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Collected Poems 1991–2000: Flow Chart / Hotel Lautréamont / And the Stars Were Shining / Can You Hear, Bird / Wakefulness / Girls on the Run / Your Name Here / Uncollected Poems
After receiving wide acclaim and numerous awards during the early and middle years of his career, John Ashbery continued to strike out in new directions in the 1990s, writing in a style at once playful and cerebral, relaxed and precise, dreamlike in its imagery and associations yet exquisitely attuned to mundane reality. Here in one authoritative annotated volume are seven complete collections from this crucial period in which he solidified his standing among the greatest of American poets.
The volume begins with the landmark book-length poem Flow Chart (1991), a stunning tour de force that reveals Ashbery’s mastery of “the entire orchestral potential of the English language,” as Helen Vendler writes. Weaving a spell through its long lines, which unfold in mesmerizing and surprising ways, Flow Chart offers an account of the poet’s mind that complements Ashbery’s earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror but also provides a vision of the collective “dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.” As Benjamin Kunkel observes, “Anyone who cares about what’s going on in American literature must sit down . . . and read the poem through.” Prepared in consultation with the author, this edition restores a missing page—thirty-eight lines in all—inadvertently dropped during the revision process of the poem for its first publication.
Ashbery’s poems from the 1990s range brilliantly across his varied interests and obsessions—opera, film noir, French poetry, and the visual arts, most notably the work of the outsider artist Henry Darger, the point of departure for the book-length poem Girls on the Run (1999). In evidence at every turn are Ashbery’s seemingly boundless inventiveness, a pitch-perfect ear for American speech, and an exuberant erudition that transports the reader to unexpected places.
Rounding out the volume is a selection of twenty-six uncollected poems, among them “Hoboken,” a collage poem that mischievously pillages Roget’s Thesaurus, “The Hailstorm in Belgrade, May 24th 1937,” inspired by a remote memory of a Life magazine article Ashbery read as a nine-year-old, and “Victrola floribunda,” first published opposite a reproduction of a painting of an imaginary flower by the artist Dorothea Tanning, for which it provided the name.
The volume begins with the landmark book-length poem Flow Chart (1991), a stunning tour de force that reveals Ashbery’s mastery of “the entire orchestral potential of the English language,” as Helen Vendler writes. Weaving a spell through its long lines, which unfold in mesmerizing and surprising ways, Flow Chart offers an account of the poet’s mind that complements Ashbery’s earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror but also provides a vision of the collective “dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.” As Benjamin Kunkel observes, “Anyone who cares about what’s going on in American literature must sit down . . . and read the poem through.” Prepared in consultation with the author, this edition restores a missing page—thirty-eight lines in all—inadvertently dropped during the revision process of the poem for its first publication.
Ashbery’s poems from the 1990s range brilliantly across his varied interests and obsessions—opera, film noir, French poetry, and the visual arts, most notably the work of the outsider artist Henry Darger, the point of departure for the book-length poem Girls on the Run (1999). In evidence at every turn are Ashbery’s seemingly boundless inventiveness, a pitch-perfect ear for American speech, and an exuberant erudition that transports the reader to unexpected places.
Rounding out the volume is a selection of twenty-six uncollected poems, among them “Hoboken,” a collage poem that mischievously pillages Roget’s Thesaurus, “The Hailstorm in Belgrade, May 24th 1937,” inspired by a remote memory of a Life magazine article Ashbery read as a nine-year-old, and “Victrola floribunda,” first published opposite a reproduction of a painting of an imaginary flower by the artist Dorothea Tanning, for which it provided the name.
- GenresPoetry
800 pages, Hardcover
Published September 6, 2017
9 people are currently reading
105 people want to read
About the author
John Ashbery
290 books480 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 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 21, 2022
Myrtle
from "And The Stars Were Shining" (1994)
How funny your name would be
if you could follow it back to where
the first person thought of saying it,
naming himself that, or maybe
some other persons thought of it
and named that person. It would
be like following a river to its source,
which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please, and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at long last to impersonate that river,
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here.
Won’t delve in too deep, as writing critically about a figure as monolithic as Ashbery still feels too much like facing down Giannis in the post to be enticing. But I must say that it is difficult to recall any post-war writer who is able to so effectively evoke the shrouds and ruptures of distraction and fancy that colour the process of the human mind consciously thinking in time. 'Flow Chart' and its intimately heroic breadth emerges as somewhat reflective of the tone and mystery of the collection as a whole. Was really taken by how its epic length gradually ceded a growing degree of drift and ellipsis in the sentences, so that any desire for a destination became somewhat of a pillowy irrelevance.
If this doesn’t sound like your bag then I doubt that any more selling will win you over. But the most bracing poems in this collection consistently provide a heady pleasure in finding yourself lost that no other contemporary writer has quite approximated since. Whilst sometimes frustrating and vagarious, the journey is to some degree akin to being blasted off your feet by a deluge of floodwater whilst standing in your bedroom, and to find, after picking yourself up, that long unseen tokens of the banal and the intimate have been upturned and pooled together for your reinvigorated contemplation.
from "And The Stars Were Shining" (1994)
How funny your name would be
if you could follow it back to where
the first person thought of saying it,
naming himself that, or maybe
some other persons thought of it
and named that person. It would
be like following a river to its source,
which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please, and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at long last to impersonate that river,
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here.
Won’t delve in too deep, as writing critically about a figure as monolithic as Ashbery still feels too much like facing down Giannis in the post to be enticing. But I must say that it is difficult to recall any post-war writer who is able to so effectively evoke the shrouds and ruptures of distraction and fancy that colour the process of the human mind consciously thinking in time. 'Flow Chart' and its intimately heroic breadth emerges as somewhat reflective of the tone and mystery of the collection as a whole. Was really taken by how its epic length gradually ceded a growing degree of drift and ellipsis in the sentences, so that any desire for a destination became somewhat of a pillowy irrelevance.
If this doesn’t sound like your bag then I doubt that any more selling will win you over. But the most bracing poems in this collection consistently provide a heady pleasure in finding yourself lost that no other contemporary writer has quite approximated since. Whilst sometimes frustrating and vagarious, the journey is to some degree akin to being blasted off your feet by a deluge of floodwater whilst standing in your bedroom, and to find, after picking yourself up, that long unseen tokens of the banal and the intimate have been upturned and pooled together for your reinvigorated contemplation.
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November 3, 2017811.54 A819c 2017
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews