Collected Poems 1956-1987

by John Ashbery, Mark Ford (Editor)

Rooted in various kinds of irritation, each poem in this volume takes a glimpse of something that is hard to pin down—feelings, memories, landscapes—and that continually demands to be examined, explored, celebrated, or questioned. The long-form poem "Scherzo Fantastique" is light and teasing in its tone while meditating on a stage actor’s craft. Additionally, a sequence of monologues in the voice of the wives of some of the great composers—along with elegies, reflections on art, intimate domestic lyrics, jokes, and love poems—all display a technical expertise. Delighting in the moment, each poem's mixture of rhythm, imagery, and structure once again affirms the power of poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Literature, 20th Century, American, The United States Of America, Queer

1059 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2008

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

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Ashbery In The Library Of America

John Ashbery (b. 1927) has achieved a unique status among American poets. Even though much of his work is difficult to read, avant-garde, and post-modernist in character, Ashbery has become revered and beloved by many readers. For all the obscurity of his writing, his poetry is tantalizing and inspiring. It properly draws many people into its orbit. Even those who dislike Ashbery's poetry acknowledge its force and importance.

Ashbery's stature is demonstrated by, among many other ways, this volume of his Collected Poems from 1956 -- 1987 in the Library of America (LOA) series. Ashbery is the first living poet to be honored with a complete volume in the LOA. A second projected LOA volume will cover Ashbery's poetry subsequent to 1987. The Library of America was founded in 1979 to preserve the best of American writing in uniform, accessible editions. It is a series that celebrates America in poetry, history, fiction, philosophy, travel writing, journalism, and more. Ashbery richly deserves his place in it. Ashbery was born in 1927 and was raised in upstate New York. He attended Harvard and Columbia and lived for ten years (1955 -- 1965) in Paris.

This volume consists of over 450 poems. It includes the twelve books Ashbery published between 1956 ("Some Trees") and 1987 ("April Galleons") together with over 60 uncollected poems. Ashbery's first book, "Some Trees" received the Yale Younger Poets Prize. It was romantic in character and made much more use of formal verse forms than did his subsequent work. For example, an excellent early poem in the volume, "The Painter" is written in the highly traditional and formal poetic form called a sestina. (A sestina consists of six six-line stanzas and one three-line stanza with a strict structure in the words which end the lines in each stanza.)

Beyond the first book, Ashbery's work is varied and difficult. It is rarely metered or rhymed. The poems tend to be meditative, in the form of the writer conversing with himself. The poems are seemingly disjointed, with abrupt changes in persons, tenses, and with sometimes startling, incongruous figures. The language passes back and forth from beautiful and original, to colloquial, with frequent cliched or commonplace figures thrown in for effect. Most of the poems resist paraphrase. The poetry explores serious themes, such as love, sexuality, death, the nature of writing, the beauty and variety of the physical world around us, place, childhood. The poems allude freely to art, music, history and literature. For all their modernity, there is a sense of nostalgia in many poems. Inevitably the reader will encounter frustration with this volume. In part, I think Ashbery's goal is to help the reader see things in a new, direct way without the intermediary of stereotypes. The poems are serious, but Ashbery wants to show that seriousness includes playfulness and sometimes whimsy. The poems need to be read both carefully but lightly, to allow the images and lines flow over the reader. When some of the poems appear opaque or even uninteresting -- as many of them will -- the best thing to do is to avoid straining over them and to pass on. This is a long, chronological volume, and there is something to be said from reading it from cover to cover. But it is best read slowly and in small doses.

The central collection in the book "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" is a good place to start as an alternative to reading the book through. This collection won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976, an astonishing achievement. The long title poem consists of Ashbery's reflections on a painting of that name by the Renaissance painter Parmigianino (c. 1524) which in an art museum in Vienna. This celebrated long poem tends, surprisingly, to be more accessible on first blush than does much of Ashbery. The following collection of poems "Houseboat Days" (1977) is almost equally as well-known and is a good way to continue exploring Ashbery's poetry.

The most difficult poems in the book are in an early volume called "The Tennis Court Oath" (1962) which was largely written during Ashbery's stay in Paris. The work is written in a collage style in which sections from different sources are sometimes pasted together in a manner similar to that used by the beat writer William S. Burroughs who also was living in Paris at the time. Subsequent to this collection, Ashbery began the process of modifying the difficulties of his work, a process than has continued through his long career.

My favorite collections in this volume were "Three Poems" (1972) and "The Vermont Notebook" (1975). The former work consists of three lengthy and highly intense prose poems called "The New Spirit", "Theme" and "Recital" to Ashbery's companion, David. The latter book, published in the same year as "Self-Portrait" is a fond look at life in Vermont accompanied by drawings by Joe Brainard. Both these collections will reward reading.

The collections published after "Houseboat Days" tend to be more mixed and laid-back in character than the earlier volumes. A poem called "The Songs we Know Best" in the collection "A Wave" (1984) derives from the poet's repeated hearings of a rock song called "Reunited" which he disliked but couldn't get out of his head. This poem is written in rhyme and meter, unlike most of its companions. Among the many poems in the latter volumes, "Alone in the Lumber Business" , Ashbery's use of Japanese forms in "37 Haikus" and the "Haibuns", and the prose poem "Description of a Masque" seem to warrant mention in this brief overview. The long poem "The Skaters" from the "Rivers and Mountains" collection (1966) is difficult but also is worth singling out for attention.

In an interview he gave to LOA upon publication of the volume, Ashbery mentioned his own little-known favorites from his poems: "He" (from Some Trees); "Idaho" (The Tennis Court Oath); Eclogue(Some Trees); "Rain" (The Tennis Court Oath);"The Chateau Hardware" (The Double Dream of Spring); "Description of a Masque" (A Wave), "Alone in the Lumber Business" (April Galleons) and "The Young Prince and the Young Princess" (uncollected). Ashbery also expresses his fondness for the long poem "Clepsydra" in the "Rivers and Mountains" collection. Readers wishing to browse may wish to look at these selected poems in addition to the poems in "Self-Portrait" and "Houseboat Days".

This is a volume to be read slowly and lightly and over time. A key is to avoid getting angry with oneself or with Ashbery for the many things in this book that will appear almost unintelligible. I am grateful to the Library of America for making this volume available to many readers. I look forward to the second LOA volume of John Ashbery's poetry.

Robin Friedman

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fed by our dreams, so inconsequential until one day
We notice the hole they left. Now their importance
If not their meaning is plain. They were to nourish
A dream which includes them all, as they are
Finally reversed in the accumulating mirror.
They seemed strange because we couldn’t actually see them.
And we realize this only at a point where they lapse
Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up
Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape.
The forms retain a strong measure of ideal beauty
As they forage in secret on our idea of distortion.
Why be unhappy with this arrangement, since
Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed?
Something like living occurs, a movement
Out of the dream into its codification.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

this is just signifying I've read the Uncollected poems in the back of this at ~100 pages but also! Every one of the collections in here!! Amazing I'm very pleased. He's an icon he's still changing the ways the avant-garde avants. gorgeous work JA

Also the uncollecteds are brilliant! Unironically some of his most exciting work is here as he tries to form a picture of the collections broadly.
The first poem in the uncollected, written in 1945 when John was 18!!-

Seasonal

Though we seek always the known absolute
Of all our days together, love will not occur
For us. Love is a fact
Beyond the witches' wood of facts that is
Our sorcery's domain. And though we may
Charm lion into squirrel, push back the sea,
Love is made outlaw, set beyond all art,
The ultimate error of our reasoning.

But when I see you walking or catch your face
Edged with season's most erratic leaves
Love grows superfluous, and I look at you
As I would look at flowers. Our only need:
The sympathy of darkness for the seed.

[Dean Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frankly, John Ashbery could write about draining a gutter and I would be all ears.

[Elizabeth Pyjov]

THOUGHTS
I’ll try to get through this book.

I’ll write down here the poems I did like, more than others.

I don’t connect to John Ashbery per se but I feel like I need to read him. He gives me a different sense of language. We don’t resonate so he gives me a different set of language, puts me in a different frame that’s unexpected for me.




I like abstract idea of language
It’s relaxing in a way - like a whole different other environment is, if you have no points of reference to it and you could just be and feel through it and be there relaxed although estranged. It’s a nice way to read a poem. It’s where John Ashbery places me. But the more times I read the poem the more I feel like what is that, what is this language; why do I need it; why do I feel like I do in that thingy way where I just know it. Where will this take me, what will I feel, how will it complicate?
And ideas about John Ashbery that I come upon.

No beginnings. No end. Just this.
Ashbery wrote in another poem for Conjunctions, a publication out of Bard College, “To have been loved once by someone – surely there is a permanent good in that.” Maybe above all else, he was a romantic, in love with life.


We spoke of how he discovered poetry and what had drawn him to translate Rimbaud’s Illuminations.
He said, “You have to see the poetry as well as hear it; even the shapes of the letters have something to do with it.” And after reading aloud some of his own translations, he modestly commented: “I wish I could be as sure of my own poetry as I am of these translations.”
This was someone whom most of the literary minded world believed to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, and he too remained unsure. How wondrously brilliant, to be both unsure and brave, to create work that allows for the incessant contradictions of life and all that it beholds and to remind the reader, in the way in which you write, to not try to figure it all out, it’s life, moment by moment, experience by experience. It’s just life, it’s just poetry, everything and nothing.


Indeed, what sets Ashbery apart is his gentleness, almost bashfulness, about all of this searching: Flow Chart is awash in questions, two of which just as an example are a huge description of the speaker reading a magazine when a sandstorm blows up (“…how did I know it was zeroing to this ungainly end, not see any danger signs, not shut off the hose?”) followed by: “Is it that I’m sort of a jerk?” Are we jerks for having the time and the space to inundate those around us with our sandy thoughts about temporality? Maybe. Are we jerks in those moments that we relish that role? Probably. But is that constant searching, which Ashbery did in his poems rather than before he wrote them, also the glue that (very tenuously, at this moment) sticks us to the real? Also probably. That real might constantly be receding in front of us, “[t]his event rounding the corner” as Ashbery puts it in “Grand Galop,” but if we fail to chase it, we sink into oblivion. Sometimes that sounds just fine. But at the end of the day, we know better

RESEARCH



He taught me that poetry can be anything and with that comes great freedom.

No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know
exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could
seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?


We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater
had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards
drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves
sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly
crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully
know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly
amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.


I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone
with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel
with the other.
And then something like braids will stand out,
on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.
We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,
talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know
that’s probably what’s wrong – the beginnings concept, I mean.
I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some
sometime.


Enigmatic, confounding, genius, funny, unnerving, stunning, gay, mysterious. Poet John Ashbery died this weekend and the descriptions of him and his work are as varied as poetry itself. Reading through these diverse adjectives, I’m left thinking how beautiful it is to not be defined and yet to be so profoundly revered. For Ashbery, poetry is not about definitions or pronouns or intentions or genres. It’s not about telling a story that has a proper conclusion. It’s about what it is to experience – experience anything. His work says you don’t need to decipher the words, just experience them. Is there anything more valuable than that?

NY Times Interviewer: Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful?

Ashbery: Perhaps “Chinese Whispers” or “Where Shall I Wander.” I cite these because I don’t remember them too well myself, but happened to glance at them recently and got interested. It can be exciting to stumble on a work you’ve forgotten you wrote, and becoming smitten with it, as Randall Jarrell has pointed out.

“John Ashbery’s poetry is extremely difficult, if not often impenetrable; it does not ‘work’ or ‘mean’ like traditional verse, or even most contemporary poetry.”

. “On occasions when I have tried to discuss the meanings of my poems,” he says, “I have found that I was inventing plausible-sounding ones which I knew to be untrue.”

“To create a work of art that the critic cannot even begin to talk about ought to be the artist’s chief concern,” John Ashbery once wrote in a review for ARTnews.

Here, as in Ashbery’s description of his reputation as “a writer of hermetic poetry,” his work’s difficulty is framed as impenetrability, as inaccessibility: it withholds its meaning from the reader. But the fact that the work is difficult does not mean that is inaccessible—not if we try to see open doors where Howard’s students saw keyholes. Rather than suspect Ashbery of deliberately concealing his poems’ true meaning, we might begin from the premise that Ashbery left doors open everywhere in the particular modes of strangeness he chose.

Rather, it’s a body of work, as playful as it is perplexing, in which the difficult elements exist not to impede our access to something more straightforwardly expressible, but to welcome us into what cannot be simply said.

All these approaches are useful, but it’s a testament to the abiding strangeness of his verse that no single theory can quite encompass it. Polyphonic and idiosyncratic, yet consistently moving and affirming, Ashbery’s poems are always unmistakably his, yet each is its own experience, an individual “living system.”

At the center of an Ashbery poem isn’t usually a subject (à la Philip Larkin) but a feeling (à la Jackson Pollock). That feeling is conjured up by the interplay between aesthetic conviction and amiably bland bewilderment; amid all the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life is the enduring hope that, as one speaker puts it, “at last I shall see my complete face.” The best thing to do, then, is not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music. It’s only then, for most readers, that the meaning begins to leak through.

Ashbery may be poetry’s first skeptical revolutionary. He is the first poet to achieve something utterly new by completely doubting the possibility—and the value—of capturing what the lyric poem has traditionally tried to capture: a crystallization of a moment in time, an epiphanic realization—what Wordsworth called “spots of time.” Ashbery has updated the lyric poem by rejecting this project, finding it fundamentally inauthentic (though he’d never put it in such somber terms). As he writes in “Clepsydra,” “Each moment/ of utterance is the true one; likewise none is true.” The poet must somehow capture this paradox, to make a poem that is not a verbal artifact but a kind of living system. What’s important is not art, per se, but “The way music passes, emblematic/ Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it/ And say it is good or bad/ . … one cannot guard, treasure/ That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting.”


To the opening of Ashbery’s monumentally long poem Flow Chart:
Still in the published city but not yet
overtaken by a new form of despair, I ask
the diagram: is it the foretaste of pain
it might easily be? Or an emptiness
so sudden it leaves the girders
whanging in the absence of wind,
the sky milk-blue and astringent? We know life is so busy,
but a larger activity shrouds it, and this is something
we can never feel, except occasionally, in small signs …
Both poets perceive a needling duality about the world: the fragments that form our lives (our jobs, our perceptions, hell is other people, et cetera) and the “larger activity” or “obvious whole” that lies beyond it, toward which the poet is writing, writing, writing. Ashbery is, predictably, less convinced about that wholeness than Stevens; if it’s there, we feel it only “occasionally,” in “small signs.” And his conversational peregrinations — oh, hello, please sit down, I was just mulling over the concept of totality — are less lecture-like than Stevens’s declarations about what poetry must do. But that rigorous curiosity — What will cause me pain? What constitutes emptiness? — is left whole in the poem, in all of its discursiveness and abstractness. And that, one could say, is Ashbery’s modernist inheritance, one that was never bulldozed by “postmodernity” per se but instead infused with a deep suspicion about the ability of his language to sidle close to his desires. Ezra Pound, alas, was never unsure of himself. Ashbery practically made a career out of it.

THE FIRST ONE
He was 29 years old, that makes it special

TWO SCENES

We see as we truly behave:
From every corner becomes a distinctive offering.
The train comes bearing joy;
The sparks it strikes illuminate the table.
Destiny guided the water-pilot, and it is destiny.
For long we hadn’t heard so much news, such noise.
The day was warm and pleasant.
‘’We see you in your hair,
Air resting around the tips of mountains.’’

[James Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writing about Ashbery, John Updike took note of how prolific he is and how easily he seems to sit at his work to turn out poetry of this quality. At almost 1000 pages there's a lot of poetry here, and it's difficult. The poet himself has stated he thinks of a poem as a kind of environment to be inhabited. I think that's right in that you have to enter the individual Ashbery poem. You have to step inside and pull these poems around you. Most are very subtle. There are few hammer blows of epiphany. There aren't many electric jolts making ideas and vision sharp. Ashbery is slant intelligence and language like a house of mirrors. This was a slow read for me, taking slightly over a year. There are some rewards. It's like panning for gold.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

the vermont notebook is sunlight on the grayest of days. i've read that he wrote the vermont notebook while traveling on a bus throughout new england. if i remember correctly he wasn't even traveling in vermont. traveling by bus. and then this. this is the song of america. and reading it you can't help but stop and notice the tiniest of moments that surround you.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror *** -- Ashbery’s poems are full of wonderfully tantalizing language. The prose and the ideas (or fragments of ideas) have a compelling force that move across the page. He certainly stands among the best of his generation of poets. But like Tantalus, I’m left thirsty. That’s probably his intent. While I enjoyed this book, and will continue to read Ashbery, he doesn’t stand among my favorite poets.

[Dougal Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

All one wants to do after reading John Ashbery is write sub-Ashbery poetry, and it’s a wonderful feeling. Imagine what it must’ve felt like to write the real stuff.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much has been said of Ashbery's very particular stasis in American poetry: A poet that can unite Harold Bloom and Charles Bernstein in praise as well as unite equally disparate schools of thought in frustration. This is an excellent overview of his early work, although it does miss some of has particularly excellent poetry in the last two-and-a-half decades. The Library of America collection does Ashbery's work a profound service by making it the first work of a living (and still working poet) to be released by them. Even though this does not cover the later 1/4 of his career, the over 450 poems do give one much to enjoy: his early more formal work, "Some Trees" and "The Painter," hint at his more avant-garde moves later on. After those two books, while Ashbery is formally complicated, his rarely ever works in traditional forms or rhymes. Included is one of the most highly regarded of Ashbery's work, 1976's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," which often serves as an introduction to Ashbery. While not necessarily my favorite work, it is a solid introduction to what Ashbery's poetics are and the fugue states one goes through reading it. In addition, despite the someone obscure topic (Parmigianino ) and the length of the poems, it is one of Ashbery's more accessible post-formal works.

My two favorites within this volume are the ""Houseboat Days," which hit at the more relaxed and free-flowing later poetry including those collections released after the purview of this book, and "The Tennis Court Oath," which is about Ashbery's days in Paris and contain what many see as his most challenging work. Overall, this is an excellent way into the work of John Ashbery and is to be savored.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great collection to dip into here and there, or, if you're slightly crazy, to read all the way through. I took on the latter, and after weeks of what I can only accurately describe as brainhurt, concluded my trek through Ashbery's early work. It's argued that these poems are his better work, but I have a hard time labeling them one way or the other, because of the consistent diversity from one book to the next. It's astounding to see, not only the amount of work Ashbery has continued to put out on a regular basis, but also his ability to write new material that is more innovative, experimental, or different from what preceded it. Everyone knows Ashbery isn't easy, but one doesn't have to fully understand him, in order to appreciate him. His poetry is surreal, philosophical, and even literal, at times, making the work as a whole likeable, despite its challenges.

A note, also, on the volume. As with other Library of America books, this one is attractive inside and out, is small and easy to travel with, and opens flat for easy reading. Ashbery's poetry, however, isn't quite suited to the size of this book, as his long lines frequently exceed the width of the page. A minor complaint, though, as the overall product is convenient and durable.

[Andrew Neuendorf · Rating 5 out of 5]

When people say "Later Ashbery" they mean everything written after this collection, a collection which, I guess, includes the early and middle periods. Think of his career like Bob Dylan's (minus the Christian period and the 1980's). The early and middle stuff (say "Bob Dylan" through John Wesley Harding) is consistently good. Everything after is uneven, repetitive, sometimes uninspired, occasionally drenched with self-parody....all of which gives ways to occasions of brilliance. Of course, Ashbery takes longer to reach his great period, which, to me, begins with Double Dream of Spring and keeps going through the end of this collection. Really Early Ashbery is either a kind of Auden-Stevens jumble (see Some Trees) or an exercise in postmodern pastiche (Tennis Court Oath) or some mixture therefore. He starts to ramp up with the uneven Rivers and Mountains (which contains the mind-boggling and great Whitmanesque long poem "The Skaters") and the greatness follows from there. Anyway, this hand-held Library of Congress edition is pretty, convenient, and sufficient for clubbing someone over the head.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The anthology is quite complete, spanning most of Ashbery’s career. The anthology is quite complete, spanning most of Ashbery’s career. Overall, I felt the anthology was quite comprehensive. Looking at some of Ashbery’s early works, I felt it was quite insightful to see the development over time. This volume contains all of Ashbery's books up through 1987's April Galleons; it begins with the Yale Younger Poets Prize–winning Some Trees (1956), chosen by Auden, and includes Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which won all three major American book awards. Other notable inclusions are the complete text of The Vermont Notebook, with illustrations by Joe Brainard, and an ample group of uncollected poems. Ashbery’s works begin very formal, but I really enjoyed and I think gained a lot out of his more experimental work of the 70s and 80s. The only drawback from the book is that I think some poems such as “Litany,” need to be heard as well as read. However, there are many websites with archived audio of Ashbery to get the full effect of his work.

[Wesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read up till “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” but then I went to the beginning and re-read all those beginning collections to note all the “connectives” therein, but still never got past SPCM. Now I’ll just log this has done, and log the individual collections separately as I read them.

(Oct 6. is just a rough estimate, and I came back to this book a lot for little snippets and such)

[Robert]

John Ashbery is my poet for 2012. Got this as a Christmas present from my sister Charlie (what's up-Chuck). There was an interesting article in Time magazine that motivated me. Good poet after about 5 poems. More accessible than Merwin.

[Aaron Bauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who else can write a poem named "Daffy Duck in Hollywood"? Not only that, but write a poem named after a Loony Tunes episode and have it be absolutely amazing.

[George]

clearly the great poet of last half of 20th. what there is to learn: everything

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which won the Pulitzer

Read most of it before I had to return it to the library. Found it not un-enjoyable, but slow.

[Ted Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utter genius. You do not finish poetry like this. It becomes part of you and you reread