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Commotion of the Birds: New Poems – Contemporary American Poetry Exploring Modern Life with Wry Humor and Insight
A crackling, moving new collection from one of America’s greatest living poets. In over twenty-six original books, the poems of John Ashbery have long served as signposts guiding us through the delights, woes, hypocrisies, and uncertainties of living in the modern world. With language harvested from everyday speech, fragments of pop culture, objects and figures borrowed from art and literature, his work makes light out of darkness, playing with tone and style to show how even the seemingly frivolous stuff of existence can be employed to express the deepest levels of feeling. Commotion of the Birds showcases once again Ashbery’s mastery of a staggering range of voices and his singular lyric wry, frank, contemplative, resigned, bemused, and ecstatic. The poet in this new collection is at once removed from and immersed in the terrain of his examination. Disarmingly conversational, he invites the reader to join him in looking out onto the future with humor, curiosity, and insight. The lines of these poems achieve a low-humming, thrilling point of vibration, a jostling of feathers before flight.
112 pages, Hardcover
Published November 1, 2016
31 people are currently reading
119 people want to read
About the author
John Ashbery
290 books479 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 25, 2016Yesterday, I walk into one of the two non-chain stores where you're likely to find poetry in Windsor, to discover, on their shelves, three or four hard copies of Ashbery's latest collection of poems that Goodreads says HarperCollins published this November - "the American century" push into wilder markets still carrying Ashbery forward, while other US poets, who've had greater influence on Windsorites I believe, such as Ron Silliman, are nowhere to be seen (forget about Canadian ones). "To them he was a special case, something to take home and place on the library mantel, and talk about," as one poem, "Die Meistersinger," says. This has been Ashbery's bane and blessing. Whoever "them" is. Them is me too.
Just now, I watched a youtube clip of Ashbery receiving a 2012 Humanities Award from President Obama, in the east wing of the White House, along with Charles Rosen and others; from the look, the handshake, the body language, I couldn't tell how familiar Obama was with Ashbery's work. Audience clapping sounded a little more perfunctory and more hollow than it did for Al Pacino (his was accompanied by the force of hoots and cheers); but is that perhaps not a deep tribute to Ashbery's skills at evoking just the surfaces of speech and custom? That's what actors do.
"My gosh! The President of the United States!
Years and years went by like that.
It was impossible to keep track of them.
I'm all about truth, and meaning. In the end
they said they were delighted with what they found."
I reflected a moment on the title's definite article, Commotion of the Birds, and on how another writer may have placed it elsewhere, or else placed several of them. Then wondered how successful would I be at explaining those crucial distinctions.
Sums up what's great about the book for me, these two lines - "Leave it that way, imperfect start beyond / where I was going." - when taken as reflexive principle of his writing practice and attitude. Example: "My favorite big slum was the matter / if you need to be."
Before today's "constraint," yesterday's "procedure," and the bygone "material word," perhaps one of the more mine-ful words referencing poetic practice was Duncanian "permission." I often feel like asking that as a question of Ashbery's lines. Ashbery's poetics predate that word by decades. "Stay preconscious." And ask it in this way: How does the permission work, for example to allow the word "history" in the lines
"Or for the man who listens to it,
an abrupt yawn, history or the other."
Is "it" a cataphoric pronoun there? In the early 2000s, I would feel something like the equivalent of "an abrupt yawn" of I guess it was awkward nervous energy (energy directed at myself) just before I would feel compelled to invoke "capitalism" as the totality of what we were living through, as if that word somehow "helped" understanding. So, "history."
Sartre 1943: that there is no longer a philosophical need for dualism between interior and exterior. Translate that to poetry and to Ashbery. His language is linguistic pragmatics in tatters, mashed, patched. Some of the syntax is broken in a way i don't recall reading since The Tennis Court Oath. Expression always already mediated by its convention, and every convention by context of its use. How do you use that phrase? Then, bump that phrase up against another. And how do you use that one? But, they don't "add up." They join with a rhythmical sense: "Sorry about the vegetables. Stones'll be pretty with that." It's important the language is heard language. "You will not have heard that," a quatrain-length poem starts, which is hard not to take as a reference to the idiomatic twist given its title, "Who Will Do the Kissing?" Kiss the bird before you carve it? What a commotion! Rhythmical sense includes sound-echoes, and these ones aren't placed in a way to draw that much of your attention to, but they are pleasing: the stuttering echo of the sounds of "sorry" in "Stones'll be pretty...."
Fan of these (not a couplet, by the way):
"Somebody sends you a bill.
At first you want to laugh."
You come home from the hospital, and a week later, you get a bill for your pains. At first you want to laugh....
Just now, I watched a youtube clip of Ashbery receiving a 2012 Humanities Award from President Obama, in the east wing of the White House, along with Charles Rosen and others; from the look, the handshake, the body language, I couldn't tell how familiar Obama was with Ashbery's work. Audience clapping sounded a little more perfunctory and more hollow than it did for Al Pacino (his was accompanied by the force of hoots and cheers); but is that perhaps not a deep tribute to Ashbery's skills at evoking just the surfaces of speech and custom? That's what actors do.
"My gosh! The President of the United States!
Years and years went by like that.
It was impossible to keep track of them.
I'm all about truth, and meaning. In the end
they said they were delighted with what they found."
I reflected a moment on the title's definite article, Commotion of the Birds, and on how another writer may have placed it elsewhere, or else placed several of them. Then wondered how successful would I be at explaining those crucial distinctions.
Sums up what's great about the book for me, these two lines - "Leave it that way, imperfect start beyond / where I was going." - when taken as reflexive principle of his writing practice and attitude. Example: "My favorite big slum was the matter / if you need to be."
Before today's "constraint," yesterday's "procedure," and the bygone "material word," perhaps one of the more mine-ful words referencing poetic practice was Duncanian "permission." I often feel like asking that as a question of Ashbery's lines. Ashbery's poetics predate that word by decades. "Stay preconscious." And ask it in this way: How does the permission work, for example to allow the word "history" in the lines
"Or for the man who listens to it,
an abrupt yawn, history or the other."
Is "it" a cataphoric pronoun there? In the early 2000s, I would feel something like the equivalent of "an abrupt yawn" of I guess it was awkward nervous energy (energy directed at myself) just before I would feel compelled to invoke "capitalism" as the totality of what we were living through, as if that word somehow "helped" understanding. So, "history."
Sartre 1943: that there is no longer a philosophical need for dualism between interior and exterior. Translate that to poetry and to Ashbery. His language is linguistic pragmatics in tatters, mashed, patched. Some of the syntax is broken in a way i don't recall reading since The Tennis Court Oath. Expression always already mediated by its convention, and every convention by context of its use. How do you use that phrase? Then, bump that phrase up against another. And how do you use that one? But, they don't "add up." They join with a rhythmical sense: "Sorry about the vegetables. Stones'll be pretty with that." It's important the language is heard language. "You will not have heard that," a quatrain-length poem starts, which is hard not to take as a reference to the idiomatic twist given its title, "Who Will Do the Kissing?" Kiss the bird before you carve it? What a commotion! Rhythmical sense includes sound-echoes, and these ones aren't placed in a way to draw that much of your attention to, but they are pleasing: the stuttering echo of the sounds of "sorry" in "Stones'll be pretty...."
Fan of these (not a couplet, by the way):
"Somebody sends you a bill.
At first you want to laugh."
You come home from the hospital, and a week later, you get a bill for your pains. At first you want to laugh....
September 18, 2017
The older I get, the more removed I become from popular life. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t need to know those popular reference points as I move out into my advanced years. The only trouble is as I lose my orientation, the only loadstar to follow is death. But ain’t it always the case.
COMMOTION OF THE BIRDS is the last book of poetry published by John Ashbery, who died recently. He was no spring chicken, but his poems are like dragging chicken wire over the culture landscape and watching him pick through what gets caught. He places those remnants like a collagist over the page and creates an obscure yet not impenetrable object.
Like most poetry and nearly everything I read, my experience is experiential if I’m being generous and superficial, if I’m more honest. But you got to start somewhere. For me, it’s at the end. That’s how I read magazines — back to front — and that’s how I'm going to begin my relationship with Ashbery, backwards.
It’s like a friend who read the great two-volume biography of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick, starting with book two, so he could watch the Fat Elvis turn into the hungry young pup. Now I’ll understand the references of life, pop and otherwise, stuck to the poetry of Ashbery as I grow older and he gets younger.
COMMOTION OF THE BIRDS is the last book of poetry published by John Ashbery, who died recently. He was no spring chicken, but his poems are like dragging chicken wire over the culture landscape and watching him pick through what gets caught. He places those remnants like a collagist over the page and creates an obscure yet not impenetrable object.
Like most poetry and nearly everything I read, my experience is experiential if I’m being generous and superficial, if I’m more honest. But you got to start somewhere. For me, it’s at the end. That’s how I read magazines — back to front — and that’s how I'm going to begin my relationship with Ashbery, backwards.
It’s like a friend who read the great two-volume biography of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick, starting with book two, so he could watch the Fat Elvis turn into the hungry young pup. Now I’ll understand the references of life, pop and otherwise, stuck to the poetry of Ashbery as I grow older and he gets younger.
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September 2, 2025"It’s good to be modern if you can stand it.
It’s like being left out in the rain, and coming
to understand that you were always this way: modern,
wet, abandoned, though with that special intuition
that makes you realize you weren’t meant to be
somebody else, for whom the makers
of modernism will stand inspection
even as they wither and fade in today’s glare."
ainda pensando sobre esse.
It’s like being left out in the rain, and coming
to understand that you were always this way: modern,
wet, abandoned, though with that special intuition
that makes you realize you weren’t meant to be
somebody else, for whom the makers
of modernism will stand inspection
even as they wither and fade in today’s glare."
ainda pensando sobre esse.
October 1, 2020
I totally did not understand a single poem. Looking at reviews of this collection, I am not alone. Yet I found the poems surprisingly easy to read and they let my brain just escape a bit. It's exactly what I needed to push the reset button after finishing a rich and satisfying novel when I wasn't quite ready to plunge into a new title.
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August 4, 2022loved !!
January 18, 2018
99% of the time, poetry is not for me. I’ve liked a few works but usually I strongly dislike it. Interestingly, I didn’t understand any of this but still found it surprisingly fun to read. Sometimes for two or three lines I’d think I knew what was going on and what it all might be about and then the next line would read like complete nonsense, just not in an unenjoyable way. I remember in high school we had a project where we had to write different kinds of poems and one I did by taking a sentence or sentence fragment from each commercial I watched during a TV movie and letting those disjointed lines make up the poem. To me, these poems felt that random and unconnected, though I’m sure the poet put more thought into his construction and meaning, it just sailed right over my head.
April 6, 2020
That was the strangest book I've read in a long time. No, probably ever. I think I liked it but I'm not sure. I'd really recommend this book to someone with a very open mind, isn't "results oriented" in their reading, and also someone who can appreciate words and sounds creating a very three dimensional experience, in the way that he reconstructs that feeling of the mind thinking, listening to other conversations, and a sense of feeling all at once without making much sense.
January 19, 2018
Pretty funny poetry. It's like Tender Buttons marketed for a throw-back 80's crowd. I mean, you really only need to read a few poems to get the idea, but any of 'em can be a real riot. I like how much is performed with nothing being said. I dunno. Worth delving into if you like Dada of the new millenium.
August 16, 2018
Commotion of the Birds was an enjoyable and good collection of poems. I really liked Ashbery's poetic energy and his vibrant postmodern allusiveness and play--like in "Land Mass" where we get the stanza
As a result, I'm not sure what my favorite pieces were although I liked "The Gay Philosopher", "Prayer not to Touch", "Featurette" and "Yclept" and broadly speaking tended to like the poems that seemed to touch on queer themes--like "Beleagured". Likely not a masterwork, but certainly a collection worth reading and worth keeping around.
the indifferent breathI thought this was funny and many of the poems had similar funny and intelligent moments. The poems engaged in intriguing and engaging slippage: "Why would she have said that, / an undeserving egg, not to die for? / Rainbow pencils retracted" ("Cartoon Music") or "The girl in the green ski chasuble / hasn't yet graduated from radio school" ("Late-ish"). The reason this collection didn't garner five stars is that it was strangely unmemorable. While I liked each poem as I read it--and I suspect that I could pick a poem almost at random and find it a productive exercise to close read--they didn't stick. I often found myself staring at a poem unsure of whether or not I had read it already because neither the title nor the beginning of the poem impressed itself on my memory strongly enough to tell if I had encountered this piece before.
late every second of every day . . .
Kids, this is Moloch. He'll be taking over in study hall. I don't know what this is.
Stop milking his act.
As a result, I'm not sure what my favorite pieces were although I liked "The Gay Philosopher", "Prayer not to Touch", "Featurette" and "Yclept" and broadly speaking tended to like the poems that seemed to touch on queer themes--like "Beleagured". Likely not a masterwork, but certainly a collection worth reading and worth keeping around.
March 16, 2017
I'm not sure what Ashbury is trying to say in these poems, but I like the way he says it. He was born in 1927 and this is his 27th collection of poems. I quote the following paragraph from the book's jacket.
"For more than sixty years, the poems of John Ashbury have served as signposts guiding us through the delights, woes, hypocrisies, and uncertainties of living in the modern world. With language harvested from everyday speech, fragments of pop culture, and objects and figures borrowed from art and literature, his work makes light out of darkness, playing with tone and style to show how even the seemingly frivolous stuff of existence can be employed to express the deepest levels of feelings."
"For more than sixty years, the poems of John Ashbury have served as signposts guiding us through the delights, woes, hypocrisies, and uncertainties of living in the modern world. With language harvested from everyday speech, fragments of pop culture, and objects and figures borrowed from art and literature, his work makes light out of darkness, playing with tone and style to show how even the seemingly frivolous stuff of existence can be employed to express the deepest levels of feelings."
October 18, 2017
Ashbery's last collection -- evocative and oddly prescient. And of course a bit difficult.
December 22, 2022
I’ve been reading in this book little by little for months, partially because it requires a particular amount of focus to penetrate. In other words, I felt I could only absorb the writing under refined circumstances. Like most Ashbery, there are moments of “What are you saying to me right now,” but, also like most Ashbery, they aren’t bothersome in their obscurity (though the difficult to understand syntax could at times be the reason for my difficulty focusing). Ultimately, some poems will/are now on my favorites list, but others I will need to return to in order to process them in any real way. A dog is incessantly barking in the apartment as I finished this book, and I had to frequently pause for lengths of time until some silence occurred. When it finally did, the poetry consumed me completely.
December 2, 2021
This sometimes had really brilliant phrases. But that's meaningless when the poems overall have no meaning. I love poetry that is filled with metaphor and allusions and sometimes edge on making no sense. But what I love about that kind of poetry is that it tends to inspire a feeling. Of wonder, of sadness, of terror, or anger or grief. Some sort of emotion makes it through the purple-prose descriptions and nonsensical words. These poems don't inspire any emotion in me. I'm so completely confused, I can't settle on any thought or idea behind the poem. I feel just a empty sort of nothingness.
October 17, 2017
These poems may well be very good. I’m not sure I understand much of them. Phrases, images, remind one of life - and then the words will cluster into sounds whose meaning eluded me. I was unsure, as this is the first collection of Ashbery’s poems I’ve ever read, was the strangeness a style refined over decades or a mind slipping away?
September 20, 2020
Love Ashbery, and loved reading this, even when there were nearly a hundred pages between my first endorphin-ping of love, the title poem's "Often it's a question of seeming rather than being modern," that oddly enough tropes the last ping, in "Evening and Elsewhere," "They threw the book at him | under the bus."
August 16, 2021
Not my favorite of Ashbery's books, most of the pieces seem somewhat disjointed. Of course some lines live at that intersection between smart and lovely that I particularly enjoy from Ashbery, but I hoped for more momentum.
May 7, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This collection was a beautiful and moving experience, filled with heartfelt verses that resonated deeply. Each poem felt like a glimpse into something raw and true, making it a joy to read and reflect on!
This collection was a beautiful and moving experience, filled with heartfelt verses that resonated deeply. Each poem felt like a glimpse into something raw and true, making it a joy to read and reflect on!
November 7, 2017
Commotion of the Birds is a pretty excellent late addition to Ashbery's bibliography, a marked improvement over the last couple collections he's published. Farewell!
December 12, 2019
Funny, quirky, moving, and enigmatic, but more accessible than Three Poems. This is Ashbery's last poetry collection, published in 2016 when he was 89. He died the following year.
November 21, 2020
Just not my style
March 19, 2023
Late Ashbery heavy on whimsy with a few vague nods towards “the times” (this collection was ~2016 after all). But even in the weakest Ashbery poem there’s flashes of brilliance
July 1, 2025
Not for me.
July 29, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
January 31, 2017
The Upright Piano is great. The Commotion of the Birds is great. Give the rest 5 stars if you love Ashbery.
April 27, 2017
". . . it's velveteen, silly!" (She is now dis-arming her sways and preening. Who knew that underwear could be so dangerous? so nubian. and so slippery.)
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews