. || It was a moment, what can I say." (from "Domani, Dopodomani") Ashbery dramatizes the speaker's lateral speed in the jagged openness of the loose sentence: two kinds of address (declarative/imperative) opening onto the demotic trope: "do something about it," which could be what's savory, or could be the devouring, this ambiguity finding its own troping in the subordination, "rusty at the bottom | before we came to this past." That past is the past of the phrases' meanings before we got to them in the Ashbery poem. The senses are then trapped again, in the lovely reflective idiom "It was a moment, what can I say." This is that bit of self-care I need in the Ashbery lyric. "Domani, Dopodomani" is far from the volume's most brilliant lyric, but the brilliance is there.
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June 9, 2023I've not read much of JA's late work. Here, I had fun. I also feel I should say Good Luck.
A neatness too, eagerness for the present. these will float by a lot, but they're not impossible. Holy Grail, Batman!
A neatness too, eagerness for the present. these will float by a lot, but they're not impossible. Holy Grail, Batman!
July 23, 2015
Few figures loom in the world of poetry like John Ashbery. His work, and its playful transgressions, have been definitive pieces in the evolution towards contemporary poetry, and main stays in the academic circle.
His latest collection “Breezeway” continues in the tradition he has set, with a style that embraces the incredible speed at which thoughts travel, and melts the personal experience of life into that of the world. It opens simply:
“The fifty-foot old masterpiece, that awful necklace, is that good for you?
I mean, do you like it any better? Treestumps?”
Setting the stage with an image of intimacy, a question of the nature of a relationship between a person and their necklace, bookended with vague but worldly concepts of art and nature. How do we relate to the objects around us? How do we relate and communicate to each other through those objects? It is this playfulness of Ashbery’s, coupled with a remarkably natural sense of conversational tone, that makes his poems work. As a poet he captures the familiarity of language right alongside its diversions and double-meanings, begging the reader, in the near irreverent play of his work, to question, contort, break-apart, and rebuild the poems and their language. His free-verse marries this, forcing stops and starts, breaking away mid-thought and returning to somewhere you’d never been.
He is a truly craft-oriented poet, seemingly interested in words and people, and how they work together. This shines through in these poems, showcasing a world of poetry often neglected by more overtly personal or rhetorical phrasing, and encouraging a thoughtful experience that feels intellectual, yet at the same time supremely basic, afterall we all use language and most of us know how funny it can be. These poems do feel asocial at times though, so caught up in themselves, and begging your interest without seeming to share much. There is a reticence to the work that is essential to their very existence, and adds a certain timelessness, but can be too distant or cold at times. The pure artful employment of language, and its use at glimpsing the world is more than redemptive though, and “Breezeway” stands as another successful addition to Ashbery's lengthy bibliography.
His latest collection “Breezeway” continues in the tradition he has set, with a style that embraces the incredible speed at which thoughts travel, and melts the personal experience of life into that of the world. It opens simply:
“The fifty-foot old masterpiece, that awful necklace, is that good for you?
I mean, do you like it any better? Treestumps?”
Setting the stage with an image of intimacy, a question of the nature of a relationship between a person and their necklace, bookended with vague but worldly concepts of art and nature. How do we relate to the objects around us? How do we relate and communicate to each other through those objects? It is this playfulness of Ashbery’s, coupled with a remarkably natural sense of conversational tone, that makes his poems work. As a poet he captures the familiarity of language right alongside its diversions and double-meanings, begging the reader, in the near irreverent play of his work, to question, contort, break-apart, and rebuild the poems and their language. His free-verse marries this, forcing stops and starts, breaking away mid-thought and returning to somewhere you’d never been.
He is a truly craft-oriented poet, seemingly interested in words and people, and how they work together. This shines through in these poems, showcasing a world of poetry often neglected by more overtly personal or rhetorical phrasing, and encouraging a thoughtful experience that feels intellectual, yet at the same time supremely basic, afterall we all use language and most of us know how funny it can be. These poems do feel asocial at times though, so caught up in themselves, and begging your interest without seeming to share much. There is a reticence to the work that is essential to their very existence, and adds a certain timelessness, but can be too distant or cold at times. The pure artful employment of language, and its use at glimpsing the world is more than redemptive though, and “Breezeway” stands as another successful addition to Ashbery's lengthy bibliography.
August 15, 2015
In Breezeway, Ashbery seems to simply collect speech samples rather than craft something with them. This anthropological bent is nonetheless fun in itself. If one hallmark of literary greatness is supposed "opinionlessness" or "objectivity," then Ashbery's great. He achieves the opposite of focus, an expansive peripheral vision. Thanks to its diversity, the book's lighthearted both in tone and demand. You take what you like and leave the rest. Breezeway may lack intention, but it's at least a good vocabulary exercise that endears nonsense. True modern nonsense, not garish Victorian stuff. After you read it, everyday speech sounds like slightly boring poetry, which is a step up for me.
March 1, 2016
"thanks to a snakeskin toupee, my grayish push boots exhale new patina/prestige. exeunt the kardashians." and here goes another chapter in the weird 4lAy ashbery phenomenon. how much e!ntertainment does an 88 year-old avant gardu listrik poet read and watch? he has outlasted joan rivers as fashion police! pace marjorie perloff, it may look on the surface easier to "normalise" ashbery as he gets older and 4lAyer, but on closer inspection, his nominalism now rivals pound, his coterieness beats o'hara, and almost every poem in this collection is suffused thick with duchampian infrathins. it always astounds me how much of a breeze it is to read this heavyweight of modern(ist) poetry.
July 1, 2015
I think it is one of his finest, single collections...up there with double dream of spring, houseboat days...probably not for everybody, even less so than his other collections....there is a sense of him using everything available to him, it's quick, moving, electric, weird,,,makes me want to go back to his work from the earlier 2000's because while reading them I kept thinking they were ok but the poems were treading water...and now, in this and Quick Question, I think he is writing some of his most exciting and interesting poems...a book to never finish...
July 18, 2015
It's amazing to me that someone can be writing in English with proper sentences and still make no goddamn sense.
June 1, 2015
He's gone and done it again
Dead dog in the road. The poet says, I didn't do that. It was one of the seven. Nothing ever never changes, but nothing changes much.
Dead dog in the road. The poet says, I didn't do that. It was one of the seven. Nothing ever never changes, but nothing changes much.
September 5, 2016
Love every one of his poems, make no sense but such magnificent trouvailles.
November 17, 2015
A Brief Look at Breezeway
Review by Jorge Diaz
John Ashbery… John. Ashbery. Forgive my momentary mental lapse, but I’m still recovering from my third read through of John Ashbery’s latest literary work, “Breezeway” (2015). I told myself (as a reader) that if I just gave some time to process this 105 page compendium of short poems, that it would change the way it’s sitting in my stomach right now: unsettled. His adapted style of twisted linguistics falls on the eyes like nails on a chalkboard do on the ears. There are times where the reader has to literally stop and wonder if John chooses the verbs of his next line by drawing them out of a hat, or targeting them with darts on a board. With lines that deliver complete bafflement: “I was quite different then, / guilty of changing the money. Look, I- / Thanks. So you can do this at home, / on a whoopee calendar. But don’t do that. // Sleeping”. (Ashbery 8). No, you didn’t miss anything – it only gets stranger as you read. This review will attempt to give you an average Joe’s opinion on what makes “Breezeway” unique and how it both hurts and helps the writer in his avant-garde approach to poetry.
Looking back at older, tamer Ashbery works, I wouldn’t have thought his writing to take this far of a turn, “As We Know” (1979) and “The Ice Storm” (1987) were the infancy of this frivolous writing style. With “Breezeway”, it’s hard to tell where the sentiment lies because the amount of tongue-in-cheek garbage filling up some pieces. At first glance, there is a schizophrenic flatness to it; the mixed efforts of a child with ADHD that has just found where grandmother stores the secrets stash of sweets and a pseudo-intellectual hipster poet adventuring abroad in a city (possibly foreign). The fusion of pop culture with the scenarios presented
by the speaker help pique your interest just as you’re starting to wonder what the hell you’re reading. Take “Wherever Your Sun Takes You” for example:
Holy Grail, Batman! Can’t you see it?
Ice cream fell on his arm when I went to explore
and found students reading papers. Please
join the opera of interesting things. (Ashbery 8)
Every few poems, Ashbery drops tiny Easter Eggs alluding to something in pop culture like the Kardashians, Batman, Scooby Doo, and a few popular television commercials. The references pop out at you, never attempting to be subtle, but even that can’t exactly help you fluently read through the lines of his book, not without developing a migraine at least. As a reader, you’re continuously forced to a halt every few lines to ensure you didn’t skip or miss something in context. His piece “Ruffle Theory” helps describe this:
I’m the wardrobe expert.
Electrocuted! You can’t mean that.
All those years nothing but his blond
ticking hair, and vote for him. Whomever.
And then we never did hear much from him. (Ashbery 69)
If you really wanted to dissect it, you could say that the “wardrobe expert” is a campaign manager whose primary candidate for office has just been “electrocuted” or caught in a stunning whirlwind of bad PR for some scandalous affair. He is a poster boy, a visage whose appearance has been defiled, but one that is easily replaced, hence, “vote for him. Whomever.” This is the nod at most politicians being duds/placeholders, a.k.a. interchangeable. Many of which fly under the radar all the way into office, “we never did hear much from him.” (Ashbery 69). Of course, this could all be incredibly off, but the matter is highly subjective.
It wouldn’t be fair to critique this book and not give it proper merit, for it was a decent read. John is 88 years old and that closeness he feels to death and the way he views the world sometimes permeate the page. You can tell it’s a recurring theme among many of the works in this book; life, finality, regret, acceptance – it’s all there. The poem “Be Careful What You Wish For” has all of these themes embedded in a couple of lines:
They don’t say please in heaven. All business is carried out
in the pre-noon hours, leaving time for naps and reflection.
This is the kind of life I was supposed to lead. What happened?
you ask. Cutie pie went bye bye. (Ashbery 103)
This piece isn’t talking about a literal heaven; in fact, I believe it might allude to a retirement home. Brochures and family members commonly market these places as tiny slices of “heaven” to their elderly relatives. In many of them, they aren’t much for manners politeness, foregoing formalities such as “please” and thank you. Retirement homes, villages, elderly social clubs, or whatever you want to call them, have their residents rise early hence, “All business is carried out in the pre-noon hours”. This leaves pretty much the rest of your day to spend calmly among yourselves, or with other patrons. John seems to choose the solitary path of “naps and reflection.” When he mentions, “This is the kind of life I was supposed to lead. What happened? you ask. Cutie pie went bye bye.” (Ashbery 103) you get a sense that he has been avoiding this life of complacency for some time. He knew he belonged, but you can tell by his question, “What happened?” it’s not something he wanted or even planned for. Then we get our response as to why he’s stuck there: “Cutie pie went bye bye.” (Ashbery 103). That line is devastating! This symbolizes his daughter abandoning John at the village. We get the impression that his daughter, “Cutie pie”, possibly preoccupied with her own life could no longer take care of John and saw he wasn’t fit enough to take care of himself. Her departure from her caretaker role and, granting his age, caused him to become a tenant in “heaven”.
When you’re reading some parts of his poems, just the way he talks about the people and settings sound as if they’re from a different time – a happier time in John’s life. However, as you progress through the book, the time period seems to become more recent and in some sense… darker. This transitional timeline doesn’t happen in any one poem in particular, it’s all in the order and wording of the works and how they evolve as a whole. You see, when I first started reading “Breezeway”, I was looking at it all wrong. I took it as a combination of multiple poems, but to really peer into the soul of this small arrangement of pages, you must read them time and time again from start to finish to really pick up on the theme of finality. The book is littered with intimate memories of John’s friends and life experiences, his views on love, life, and politics, as well as his concession to the idea of death. “Breezeway” has - in the end - proved to be as charming as it is confusing.
Looking back at “Breezeway”, this book of poetry has an unconventional approach at literature with some subtle strengths and glaring weaknesses. Honestly, the only real downside to this writing style is that you cannot expect to sit down and devour more than a couple of poems at a time. Not without completely missing a lick of what you just read anyway. John Ashbery does a phenomenal job of making you work hard to understand his train of thought and, he’s very unapologetic about it. Yet, it’s this same stop-and-go reading that hurts the book in the delivery of its message. In one of Breezeway’s final poems, “Cheap Legs”, John writes, “To be comfortable in his facial hair / is as much and as little of a man / as one can ask.” (Ashbery 102). I find that line to be quite true for John, he is comfortable in what he writes and that’s probably why it works. Heck, there are even moments where you can gaily glide from one stanza to the next before unavoidably tripping over the bipolarity of his sentences. The book is like a badly oiled train wreck that somehow – just barely - makes it to its destination.
Review by Jorge Diaz
John Ashbery… John. Ashbery. Forgive my momentary mental lapse, but I’m still recovering from my third read through of John Ashbery’s latest literary work, “Breezeway” (2015). I told myself (as a reader) that if I just gave some time to process this 105 page compendium of short poems, that it would change the way it’s sitting in my stomach right now: unsettled. His adapted style of twisted linguistics falls on the eyes like nails on a chalkboard do on the ears. There are times where the reader has to literally stop and wonder if John chooses the verbs of his next line by drawing them out of a hat, or targeting them with darts on a board. With lines that deliver complete bafflement: “I was quite different then, / guilty of changing the money. Look, I- / Thanks. So you can do this at home, / on a whoopee calendar. But don’t do that. // Sleeping”. (Ashbery 8). No, you didn’t miss anything – it only gets stranger as you read. This review will attempt to give you an average Joe’s opinion on what makes “Breezeway” unique and how it both hurts and helps the writer in his avant-garde approach to poetry.
Looking back at older, tamer Ashbery works, I wouldn’t have thought his writing to take this far of a turn, “As We Know” (1979) and “The Ice Storm” (1987) were the infancy of this frivolous writing style. With “Breezeway”, it’s hard to tell where the sentiment lies because the amount of tongue-in-cheek garbage filling up some pieces. At first glance, there is a schizophrenic flatness to it; the mixed efforts of a child with ADHD that has just found where grandmother stores the secrets stash of sweets and a pseudo-intellectual hipster poet adventuring abroad in a city (possibly foreign). The fusion of pop culture with the scenarios presented
by the speaker help pique your interest just as you’re starting to wonder what the hell you’re reading. Take “Wherever Your Sun Takes You” for example:
Holy Grail, Batman! Can’t you see it?
Ice cream fell on his arm when I went to explore
and found students reading papers. Please
join the opera of interesting things. (Ashbery 8)
Every few poems, Ashbery drops tiny Easter Eggs alluding to something in pop culture like the Kardashians, Batman, Scooby Doo, and a few popular television commercials. The references pop out at you, never attempting to be subtle, but even that can’t exactly help you fluently read through the lines of his book, not without developing a migraine at least. As a reader, you’re continuously forced to a halt every few lines to ensure you didn’t skip or miss something in context. His piece “Ruffle Theory” helps describe this:
I’m the wardrobe expert.
Electrocuted! You can’t mean that.
All those years nothing but his blond
ticking hair, and vote for him. Whomever.
And then we never did hear much from him. (Ashbery 69)
If you really wanted to dissect it, you could say that the “wardrobe expert” is a campaign manager whose primary candidate for office has just been “electrocuted” or caught in a stunning whirlwind of bad PR for some scandalous affair. He is a poster boy, a visage whose appearance has been defiled, but one that is easily replaced, hence, “vote for him. Whomever.” This is the nod at most politicians being duds/placeholders, a.k.a. interchangeable. Many of which fly under the radar all the way into office, “we never did hear much from him.” (Ashbery 69). Of course, this could all be incredibly off, but the matter is highly subjective.
It wouldn’t be fair to critique this book and not give it proper merit, for it was a decent read. John is 88 years old and that closeness he feels to death and the way he views the world sometimes permeate the page. You can tell it’s a recurring theme among many of the works in this book; life, finality, regret, acceptance – it’s all there. The poem “Be Careful What You Wish For” has all of these themes embedded in a couple of lines:
They don’t say please in heaven. All business is carried out
in the pre-noon hours, leaving time for naps and reflection.
This is the kind of life I was supposed to lead. What happened?
you ask. Cutie pie went bye bye. (Ashbery 103)
This piece isn’t talking about a literal heaven; in fact, I believe it might allude to a retirement home. Brochures and family members commonly market these places as tiny slices of “heaven” to their elderly relatives. In many of them, they aren’t much for manners politeness, foregoing formalities such as “please” and thank you. Retirement homes, villages, elderly social clubs, or whatever you want to call them, have their residents rise early hence, “All business is carried out in the pre-noon hours”. This leaves pretty much the rest of your day to spend calmly among yourselves, or with other patrons. John seems to choose the solitary path of “naps and reflection.” When he mentions, “This is the kind of life I was supposed to lead. What happened? you ask. Cutie pie went bye bye.” (Ashbery 103) you get a sense that he has been avoiding this life of complacency for some time. He knew he belonged, but you can tell by his question, “What happened?” it’s not something he wanted or even planned for. Then we get our response as to why he’s stuck there: “Cutie pie went bye bye.” (Ashbery 103). That line is devastating! This symbolizes his daughter abandoning John at the village. We get the impression that his daughter, “Cutie pie”, possibly preoccupied with her own life could no longer take care of John and saw he wasn’t fit enough to take care of himself. Her departure from her caretaker role and, granting his age, caused him to become a tenant in “heaven”.
When you’re reading some parts of his poems, just the way he talks about the people and settings sound as if they’re from a different time – a happier time in John’s life. However, as you progress through the book, the time period seems to become more recent and in some sense… darker. This transitional timeline doesn’t happen in any one poem in particular, it’s all in the order and wording of the works and how they evolve as a whole. You see, when I first started reading “Breezeway”, I was looking at it all wrong. I took it as a combination of multiple poems, but to really peer into the soul of this small arrangement of pages, you must read them time and time again from start to finish to really pick up on the theme of finality. The book is littered with intimate memories of John’s friends and life experiences, his views on love, life, and politics, as well as his concession to the idea of death. “Breezeway” has - in the end - proved to be as charming as it is confusing.
Looking back at “Breezeway”, this book of poetry has an unconventional approach at literature with some subtle strengths and glaring weaknesses. Honestly, the only real downside to this writing style is that you cannot expect to sit down and devour more than a couple of poems at a time. Not without completely missing a lick of what you just read anyway. John Ashbery does a phenomenal job of making you work hard to understand his train of thought and, he’s very unapologetic about it. Yet, it’s this same stop-and-go reading that hurts the book in the delivery of its message. In one of Breezeway’s final poems, “Cheap Legs”, John writes, “To be comfortable in his facial hair / is as much and as little of a man / as one can ask.” (Ashbery 102). I find that line to be quite true for John, he is comfortable in what he writes and that’s probably why it works. Heck, there are even moments where you can gaily glide from one stanza to the next before unavoidably tripping over the bipolarity of his sentences. The book is like a badly oiled train wreck that somehow – just barely - makes it to its destination.
July 22, 2019
I have a strange fascination with Ashbery, but he is quite difficult. I have no idea what any of the poems in Breezeway meant—yes, I understand that this is likely by design. But I was captivated the whole way. His poems are like Rothko paintings: beautiful, precise, concise, diverse, meaningless. I’ve read two of his later collections now, and I look forward to reading some of his earlier ones next.
June 2, 2025
Read twice on the plane — Ashbery’s late poems can be so mystifying at first glance, seemingly inscrutable at times, but if you just relax you’ll see it’s basically just an American master shooting the breeze. Perfect to me
July 9, 2023
Ashbery’s poems didn’t land for me. I didn’t understand what he was getting at, his word choices and lines felt random and didn’t get to a point. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I might lack the proper education for poetry to fully interpret Ashbery, but I still didn’t gain much.
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December 31, 2015Two prominant techniques in this book are the witholding of pronoun reference and the witholding of pragmatics of idiomatic expression. One stanza might have a first name mentioned (the only instance in the poem), and a one-time-only "he," also a "she," and then several kinds of "it." Contexts to ground the idioms slide away, while the familiar idioms themselves float free of association to be marshalled along inside clauses of elegantly spun out sentences that are punctuated on the point of non sequitur.
December 8, 2018
“They don’t say please in heaven. All business is carried out in the pre-noon hours, leaving time for naps and reflection. This is the kind of life I was supposed to lead. What happened? you ask. Cutie pie went bye bye. Once the hypnotic hour of twelve has struck you are like any other paying guest, waiting for the intoxicating smell of burgers to waft up the stairway” (p. 103)
September 28, 2025
I didn't start reading Ashbery until 2025 and I started with this book. Ashbery heads will probably say I did it all wrong, but I adored this book. It was goofy and playful and stranger than I expected. I ate it up.
December 19, 2017
I’m not the biggest poetry person in the world but I really enjoyed this collection
May 18, 2019
Seems to be written by a random word generator.
October 24, 2019
Engagingly elusive, allusive, polyphonic, alternately trivial and reflective, hermetic and entertaining—Ashbery, in other words.
July 11, 2025
some gems here and there
December 28, 2025
While this book was not unpleasant to read, I was pretty mystified by the poems.
December 30, 2025
Okay; difficult in the state I was in when reading. However, there were some wild and funny ones. Probably read too fast, as well. 3.5 at home.
September 5, 2016
Before i start, would like to make crystal clear that John Ashbery is my absolute favorite poet ... galaxies away from any other; tried plenty other poets but ( maybe ) for my particular taste, nobody come close to the consistent genius lucid state of mind this man has achieved effortlessly since he decided to bless the world with his writing, and we're talking about decades here .
Own the whole Ashbery's bibliography ( all his poetry books at least ), that will always hold the best spot on my library as its way too invaluable for me, the kind of books i love to come back to again & again... and that love me back in exchange, always brighten up my day... years pass and i still can read this or that poem for the eleventh time not feeling tired about it and always with a new perspective on it so i can sleep that night with a smile on my head while keeping that feeling in mind.
How come i dare to rate this new book the lowest then ?
Kills me to face the truth, but this has been coming since 2007. Yes, i'm pointing my finger at "A "Worldly Country" ; that was the very first time some ( few ) of the poems included felt second-rate, fillers even ... an unprecedented filling that made me think i didn't get it then but i'd do on a later reading.
"Planisphere" was published a couple years later ... and once again was confronted with that very same ( amped even ) feeling .
Three more years and a new work from my all-time favorite poet, "Quick Question" was avaliable ... only to slap me with more of the same, only this time was even worse. This was no longer me not feeling his poems, this was a pattern, somethings changed ... and not exactly for the better. If anything, this was a confirmation of a genius decay, leveling down to other average-Joe-poets i've read before... a genuine enough cause to shed tears of defeat.
Now, i just finished going through "Breezaway" for the first time and am truly devastated. This is by far the worst poetry book by Ashbery i've ever read !!!! Not even sure i'd tell him apart from a bunch of mediocre modern poets if these poems where mixed among other people's on some random compilation .
While writing this review i'm still painfully shocked, still wondering how such unique brain capable of holding your hand while guiding you through distant dimensions, turning your take on life upside down, making any color brighter than it ever was and every breath worth twice than what it was before... ended up like this ?
I'm aware this so-called information society is affecting the way we ( humans ) act, think, react, behave ... everything is changing so quick most people doesn't even realize about it ( some are even offended by the mere idea, even if it's a fact ), is even crystal clear when you are one of those strange persons that enjoy art / movies / books / documentaries / interviews / articles / etc... from earlier decades and compare 'em with nowaday's .
These days, everything has to be quicker, straight to the point, include a lot of this mediocre so-called popular insta-culture , disguised with references and empty ( politically ultra-correct, always fighting to fit in ) words/facts for those exceptional times where you are allowed to extend yourself a little more than average, include cursing once in a while so you are "cool" and fit among the vast mediocrity... and be judged by twitter-minded people ( 140 characters is all they can process on their minds at once ) .
What ( above ) reads like just another rant on nowaday's society is effectively polluting the way many creators are doing things, translated to facts so to speak, and that's why i'm pointing it out ( no other reasons behind, believe it or not ) ... because it's important to stress how influential this can be.
Now, for better of for worse... was conviced that most veterant artists / creators / writers / poets .... were capable of living away for today's decadence. Their characters, ideas, mental-mechanics , etc... already have a strong foundation and that's something that won't change all of a sudden just because newer generations are leaning towards short-sighted thoughts & constantly resourcing to ( quick & substance-less ) visual effectism . And was convinced of this until i read "Breezeway"... where i feel the pollution.
This is probably one of the saddest days of my reading-life. I'm no longer safe nor i feel like i leaped through a fantastic time-space again. Industry's fumes, traffic lights & noise stabbed my soul while i was on Breezeway ; looks like Ashbery is no longer able to build those colosal spiral walls built with otherworldy materials & out-of-our-mental-range colors to effectively shield us from reality... and for that very reason, today i weep red .
Own the whole Ashbery's bibliography ( all his poetry books at least ), that will always hold the best spot on my library as its way too invaluable for me, the kind of books i love to come back to again & again... and that love me back in exchange, always brighten up my day... years pass and i still can read this or that poem for the eleventh time not feeling tired about it and always with a new perspective on it so i can sleep that night with a smile on my head while keeping that feeling in mind.
How come i dare to rate this new book the lowest then ?
Kills me to face the truth, but this has been coming since 2007. Yes, i'm pointing my finger at "A "Worldly Country" ; that was the very first time some ( few ) of the poems included felt second-rate, fillers even ... an unprecedented filling that made me think i didn't get it then but i'd do on a later reading.
"Planisphere" was published a couple years later ... and once again was confronted with that very same ( amped even ) feeling .
Three more years and a new work from my all-time favorite poet, "Quick Question" was avaliable ... only to slap me with more of the same, only this time was even worse. This was no longer me not feeling his poems, this was a pattern, somethings changed ... and not exactly for the better. If anything, this was a confirmation of a genius decay, leveling down to other average-Joe-poets i've read before... a genuine enough cause to shed tears of defeat.
Now, i just finished going through "Breezaway" for the first time and am truly devastated. This is by far the worst poetry book by Ashbery i've ever read !!!! Not even sure i'd tell him apart from a bunch of mediocre modern poets if these poems where mixed among other people's on some random compilation .
While writing this review i'm still painfully shocked, still wondering how such unique brain capable of holding your hand while guiding you through distant dimensions, turning your take on life upside down, making any color brighter than it ever was and every breath worth twice than what it was before... ended up like this ?
I'm aware this so-called information society is affecting the way we ( humans ) act, think, react, behave ... everything is changing so quick most people doesn't even realize about it ( some are even offended by the mere idea, even if it's a fact ), is even crystal clear when you are one of those strange persons that enjoy art / movies / books / documentaries / interviews / articles / etc... from earlier decades and compare 'em with nowaday's .
These days, everything has to be quicker, straight to the point, include a lot of this mediocre so-called popular insta-culture , disguised with references and empty ( politically ultra-correct, always fighting to fit in ) words/facts for those exceptional times where you are allowed to extend yourself a little more than average, include cursing once in a while so you are "cool" and fit among the vast mediocrity... and be judged by twitter-minded people ( 140 characters is all they can process on their minds at once ) .
What ( above ) reads like just another rant on nowaday's society is effectively polluting the way many creators are doing things, translated to facts so to speak, and that's why i'm pointing it out ( no other reasons behind, believe it or not ) ... because it's important to stress how influential this can be.
Now, for better of for worse... was conviced that most veterant artists / creators / writers / poets .... were capable of living away for today's decadence. Their characters, ideas, mental-mechanics , etc... already have a strong foundation and that's something that won't change all of a sudden just because newer generations are leaning towards short-sighted thoughts & constantly resourcing to ( quick & substance-less ) visual effectism . And was convinced of this until i read "Breezeway"... where i feel the pollution.
This is probably one of the saddest days of my reading-life. I'm no longer safe nor i feel like i leaped through a fantastic time-space again. Industry's fumes, traffic lights & noise stabbed my soul while i was on Breezeway ; looks like Ashbery is no longer able to build those colosal spiral walls built with otherworldy materials & out-of-our-mental-range colors to effectively shield us from reality... and for that very reason, today i weep red .
April 25, 2024
I wanted very much to read this collection of poetry, as I have admired the single doses of Ashbery I had received up to this point. So first, if you are seeking more traditional verse that opens itself to understanding, run away now.
This accounts for many of the reviews of Ashbery: his simple language nonetheless yields little comprehension. Half-utterances collide with others in non sequiturs which occasionally make reference to popular culture, more often to what appear inside jokes or private talks, all from the seeming musings of an elderly speaker gamely spry and moderately hip. This poetry was not "above my head"--I leave such claims for Blake or parts of Eliot. No, Ashbery here is just difficult: and that "difficult" is in his opacity to readers. His poetry isn't hard; the author is, and not for any reason that I can account for. The occasional nugget of wry insight (a promise of meaning, perhaps?) is quickly buried in the bizarre.
If the answer is that his poetry reveals a flippancy and irreverence to culture, events, and relationships, my response is that each of his works carries essentially this same unchanging message. Why read more than one? My fear is that, as this is one of his later collections, old John may be phoning it in.
But I admit to not having read near enough to make such a general claim. Instead, I will say that this is not a good entry point for Ashbery. Surely--surely--there is a better one.
This accounts for many of the reviews of Ashbery: his simple language nonetheless yields little comprehension. Half-utterances collide with others in non sequiturs which occasionally make reference to popular culture, more often to what appear inside jokes or private talks, all from the seeming musings of an elderly speaker gamely spry and moderately hip. This poetry was not "above my head"--I leave such claims for Blake or parts of Eliot. No, Ashbery here is just difficult: and that "difficult" is in his opacity to readers. His poetry isn't hard; the author is, and not for any reason that I can account for. The occasional nugget of wry insight (a promise of meaning, perhaps?) is quickly buried in the bizarre.
If the answer is that his poetry reveals a flippancy and irreverence to culture, events, and relationships, my response is that each of his works carries essentially this same unchanging message. Why read more than one? My fear is that, as this is one of his later collections, old John may be phoning it in.
But I admit to not having read near enough to make such a general claim. Instead, I will say that this is not a good entry point for Ashbery. Surely--surely--there is a better one.
October 13, 2016
Ashbery is always... well, Ashbery. But later Ashbery is especially Ashbery. By "Ashbery", I mean frequently indecipherable avant-garde babble fodder. Maybe I'm not "NYC" enough to "get" Ashbery. Maybe, in my terminally uncultured state, I will be permanently reduced to "putting" far too many "words" in "quotation" "marks" while reviewing him. However, as in all Ashbery collections, there are some moments of hilarious poetry gold. Who says that Ashbery isn't trying to be funny? Among the WTF content of Breezeway, I still found many enjoyable moments.
Exhibit A:
"Forget any mistranslations, / miscommunications. The past / loves you, baby. / Go sandpaper a horse."
To be clear, I am all for experimenting with the English language. Poetry (especially with John Ashbery as leading linguist) is the perfect laboratory to conduct such madcap mischief. That being said, I cannot completely recommend this particular collection (to just any Goodreads/internet user) of Ashbery's work in good conscience. If you love Ashbery and/or poetry, go ahead. If you hate poetry or are at the very least skeptical of its value, this collection will only turn you off more. As somebody who recently constructed* a new bookshelf exclusively to house his collection of poetry, I fall into the former camp.
*Put together a bookshelf ordered from Target.com.
Exhibit A:
"Forget any mistranslations, / miscommunications. The past / loves you, baby. / Go sandpaper a horse."
To be clear, I am all for experimenting with the English language. Poetry (especially with John Ashbery as leading linguist) is the perfect laboratory to conduct such madcap mischief. That being said, I cannot completely recommend this particular collection (to just any Goodreads/internet user) of Ashbery's work in good conscience. If you love Ashbery and/or poetry, go ahead. If you hate poetry or are at the very least skeptical of its value, this collection will only turn you off more. As somebody who recently constructed* a new bookshelf exclusively to house his collection of poetry, I fall into the former camp.
*Put together a bookshelf ordered from Target.com.
July 25, 2015
I pre-ordered this book, finally got round to finishing it. Not only was this the most disappointing book I've read all year, it's actually the worst. Right now on my desk with this pad is Ashbery's book and Lydia Davis' Cant & Wont, the former is as much a disgrace to contemporary literature as the latter is to its credit. Ashbery can, and should do better--prior to purchasing this book, I read a wide collections of his poems online, and found them, as the reviewer indicated on the back of this text that Ashbery "is in the sequence that includes Whitman....Stevens". Ashberry's lazy lines multiply and there is a lack of integrity for any single poem to stand across this collection unfortunately. There are brilliant moments, but they never last a poem. These are testament to his acknowledged genius, but his craftsmanship is on poor display here. Anybody want a first edition, lightly used? There might not be others.
June 19, 2016
This is something I read as a stretching my mind sort of exercise. I knew going in that the whole surrealist/post-modern style usually doesn't interest me, but he's a very prominent poet who I'd never read until now, so I settled in to try and connect with this. I can admire the technical aspect of it, however, one of the things I read poetry for in the first place is an emotional connection that pulls me into what the poet is saying. The gap on that personal level is simply too big here. I have no doubt that there are people who are intensely moved by some of these poems, but none of them really hit home for me, I was simply examining them from a distance without ever feeling connected. So I'm sure this deserves better on technical merit, but my ratings tend to be based on the purely subjective and personal, so I had to go with two stars as it was ultimately not what I want out of an experience. No regrets, but no repeats.
May 26, 2019
I'm sorry, was this book written by a neural net? If so I would be pretty impressed that it managed to mimic the patterns of human speech and more forgiving of the fact that it churned out meaning-free word salad.
I like strange and abstract things, and I have liked Ashbery in the past, but these poems did not seem to be constructed with care.
I like strange and abstract things, and I have liked Ashbery in the past, but these poems did not seem to be constructed with care.
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