Like a project of which no one tells - Como un proyecto del que nadie habla

by John Ashbery, Roberto Echavarren (Translator)

Poems deal with transience, memory, manners, music, art, love, reverence, time, dreams, mortality, and the past

Genres: Poetry, Literature, 20th Century, American

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

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

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Ashbery's very best. Plenty of hilarity and thwarted or provisional transcendence. "Baked Alaska" is a particular favorite, but there are plenty of others. For me it belongs on all three shelves at once -- read, to read, currently reading.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t think it had occurred to me why I should read Ashbery through Wallace Stevens before this book. Like poetic history is clear that the two are connected, and I could see the sense to it. But I’d felt Stevens’s poems to use a rhythm of encroachment. His poems were going to encroach on the imagination, open a space where it could appear—because that was the source of his poems. In Ashbery’s work, I alway felt something more kinetic, like a brisk walk, or maybe a flipped version of that. A day’s brisk walk over the poet. Where Stevens feels like looking into a crystal ball, and pulling the fog aside to realize, OMG, the imagination presents itself, Ashbery takes me on an involved textual journey, imagination in tow. Maybe I reconciled poetic history via both poets’ valuing the imaginative work necessary to make a poem. What it feels like to read a poem, to feel it reaching for some understanding. Only to be met with the irony that whatever understanding there might be, it will only be satisfied in fleeting moments.

Hotel Lautréamont has changed my sense of the Ashbery-Stevens connection. Because in this book, whatever the relationship Ashbery draws between poetic impulse and imagination, it’s not operating in a kinetic fashion. The poem isn’t carrying his imagination through the motions of a day, as I would say Ashbery often prefers. The poems in this book feel more static, or they’ve staked their poetic impulse to the ground. In anticipation that that ground will disintegrate from around the stake. There’s still that precious and tender feeling Ashbery brings to any moment. It just doesn’t feel to me that the imagination is a consistency, or an object that just occupies the poet’s body, as in other books. Like in *Hotel Lautréamont* a poem can center around a memory that’s from some past time, when the poet had felt poetic (he was on his way to a lover’s house, for instance), but then the world distracted him from those memories. Maybe a new season arrived, perhaps. Or the weather shifted. And it’s not clear whether those distractions should be part of the poetry, or if they cloud the poetry. Or, then, there are the poems that know exactly when or where that imaginative moment existed, like in “American Bar.” And all the history piling on top confuses the poet about what to do. Are the facts or circumstances interacting with the poetic impulse by proximity? Or are they disbursing the poetic feeling?

For me, this book presents a more confusing version of Ashbery. Or it’s like Ashbery wants you to combine a lava lamp with a villanelle. Where Ashbery will propose some imaginative twist on a present circumstance in the space of a single line, but by the next line it’s morphed into a different shape. It’s just different from other books by Ashbery, where I’ve relied on the sentences to guide me through the poem. In Hotel Lautréamont the sentences are rhetorical decoys. This book, however, commits more to the line, like how a villanelle would. But not in the conventional sense of a villanelle. Usually, a villanelle would hinge on the surprising coincidence of repeating lines, where the repetition doesn’t just content itself to say the same thing. Instead, it advances a new position using the same words. And with especially clever villanelles, there’s the added layer of the sentence, with repetition contouring those sentences.

I would argue Ashbery has a long history of subverting the villanelle’s coincidence of sentence and repetition. Pantoums and villanelles appear often in his work. And they register a minimized commitment to the sentence. I mean, the sentences are there. But they’re often drifting along. Like bad AI stringing words together. These poems feel more like an account of any given circumstance, a blur of their imaginative potential, and whatever the poetry that can be gleaned from that. They appear more frequently in Hotel Lautréamont. Like in “The Youth’s Magic Horn,” the repetition can be intensified. And given this frequency I’m inclined to frame it as a commentary on systems, and maybe the systems are accounting for the existence of poetry, then shifting their structure to accommodate it, at least from the poet’s perspective. A poem that seems to address this most directly is “Central Air.”

[Eric Cartier · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first encounter with Ashbery. At least 15 of these poems seemed perfection, while brilliant lines littered throughout others also stirred me. I wish I had read them all aloud, like I did the last quarter of the collection: there are two (or more) voices in some poems, which make for amusing and/or unsettling moments, all interesting to activate. There are also extraordinary and unexpected word choices and phrases that take sound measure of your breath and tongue while conjuring images in your mind. Fundamentally, the range of emotions Ashbery summons, sometimes within a single poem, made me marvel, and that might be what I remember most about reading this book these past two weeks. I'm delighted there's so much more of his work to explore.

[Dušan Šutarík · Rating 5 out of 5]

Veľmi hutná a nasýtená zbierka. Obsahuje relatívne dlhé básne a zaujme aj svojou rozsiahlosťou. Aj vďaka tomu som sa ňou prehrýzal celkom dlho, ale myslím, že to bolo ku prospechu veci. Táto poézia si vyžaduje trochu trpezlivejšie čítanie. V zásade je to typický Ashbery, čo ale rozhodne nemyslím ako výhradu. Opäť ma totiž svojou imagináciou dokázal uchvátiť ako žiadny iný básnik.

[Marc Jacobs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ashbery can be impenetrable for readers who ask, "What does this poem mean?" These poems are resistant to overarching narrative, setting, and character, even though little plots and various voices weave in and out. They are like eavesdropping on passersby on a crowded street corner or in a hotel lobby bar -- snippets of conversation, all overheard and out-of-context. From the observer's point of view, they are all imbued with zeitgeist but distorted by Doppler. These are poems to be listened to, not parsed. It's music performed with dialogue.

I have loved this book for many years, since it was originally published. I'd suggest reading it like playing on old vinyl LP. Just listen.

[A L]

This collection felt massive somehow, loved the title poem, "Korean Soap Opera," "A Sedentary Existence," and "How to Continue."

[Mariana Orantes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me gusta mucho Ashbery. La primera vez que lo leí fue en una antología y me impactó su manera de escribir versos tan largos y pasar de una cosa a otra con un extraño ritmo que recuerda más un ensayo que un poema. Sin embargo, al final del poema siempre hay un detalle, una vuelta, que lo regresa y convierte de forma extraordinaria. Este libro lo encontré en la colección de Los Bífidos de El Tucán de Virginia (una de mis editoriales más queridas porque ahí -y sólo ahí- tienen a muchos de mis poetas más queridos)en fin que lo compré junto con uno de Dana Gioia que leeré próximamente. El libro es bonito y el papel extraordinario, pero no puedo decir lo mismo de la traducción. Si bien Ashbery es difícil de traducir por su aparente lenguaje simple, es muy complejo en sus construcciones conceptuales y creo que si el traductor no comprende de qué manera funciona lo que Ashbery expone al parecer de forma dispersa, corre el riesgo de que, igualmente, se vea disperso y Ashbery NO lo es. Tiene una construcción más parecida a la música. Recuerda a los Cuatro cuartetos de Elliot (aunque de forma modesta) por la construcción de ritmo que es semejante. Pero si, no le perdono al traductor que el último poema, un poema largo que se titula Como una ola, lo haya hecho insufrible a tal grado que parece que se inventa versos. Con decir que mientras Ashbery ya había terminado el poema, la traducción seguía por tres páginas más. Sólo hay un término para eso: WORDY. La ventaja es que la edición es bilingüe y con este traductor se agradece.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

i can come back to this again and again and always find something new.

[Bill]

4

[Greg Converse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here is another great poet that I don't understand. Jackson Pollock was good for about two years, but can you imagine him with a 50-year career? Maybe I should go to college, or Paris, or Hell.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a more "accesible ashbery" yet still magnificent!