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Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems
Winner of the 2008 Griffin International Poetry Prize His long-awaited volume, a new selection of his later poems, spans ten major collections by one of America's most visionary and influential poets. Chosen by the author himself, the poems in Notes from the Air represent John Ashbery's best work from the past two decades, from the critically acclaimed April Galleons and Flow Chart to the 2005 National Book Award finalist Where Shall I Wander . While Ashbery has long been considered a powerful force in twentieth-century culture, Notes from the Air demonstrates clearly how important and relevant his writing continues to be, well into the twenty-first century. Many of the books from which these poems are drawn are regularly taught in university classrooms across the country, and critics and scholars vigorously debate his newest works as well as his classics. He has already published four major books since the turn of the new millennium, and, although 2007 marks his eightieth birthday, this legendary literary figure continues to write fresh, new, and vibrant poetry that remains as stimulating, provocative, and controversial as ever. Notes from the Air reveals, for the first time in one volume, the remarkable evolution of Ashbery's poetry from the mid-1980s into the new century, and offers an irresistible sampling of some of the finest work by this "national treasure."
- GenresPoetry
384 pages, Hardcover
First published November 6, 2007
20 people are currently reading
165 people want to read
About the author
John Ashbery
290 books476 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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December 3, 2010My interest in John Ashbery was first piqued when I read his interview in the recently-released Paris Review compilations. In particular, I was intrigued by his attitude toward ambiguity and "difficulty," which the interviewer asks about because Ashbery has a reputation as a famously "difficult" poet. In response, Ashbery emphasizes that he hates the idea of being intentionally obscure or antagonistic toward the reader; that's never been his goal, and he objects to that kind of confrontational attitude in poetry as well as in clothing. Rather, he says, "I try to dress in a way that is just slightly off, so the spectator, if he notices, will feel slightly bemused but not excluded, remembering his own imperfect mode of dress." Genius.
I might disagree with Ashbery's definition of "real happiness" here, but I deeply relate to what he says about ambiguity implying eventual resolution whereas certitude implies further ambiguity, and to the way in which supposedly "depressing" modern art makes him feel cheerful. This was one of those moments of shocking recognition for me, in which someone else articulates my exact feelings, not fully realized until I read them on the page. Combine that with his clothing analogy, and I knew I had to seek out some of Ashbery's poetry.
Notes from the Air is a sampling of his later work, selected by the poet himself, from 1987's April Galleons to 2005's Where Shall I Wander (published when Ashbery was 78 years old). The resulting volume did consistently surprise me—in large part, because the sampled collections were all so different from one another. I have read some criticisms of "unevenness" in Notes from the Air, and I would tend to agree that some sections are a lot "better"—more pleasing, more surprising, more memorable—than others, either subjectively or objectively. With such a huge variety of approaches and concerns, this is almost inevitable. Far from being a negative in my mind, though, this wide range is one of the most impressive things about my introduction to Ashbery: even in his late 70s, he never ceases to experiment, to approach poetics from different angles and with different attitudes. What's more, with a few exceptions the vision within each excerpted collection seemed unified, as if each one were a self-contained project.
In general, I found the earlier collections (April Galleons, Flow Chart, Hotel Lautréamont, Can You Hear, Bird) stronger than the later ones. The Paris Review interviewer remarks that in Ashbery's poetry "the details of a poem will be so clear, but the context, the surrounding situation, unclear," and indeed this dichotomy provided many of the pleasant surprises I found in my favorite pieces. Ashbery borrows cadences and figures from informal, colloquial speech and writing, which lends his verses a certain ease—sometimes humorous, sometimes melancholic, but always possessed of an "everyday" quality. At the same time, though, he invokes so many surprising juxtapositions that the reader often finds herself disoriented, despite the familiarity of the language. From the beginning of "April Galleons," the titular poem in the first excerpted collection:
The juxtaposition of transitions normally characterizing informal spoken language ("And besides," "Obviously, it was time to be off") and more heightened figurative language (a living "discredited waltz"; "the conquerors and their lilies") is enormously appealing to me, as is the almost fiction-esque tone created by the narrative voice behind the colloquialisms. Combined with the very Eliot-esque line "Is all of life thus / A tepid housewarming?" and this, like several of Ashbery's other poems, had me flashing back to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Even the overall conceit of the poem—finding the speaker on the verge of setting out on a metaphysical journey he imagines will change his life—is reminiscent.
Some of my favorite examples of Ashbery's hybrid colloquial/figurative approach were to be found in the book-length poem Flow Chart, of which only section 5 of 6 is included in this collection. Of all the collections on offer, Flow Chart is probably the one I'm most tempted to read in its entirety, not only because I'm curious to get a sense of the larger picture vis-a-vis this long poem, but because some of the sections therein were the most emotionally resonant for me as well. A short sample:
Perhaps it's my Scotch-Norwegian roots showing, but to me all the gruffness and "aw shucks" language here ("the unexpected pleasures and all that"; "I guess that's what you came about") heighten the poignancy of this passage—it's all about communicating with oneself and other people, about negotiating and re-negotiating conversations, and yet the speaker himself is awkward at that very task. I also love the idea that unraveling and starting over from the beginning—whether we are referring to a conversation or a piece of artwork—is a natural part of any process, only to be expected, "normal, no cause for alarm."
The selections from Hotel Lautréamont struck me as slightly more formal, and include two amazing examples of pantoums, a form in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third (respectively) of the one following. The long-ish titular poem "Hotel Lautréamont" is a particularly amazing example of the form; it's striking how the repeated lines often change meaning completely due only to recontextualization.
Can You Hear, Bird surprised me in turn by being laugh-out-loud funny. This is probably the second volume I would investigate in its entirety, just because I found Ashbery's wry humor so delightful (and often effective in bringing out his melancholia by contrast), and it's shown off to particular advantage in these poems. In "...By An Earthquake," each line gives us a hypothetical plot point in a loosely connected and sometimes petty melodrama. An excerpt:
And so on. The line about Petronius B. Furlong tickles me in particular. The poem as a whole is oddly compelling in addition to being funny, playing with stereotypes of plot and character. The poem "Sleepers Awake" has similarly literary/meta concerns, as does "Chapter II, Book 35, which was one of my favorite pieces in this whole book. Can You Hear, Bird has touches of the sinister and melancholy as well, as in "The Problem of Anxiety," which begins "Fifty years have passed / since I started living in those dark towns / I was telling you about." These more troubling touches coexist with the humor in a surprisingly compelling way, and the tension between them made Can You Hear, Bird stand out (although there were flashes of humor throughout the other collections, as well).
There were so many poems I loved in this collection, and it's so difficult to decide what to include in a blog post. The later pieces tended, I thought, to be less pressurized, more prone to rambling, and didn't transport me as consistently as the earlier ones did, but there were still some very memorable points in the latter pages. Overall Notes on the Air was a great introduction to Ashbery, since it gave me a good idea of the different characters of his later collections, which in turn allows me to decide which ones I'd like to investigate more fully. His output is so diverse that I would highly recommend someone new to his poetry starting out with a similarly bird's-eye view; it seems to me that given a panorama of Ashbery's work, most readers could find something to love.
My intention is to present the reader with a pleasant surprise, not an unpleasant one, not a nonsurprise. I think this is the way pleasure happens when you are reading poetry. [...] Ambiguity seems to be the same thing as happiness or pleasant surprise. I am assuming that from the moment life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible, and pleasant surprise is promoted to the front rank of the emotions. The idea of relief from pain has something to do with ambiguity. Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity. I guess that is why so much 'depressing' modern art makes me feel cheerful.
I might disagree with Ashbery's definition of "real happiness" here, but I deeply relate to what he says about ambiguity implying eventual resolution whereas certitude implies further ambiguity, and to the way in which supposedly "depressing" modern art makes him feel cheerful. This was one of those moments of shocking recognition for me, in which someone else articulates my exact feelings, not fully realized until I read them on the page. Combine that with his clothing analogy, and I knew I had to seek out some of Ashbery's poetry.
Notes from the Air is a sampling of his later work, selected by the poet himself, from 1987's April Galleons to 2005's Where Shall I Wander (published when Ashbery was 78 years old). The resulting volume did consistently surprise me—in large part, because the sampled collections were all so different from one another. I have read some criticisms of "unevenness" in Notes from the Air, and I would tend to agree that some sections are a lot "better"—more pleasing, more surprising, more memorable—than others, either subjectively or objectively. With such a huge variety of approaches and concerns, this is almost inevitable. Far from being a negative in my mind, though, this wide range is one of the most impressive things about my introduction to Ashbery: even in his late 70s, he never ceases to experiment, to approach poetics from different angles and with different attitudes. What's more, with a few exceptions the vision within each excerpted collection seemed unified, as if each one were a self-contained project.
In general, I found the earlier collections (April Galleons, Flow Chart, Hotel Lautréamont, Can You Hear, Bird) stronger than the later ones. The Paris Review interviewer remarks that in Ashbery's poetry "the details of a poem will be so clear, but the context, the surrounding situation, unclear," and indeed this dichotomy provided many of the pleasant surprises I found in my favorite pieces. Ashbery borrows cadences and figures from informal, colloquial speech and writing, which lends his verses a certain ease—sometimes humorous, sometimes melancholic, but always possessed of an "everyday" quality. At the same time, though, he invokes so many surprising juxtapositions that the reader often finds herself disoriented, despite the familiarity of the language. From the beginning of "April Galleons," the titular poem in the first excerpted collection:
Something was burning. And besides,
At the far end of the room a discredited waltz
Was alive and reciting tales of the conquerors
And their lilies—is all of life thus
A tepid housewarming? And where do the scraps
Of meaning come from? Obviously,
It was time to be off, in another
Direction, toward marshlands and cold, scrolled
Names of cities that sounded as though they existed,
But never had.
The juxtaposition of transitions normally characterizing informal spoken language ("And besides," "Obviously, it was time to be off") and more heightened figurative language (a living "discredited waltz"; "the conquerors and their lilies") is enormously appealing to me, as is the almost fiction-esque tone created by the narrative voice behind the colloquialisms. Combined with the very Eliot-esque line "Is all of life thus / A tepid housewarming?" and this, like several of Ashbery's other poems, had me flashing back to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Even the overall conceit of the poem—finding the speaker on the verge of setting out on a metaphysical journey he imagines will change his life—is reminiscent.
Some of my favorite examples of Ashbery's hybrid colloquial/figurative approach were to be found in the book-length poem Flow Chart, of which only section 5 of 6 is included in this collection. Of all the collections on offer, Flow Chart is probably the one I'm most tempted to read in its entirety, not only because I'm curious to get a sense of the larger picture vis-a-vis this long poem, but because some of the sections therein were the most emotionally resonant for me as well. A short sample:
A few anomalies
are a help sometimes, confetti that gets lost in the cracks
of some conversation and then you have to take it back again to the beginning
and start all over again, but that's normal, it's no cause for alarm, there are
more people out there than before. If you can think constructively, cogently,
on a spring morning like this and really want to know the result in advance, and can
accept the inroads colorful difficulties can sometimes make as well as all the
fortunate happening, the unexpected pleasures and all that, then there's no reason not to
rejoice in the exterior outcome, sudden
mountain-face, the abrupt slide
into somewhere or other. It will all twist us
closer together, under heaven, and I guess that's what you came about. See these
polished stones? I want them and I want you to have them. It's time, now.
Perhaps it's my Scotch-Norwegian roots showing, but to me all the gruffness and "aw shucks" language here ("the unexpected pleasures and all that"; "I guess that's what you came about") heighten the poignancy of this passage—it's all about communicating with oneself and other people, about negotiating and re-negotiating conversations, and yet the speaker himself is awkward at that very task. I also love the idea that unraveling and starting over from the beginning—whether we are referring to a conversation or a piece of artwork—is a natural part of any process, only to be expected, "normal, no cause for alarm."
The selections from Hotel Lautréamont struck me as slightly more formal, and include two amazing examples of pantoums, a form in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third (respectively) of the one following. The long-ish titular poem "Hotel Lautréamont" is a particularly amazing example of the form; it's striking how the repeated lines often change meaning completely due only to recontextualization.
Can You Hear, Bird surprised me in turn by being laugh-out-loud funny. This is probably the second volume I would investigate in its entirety, just because I found Ashbery's wry humor so delightful (and often effective in bringing out his melancholia by contrast), and it's shown off to particular advantage in these poems. In "...By An Earthquake," each line gives us a hypothetical plot point in a loosely connected and sometimes petty melodrama. An excerpt:
A and A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed.
Elvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an
electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which is stood
becomes a lake.
Alphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic would, which
causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal.
A has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience.
Jenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home
than she was when she first started.
Petronius B. Furlong's friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies.
Thirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading
Buster's will.
And so on. The line about Petronius B. Furlong tickles me in particular. The poem as a whole is oddly compelling in addition to being funny, playing with stereotypes of plot and character. The poem "Sleepers Awake" has similarly literary/meta concerns, as does "Chapter II, Book 35, which was one of my favorite pieces in this whole book. Can You Hear, Bird has touches of the sinister and melancholy as well, as in "The Problem of Anxiety," which begins "Fifty years have passed / since I started living in those dark towns / I was telling you about." These more troubling touches coexist with the humor in a surprisingly compelling way, and the tension between them made Can You Hear, Bird stand out (although there were flashes of humor throughout the other collections, as well).
There were so many poems I loved in this collection, and it's so difficult to decide what to include in a blog post. The later pieces tended, I thought, to be less pressurized, more prone to rambling, and didn't transport me as consistently as the earlier ones did, but there were still some very memorable points in the latter pages. Overall Notes on the Air was a great introduction to Ashbery, since it gave me a good idea of the different characters of his later collections, which in turn allows me to decide which ones I'd like to investigate more fully. His output is so diverse that I would highly recommend someone new to his poetry starting out with a similarly bird's-eye view; it seems to me that given a panorama of Ashbery's work, most readers could find something to love.
Want to read
December 26, 2007I don't get Ashbery's appeal, but I suppose I am professionally obligated to try.
March 6, 2008
I actually bought this for my husband, he's more into Ashbery than I am. But I had to read it. There's an ease, an utterly "unself-consciousness" to his poetry that I really admire. The side-effect of this is that at times he rambles. For this reason, I prefer his shorter lyrics.
November 22, 2023
Bewildering, beautiful, funny, nonsensical, difficult, infuriating, wise, insightful--pretty much everything you'd want from writing is contained herein--and nothing.
September 18, 2008
After loving "The Mooring of Starting Out", I was surprised at how hit-or-miss this collection was. Certain books were much, much stronger (Where Shall I Wander, April Galleons, Flow Chart, Chinese Whispers) than the others, which tended to fall into an abyss of sameness. The logical connections (or lack thereof) between lines are so odd that after awhile the poems all blend into one forgettable mishmash of incongruent observations, whereas the stronger books tend to be more focused and serious.
December 25, 2010
It took me a year and a half to read this book.
January 31, 2012
i hope he listens to dylan.
November 22, 2015
returning to most poets tends to enhance my understanding and increase admiration - diminishing returns with Ashbery (save for Convex Mirror)
September 29, 2017
The problem I've encountered here is akin to the problem of the infinite tome. Every poem is a pyrrhic victory, in that they are all engrossing and I can't quite find it within me to turn the page without losing something I know I'm only clinging to with my eyes.
I don't know if I'll ever be done reading this one, even if I go through the physical motions of reading over and over again. In particular I am hooked on Ashbery's cyclical works, which are in abundance here. I haven't seen them work in the way they do since The Mooring of Starting Out, reusing words and phrases in ways that build of palimpsests of meaning and contexts. Hotel lautreamont made me feel like I was reading a novel, with the meandering, calm and ouroboros-like structure of Dhalgren. Just when you think you understand the patterns, they grow more intricate and suble- but being swept along is, this time, enough.
I don't know if I'll ever be done reading this one, even if I go through the physical motions of reading over and over again. In particular I am hooked on Ashbery's cyclical works, which are in abundance here. I haven't seen them work in the way they do since The Mooring of Starting Out, reusing words and phrases in ways that build of palimpsests of meaning and contexts. Hotel lautreamont made me feel like I was reading a novel, with the meandering, calm and ouroboros-like structure of Dhalgren. Just when you think you understand the patterns, they grow more intricate and suble- but being swept along is, this time, enough.
February 11, 2018
No Longer Very Clear
It is true that I can no longer remember very well
The time when we first began to know each other.
However, I do remember very well
the first time we met. You walked in sunlight,
holding a daisy. You said, "Children make unreliable witnesses."
Now, so long after that time,
I keep the spirit of it throbbing still.
The ideas are still the same, and they expand
to fill vast, antique cubes.
My daughter was reading one just the other day.
She said, "How like pellucid statues, Daddy. Or like a . . .
an engine."
In this house of blues the cold creeps stealthily upon us.
I do not dare to do what I fantasize doing.
With time the blue conceals into roomlike purple
that takes the shape of alcoves, landings . . .
Everything is like something else.
I should have waited before I learned this.
It is true that I can no longer remember very well
The time when we first began to know each other.
However, I do remember very well
the first time we met. You walked in sunlight,
holding a daisy. You said, "Children make unreliable witnesses."
Now, so long after that time,
I keep the spirit of it throbbing still.
The ideas are still the same, and they expand
to fill vast, antique cubes.
My daughter was reading one just the other day.
She said, "How like pellucid statues, Daddy. Or like a . . .
an engine."
In this house of blues the cold creeps stealthily upon us.
I do not dare to do what I fantasize doing.
With time the blue conceals into roomlike purple
that takes the shape of alcoves, landings . . .
Everything is like something else.
I should have waited before I learned this.
April 17, 2020
A friend shared an Ashberry poem with me today, and I really needed it, so I decided to read this for my book a day book. Once of my favorite lines:
I think I liked you better when I seldom knew you.
I think I liked you better when I seldom knew you.
February 22, 2025
I never got it. All the poems seemed a bunch of sticks piling up to nothing.
Maybe it’s like modern art, where I need help figuring out what the artist was working at. These poems didn’t give me anything, no emotions or impressions or sense of directions.
Maybe it’s like modern art, where I need help figuring out what the artist was working at. These poems didn’t give me anything, no emotions or impressions or sense of directions.
February 16, 2020
Miraculously I finished this book which I started reading in December 2017
October 6, 2021
I cannot express how much I hated reading this book. It received tons of great reviews. I cannot explain why. It took a long time to finish, but I am free at last.
March 29, 2013
The one distinction I would make between Ashbery's earlier and later work is the individual collections that make up his later work seem less cohesive, with each book covering a multitude of themes. The earlier work, in my opinion, is more thematically succinct. That said, this collection is hardly disappointing. It still shows Ashbery at his best, whether he writes prose poetry (I wish more of Girls on the Run was included, as I now want to read it in its entirety) or shorter poems that we're used to seeing from him. This book includes only a selection of his later work, but one still gets quite a comprehensive look at what Ashbery published in the 90s and 2000s.
Additionally, I feel it's worth noting that the unconventionally large size of this edition gives appropriate space to Ashbery's long-lined poems, something the Library of America volume of his earlier work did not provide.
Additionally, I feel it's worth noting that the unconventionally large size of this edition gives appropriate space to Ashbery's long-lined poems, something the Library of America volume of his earlier work did not provide.
October 1, 2015
I tend to gravitate to the longer rambling works of which the selection from [i]Flow Chart[/i] is impressive.
Many lines that surprise, and jump out in this collection, more than some of the flatter poems.
Many lines that surprise, and jump out in this collection, more than some of the flatter poems.
July 30, 2019
The magic eight ball of books.
April 16, 2021
I loved Ashbery's first "Selected Poems", but this collection was uneven and somewhat of a disappointment, aside from the very good title poem "Notes from the Air".
December 25, 2015
ashberry's so influential that his imitators/inheritors have become better than him (for example, ben lerner, josh bell, ana bozicevic, geoffrey nutter, etc)
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March 15, 2013811.54 A8198n 2008
Read
July 30, 2018There's something good on nearly every page, but still weaker than the earlier Selected and a challenge in bulk.
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