A Wave: Poems

by John Ashbery

One of Ashbery’s most acclaimed and beloved collections since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, filled with his signature wit and generous intelligence

The poems in John Ashbery’s award-winning 1984 collection A Wave address the impermanence of language, the nature of mortality, and the fluidity of consciousness—matters of life and death that in other hands might run the risk of sentimentality. For John Ashbery, however, these considerations provide an opportunity to display his prodigious poetic gifts: the unerring ear for our evolving modern language and its ever-expanding universe of meanings, the fierce eye trained on glimmers underwater, and the wry humor that runs through observations both surprising and familiar. As the poem “The Path to the White Moon” has it, “We know what is coming, that we are moving / Dangerously and gracefully / Toward the resolution of time / Blurred but alive with many separate meanings / Inside this conversation.” The long title poem of A Wave, which closes the book, is considered one of Ashbery’s most distinguished works, praised by critic Helen Vendler for its “genius for a free and accurate American rendition of very elusive inner feelings, and especially for transitive states between feelings.”
 
Winner of both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize, this book is one to be read, reread, and remembered.

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century, American

128 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1984

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

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

The time unfolds like music trapped on the page
Unable to tell the story again
Raging
*
I keep thinking if I could get through you
I’d get back to me at a further stage
[…]
And we are left with only sensations of ourselves
And the dry otherness, like a clenched fist
*
What is restored
Becomes stronger than the loss as it is remembered;
Is a new, separate life of its own. A new color. Seriously blue.
Unquestioning. Acidly sweet. Must we then pick up the pieces
(But what are the pieces, if not separate puzzles themselves,
And meanwhile rain abrades the window?)
*
For even when hours and days go by in silence and the phone
Never rings, and widely spaced drops of water
Fall from the eaves, nothing is any longer a secret
And one can live alone rejoicing in this: [...]
That memory contains everything. And you see slipping down a hallway
The past self you decided not to have anything to do with any more
And it is a more comfortable you, dishonest perhaps,
But alive. Wanting you to know what you’re losing.
And still the machinery of the great exegesis is only beginning
To groan and hum. There are moments like this one
That are almost silent, so that bird-watchers like us
Can come, and stay awhile, reflecting on shades of difference
In past performances, and move on refreshed.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not opposed to feeling adrift when reading, but this book, on my first read-through of it, made me feel more than adrift: I struggled to find a way in, or anything to hold on to. I didn't like this book much after my first read-through of it, but I think the final/title poem helps cast light on Ashbery's approach: the last line of the book is "But all was strange."—which is I suppose a bit of comfort to take into a re-reading. Also heartening was the first paragraph of Christopher Middleton's 1984 review of this book in the NY Times, which starts like this: "Reading John Ashbery's poems is a bit like playing hide-and-seek in a sprawling mansion designed by M. C. Escher."

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?"

-- "At North Farm"

[Hibou le Literature Supporter · Rating 5 out of 5]

My second favorite Ashbery collection (his 10th), after SELF-PORTRAIT. Having read Ashbery all my life, I find what I love most about him, aside from his peerless wordplay, are his long poems which keep on building and building. There's a great deal of childhood nostalgia in this collection, and also a very grown-up New York / Paris cosmopolitan angle that I want to be around.

"And want to go on living under the same myopic stars as have known /
Since childhood, when, looking out a window, we saw them /
And immediately liked them."

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of it was really beautiful and really good but so much of it felt like I was just reading laboriously and it had gotten to the point where I had 1 poem/prose piece left and abandoned it because I was done.

He does a wonderful job of pairing certain words and creating these just glimmer moments of phrases that verbally and visually work well together but poetry should never be a labor to read. I think as a reader to labor over any written work should only be done in the context of a paper, thesis, critique or because within yourself the text is giving you a struggle for thought, introspection, etc but not for anything else.

I'm glad I finally read him though as a few works I've read lately have referenced him, but I doubt I will go to his work again.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember the ocean at sea, the movement of a wave, which wasn’t so much a movement as a tilting action, or a nod. The waves that never lifted the carrier until we were in the North Sea. And then I could only see the lifting action on closed circuit television. My friends would bring me to the TV in berthing and show me the waves crashing over the flight deck. My friends and I sitting in office chairs and letting the waves lift the ship so we would roll from one bulkhead to the other.

But normal ships are not measured in football fields. And normally, a sailor could look in the abstract at the ocean’s waves, the waves’ nods to deeper currents and tides rising up to the surface of the water. Because the ship was indifferent to the waves. That’s the action of Ashbery’s poems in this book. An observation that water rises up and then eases itself back down. Not like a wave at the beach, that might appear to be coming home, or throwing itself at the land attempting to push an immovable object into itself, or away from the ocean. And, significantly, not like the ocean waves in the middle of the ocean, that would rise and fall in harmony with the waves surrounding them. Ashbery’s book proposes a wave, in its singularity, focusing on its movement. A single moment in time. Rising. Easing back. Into what? Which, for my reading of Ashbery, is the recurring question. What does time present of itself, what use are referents if you’re thinking about time? What might those referents help you say when time doesn’t have to be going anywhere?

All these movements and personal concerns and sociality are especially present in the book’s title poem, “A Wave.” Where Ashbery plays his Ashbery digression and realization that can only be partial realizations because the Ashbery self always feels present to the moment and also mindful of how any one moment could compare to other moments. There should be a whole school called The Ashbery Irony, where acute awareness is confounded by the awareness that how anyone looks at past awarenesses seems sharper, even as they know the present awareness is the one most comprehensive and capable of being fully aware of the present moment. There will be times in life that bead to themselves, like drops of mercury, and the irony is that Ashbery’s speaker will never only embrace that beading action. He is always discovering time’s looser structures, its perforations, so he can share what might have led to this time, or what others think of the time you’re experiencing. Meaning, your experience of any given “now” has other considerations of now fundamentally present. And Ashbery’s poems are going to situate that for your benefit.

[ocean 99 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!! What can I say— all words seem pointless, cliched, almost immature after this masterpiece. It’s the first time I’ve felt strong jealousy wishing that I was the one to come up with such incomparable work of art. It was the first time too that I’ve felt how I find all of this extremely personal, touching my heart so intimately in a way no other book has ever did! This’s a book I would always be reading, would always have on the go. The book that I know would set me right, guide me when I’m lost, be my loyal friend❤️
I think how fortunate it must have been to know all along that my favourite poem has been written by this man, is within this collection, and yet not read the entirety of the collection until now! Each poem, each line felt like unraveling a long-awaited present— I was my most childish, joyous self gasping with pure excitement all the way through unable to do otherwise.This book revived me, polished my rusty soul back to its vibrant colors. I owe so much to this book, maybe too much.

[No_Name_tard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The primary task of poetry is to express complexity in beautiful, poignant lines. At that, John Ashbery is a master, but my primary pleasure of reading Ashbery is the novelty of his line. He expresses great complexity but perhaps doesn't always bother with finding the right construction to convey its meaning. But the lines are always beautiful and he can alternatively be praised for meeting that complexity with a diction that appreciates it for what it is.

[Barbara Vojtašáková · Rating 4 out of 5]

táto knižka mi prvých pár pokusov nedávala zmysel, vždy som sa zastavila tak na strane číslo päť, a potom to zrazu kliklo. čo som si totiž najprv neuvedomila bola na jednej strane jednoduchá ale trochu skrytá narácia a excesívne zosobňovanie sa do priestorov a predmetov a svetov na strane druhej. na prvý pohľad bola na mňa ashberyho vlna komplikovaná, na piaty vôbec. odporúčam, viliam, vďaka!

[Alfredo Suárez Palacios · Rating 4 out of 5]

La luminosidad y a la vez lo opaco de los versos de Ashbery me encanta. Parece simple pero la gramática encierra una inteligencia brutal, la luz es amplia, pero su significado siempre es un poco más rápido que nosotros. Es increíble este señor, cuánta ternura, cuánta inteligencia.

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

grappling with a review.

[Bruce · Rating 1 out of 5]

A very bad translator.

[Eva Tomkuliaková]

Lovely bubbly... and what... I read it in Slovak translation and I guess it lost in it a little bit of its energy that it has in English original version.

[Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man,
fuck these waves.

[Richard Smith]

John Ashbery’s A Wave, is a collection of poems that struggles between poetry and prose and between prose and short story. The poems are, in typical Ashbery fashion, written with longer lines and in various forms, but in this book there are several “short stories” of 3-15 pages that appear scattered throughout the work.

“Description of a Masque,” the first “short story” that appears in the book, rides the line between short story and prose poetry. Although it clearly follows some kind of progression of a masque, the characters are metaphorical (such as Alice from Wonderland and Jack Horner from the nursery rhyme) and much of the language is filled with vague poetic description that make it feel more like a poem. The next short story, however, is “The Lonedale Operator,” which follows a very logical progression of a train of thought from the speaker. The language is more descriptive and pragmatic instead of flowery and poetic, and, as a reader, I saw a whole different style of writing in this piece that I didn’t enjoy compared to the rest of the book.

In this book, I enjoyed the poetry much more than the stories. The poetry was still riddled with classic Ashbery style, such as his powerful and mysterious couplets that often end a poem, such as “Darlene’s Hospital.” These poems, however, strayed from Ashbery’s earlier collections in that they relied less on the words and images themselves and introduced more of Ashbery’s experiences and life lessons. The poems felt more mature and relatable to my life, and it was a very welcome and interesting shift from reading Some Trees.

[Rue Solomon · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there, and mystery and food.
Come see it. Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other."

"Keep track of us
It gets to be so exciting but so big too
And we have ways to define but not the terms
Yet
We know what is coming, that we are moving
Dangerously and gracefully
Toward the resolution of time
Blurred but alive with many separate meanings
Inside this conversation"

"Until those times when, driving abruptly off a road
Into a field you sit still and conjure the hours."

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

John keeps doing this I’m all fluttering from the collection as a whole & then he sweeps it away with a tidal long poem, here titular, A Wave. Phrasemic challenges throughout, ripe sentences and a lovely sequence of haiku & haibun. Approve of “squirted astrology”

The title poem is an epic I’m barely beginning to piece into. It’s frustrating to come across somebody this consistently massive time is really tidal, lately


A lake of pain, an absence:
Leading to a flowering sea? Give it a quarter-turn
And watch the centuries begin to collapse
Through each other, like floors in a burning building,
Until we get to this afternoon:

Those delicious few words spread around like jam
Don't matter, nor does the shadow.
We have lived blasphemously in history
And nothing has hurt us or can.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a mixed reaction to this collection. On the one hand, there are some fantastic poems among these pages. On the other, I could sense no real unity other than the stylistic qualities that are easily identifiable as Ashbery, and so I would have preferred to read these as part of a larger anthology.

It's tough to say exactly why poetry books like Harmonium can be so moving as a whole, while A Wave fails to impress in the same way. The parts are great in both case, but here the whole feels like less than the sum of the parts, whereas I wouldn't have Harmonium any other way.

Since this review is terribly vague and whiny, I promise to revist A Wave when I become more familiar with Ashbery and a better reader of poetry, but until then this is my response.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

I find "A Wave" difficult to read--out loud. It is jarring, unmelodious, without a metrical sense of rhythm. Much made little sense, in a bad way, without imagery juxtaposing new possibilities of meaning. The first portion of the book is staid. And by staid, I mean boring. The author takes no chances, doesn't seem to try. Later in the book, especially with the title poem, some fine imagery presents itself, some interesting jarring in the writing appears. But audience is ignored, except, probably, the audience of literary scholars, and all those grad students forced to grope through this material and create a meaning out of the thin air between the staccatod words. There is no beauty here.

[Sameen Shakya · Rating 5 out of 5]

American poet, John Ashbery, is one of my favorite poets of the latter half of the 20th century, and if you look at my reviews I've read a lot, A LOT, of his books.

As for this one, I'd describe this as very Ashbery. The last poem was a doozy. Kinda hard to keep track of. As always his shorter lyrics, the ones that pack a punch, are the best. The first two poems in the collection were the finest, in my opinion.

Overall, you can't go wrong with Ashbery and this book is no exception. The last poem though, you need to hold on to your toes for that one.

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't like the prose poems. the 37 Haiku didn't work for me either. Too much randomness. In fact, that's what I'm having a problem with in most of these poems...just random words thrown together does not make a poem. Am I missing something? A few I did like though, particularly in the beginning of the collection.

[Antonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite Ashbery collection (and I've only read a few), but much to return to and reread. As for the long title poem, I sometimes felt I was carried along by the wave, sometimes awash in it, and sometimes smacked by it.

[david · Rating 4 out of 5]

good! seems to rank as one of ashbery's lesser works, but i found it quite humane and satisfyingly relatable; especially in that my only other experience with him was the tennis court oath, which, was decidedly different.

[Jewelz]

Look like a goo dbook to borrow!

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

my friend nico said "ready this" and you know i owe him a thank you!

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

favorite ashbery

[Jared Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?