As We Know: Poems

by John Ashbery

The long poem Litany, written as two interrelated monologues, joins with forty-seven lyrical poems to portray the search for self-identity in the modern world

Genres: Poetry

118 pages, Paperback

First published November 29, 1979

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

[Geoff]

My Erotic Double

He says he doesn’t feel like working today.
It’s just as well. Here in the shade
Behind the house, protected from street noises,
One can go over all kinds of old feeling,
Throw some away, keep others.
The wordplay
Between us gets very intense when there are
Fewer feelings around to confuse things.
Another go-round? No, but the last things
You always find to say are charming, and rescue me
Before the night does. We are afloat
On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,
Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight
That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams
As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.

I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.
Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.
Thank you. You are too.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Okay a HUGE collection opening with a one hundred page poem - Litany - in two columns which is intended to be read as two "simultaneous but independent voices". It's really quite unspeakable of him to do this how dare he & it is rather excellent too. Perhaps it ought to be its own collection.

...leaving the dream
Upended in a puddle somewhere
As though "dead" were just another adjective.

THEN we get the rest of the collection it's a long book as I say & it's also certainly later-Ashberyish in a way that I felt Shadow Train hadn't quite become.

-Everything as a sea, is an eye /What is beheld is whatever lives

Characteristic explorations, unspoolings of temporality & unstable 'I'. I love Train Rising Out of the Sea.

It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes
That all things have their center in their dying,
That each is discrete and diaphanous and
Has pointed its prow away from the sand for the next trillion years.
…
The past in each of us, until so much memory becomes an institution,
Through sheer weight, the persistence of it, no,
Not the persistence: that makes it seem a deliberate act
Of duration, much too deliberate for this ingenuous being,

Like an era that refuses to come to an end or be born again.
We need more night for the sky, more blue for the daylight
That inundates our remarks before we can make them
Taking away a little bit of us each time

[birdslibrary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating exclusively for the long poem Litany, which I listened to a recording of here:
https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x...
Two voices perform two poems conceived in conjunction simultaneously, searching for a poetic equivalent to musical counterpoint.

[S. Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection didn't manage to appeal to me, something in the poems kept me at arm's length, or - more likely - it's the other way around. Litany was lost on me; even when listening to a live reading of the poem, I can't wrap my head around listening to two separate streams of thought simultaneously. Late Echo was the first poem in the collection that had an impact on me, and I found his short series of one-sentence (two if you count the title) poems - The Cathedral Is, I Had Thought things Were Going Along Well, Out Over the Bay the Rattle of Firecrackers, and We Were on the Terrace Drinking Gin and Tonics - impressed me for some reason. Other than that, a great collection of poems, but not for me at this time.

[Nicholas Galinaitis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always huge fan! Some good ones in here.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like how Ashbery can set up a subject he could never really describe, acknowledge the act of writing, then, is a paradox, and then complain the whole time about how impossible it would be to write about that moment. If the poems weren't so charming, it would just feel ridiculous reading him. As it is, I come away feeling the same way as Ashbery. That charm. I am wistful for novelty, and I am pretty sure I'll never actually grasp when I've actually discovered something novel.

One notable thing about this book, though, is the longer poem "Litany," written in two independent but simultaneous columns. I don't think he coordinates the images as well as he does in other books, but for its elaboration of the writing paradox, the two columns feel almost extra-dimensional.

[Sameen Shakya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the title, As We Know by John Ashbery is about what we don't know.

The poems in this collection are a bit different from how Ashbery usually does things. The bulk of the book is a long poem called Litany where the poet questions everything and moves through modes of expression that may leave the reader gasping for breath. I know because that's what happened to me.

The rest of the poems, short pieces, are all nice and engaging. This might be one of my favorite Ashbery books I read.

[Mitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the funnier Ashbery books, wisecracking in the dry way that only he can do. The poem for two voices is exquisite. This is the last one of his books that I really loved. After this, he is still great, but he gets dryer and dryer, and I thirst for some other quench.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This may be one of Ashbery's weaker books. It seems a little too accessible and watered down. Still, it is Ashbery.

[Carrie]

Definitely not weird enough but somewhat weird.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 A819as 1979