Three Poems

by John Ashbery

A series of prose poetry reveal the poet's concern about the meaning of time and man's awakening to life

Genres: Poetry

118 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 1972

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

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

the most indescribably intense piece of writing i’ve read so far, any attempt to describe it would only get further and further away from the actual beauty of ashbery’s poetry, maybe one day i will find the words to describe just how amazing this work is, but for now my thoughts are only fragmented unorganised explosions of an inarticulable reverie

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite Ashbery book. Definitely the most difficult one as well. The poem titled, I think, "New Spirit" is a continuous barrage of language, where meanings peel off and recombine with other meanings elsewhere in the poem, dizzying and adventurous perceptions whirlagig upside the head. Truly ahead of its time, Three Poems led me to Coolidge, which led me to Silliman, which led me back to Ashbery again. Fantastic.

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are not easy poems to read. If poetry is new to you, pick another book. Yes, there are only three poems, but there are 118 pages! One can easily become lost in these pages. This being my second try in two years, I finished this time, but still had my problems. I give myself 2 stars for my difficulties.

[Anders · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer way."
~
"As if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows. There is more to be said about this, I guess, but it does not seem to alter anything that I am the spectator, you what is apprehended, and as such we both have our own satisfying reality, even each to the other, though in the end it falls apart, falls to the ground and sinks in."
~

Well this was a real journey. First off, thanks to Ethan for giving me the book (the second Ashbery book he gave me; what a guy! He's never gonna read this because he's not on goodreads but he's a cool dude even if we don't talk much anymore. I hope he's happy out there. He should be-he's got three cats! It's got a delightful meatball recipe in it that I haven't even tried yet). Secondly, this is my second Ashbery and it's not as good as Self-Portrait in a Converse Mirror (my review of which can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), although I'm not sure what could be.

I wasn't expecting this to be quite as meta as it was, but I'm not sure why I shouldn't have known better. It says it right there on the back. Don't let me discourage you by using the word meta however, it's much more than an exercise in navel-gazing or genre-parody. The first poem tackles meaning, the second existence and carrying on, and the third a sort of digestif that is both a combination of the two and not ("The New Spirit", "The System", and "The Recital"). I liked the first far more than the other two. I struggled with the second, disagreeing with even more than the first, but grasped at something in the end, and the third seemed to float away from me, the last butterfly I saw escaping from my once full net.

I loved Ashbery's use of metaphor and simile. It's something I loved about his poems in Self-Portrait and I would pounce upon one each time I saw one in these poems. While his poems in Self-Portrait were definitely prosey, these poems are rightfully called prose-poems in style. On the one hand I loved that about them, and on the other I wished I were reading some of his poetic works so I could see those metaphors really shine. Oh well. I loved the metaphors anyway. I also loved the prosaic quality of these poems. While I don't think this is a masterpiece, I do think it is some masterful work and I have selfishly chosen not to give this book 5 stars because I didn't perfectly enjoy it, not because it wasn't perfectly masterful (the hidden premise of course being that I would have perfectly enjoyed it, if it had been perfectly masterful-teehee [that's an enthymeme for those of you following along]). Another thing I loved is his diction. Ashbery knows words like a virtuoso. He uses etiolated like he eats it for breakfast-this in particular though is also a mark of his utilization of words from the plant world. I admire Ashbery so much for being a wordsmith.

So what didn't I enjoy about the book? Well there were some things that I didn't agree with. Although, quite reasonably, I think that's a good thing. These poems are heady and dense, rushing headlong beyond nebulous, condensing into droplets less and less rarefied, past the point of pithiness into weighty and grave-serious, somber, dark, and practical. The darkness is not the mood resembling sadness but that moment before things become clear, what exists before the light of each day-the underside of your upturned palm. I don't know that I can contain that much awareness or keep up with the speed of Ashbery's blinding perception. Maybe I could have tried harder, but I'd say I tried pretty hard and got what I wanted to out of it. What I disagreed with, I didn't disagree with out of ignorance but because I did understand, not that I understood everything.

"Anders," you say, "You're just spewing a bunch of vague poetic bullshit at me and not telling me what these poems are actually about. TELL ME." Haha, you know I can't do that! Ashbery has already infected me; it's too late. But I would return you to the main points: meaning, existence, and the combination of both and neither. Surely you can see how there can be no exhaustive explanation for this so essentially human problem presented to us (every day, I might add) and I think that's what Ashbery tries to convey to us-by blinding us with his insight--and by cloud-gathering Zeus's coruscating bolts is he refulgent. I've read some vague poems, poems that revel in ambiguity, these are something else. There is a very real pragmatism to them that I haven't seen communicated quite in this way. Yet another reason for extolling our man here as masterful.

I could explicate each paragraph, line by line, and that might provide a coherent and thorough explanation for what's going on, but I'm not a grad student writing a thesis on Ashbery; I'm just some guy who's read too much and yet not enough poetry who happens to (usually!) know what he likes. And this-yes-I like it. The dynamism of these poems is relentless, ceaselessly relentless like clenched fists yet without fury or indignation. This is the ferocity of intent, a beam of pure focus and insight. There's something in that that I respect even as it outpaces me. And it's not the challenge of deciphering like some things can be. These are not riddles in the same way that other poems of his have been. These are poems of illimitable design. A design that that knows choice as an old friend, both repudiating it and acknowledging its power.

I think the other thing that makes me eschew a 5 star is the reread potential. I guessed that these poems would be best read quickly together and after reading them I almost think that's necessary. I picked out a few phrases and metaphors I liked, but they are so imbricated in their context that they take on whole new meanings outside of it, by strength of their art. It's hard to quote the poem without reading the whole thing to you. It's hard to reference a paragraph without saying now wait you have to read this one and this other one to grasp what he's throwing at you. In that way the work has forged it's own space in reality that prevents me from tearing it into digestible pieces or salient fragments-its charm and its curse.

So who would I recommend this to? Well if you like my middling parody of his style or any of the ideas I've talked about and you want to try out some very dense prose poems yeah give it a shot, but if you're new to Ashbery I would much much much sooner recommend Self-Portrait or many of the other collections of poetry that I haven't even read that, depending on the year published, are doing very different--although certainly more accessible and enjoyable--things. And if you have read Ashbery before then you probably know better than me what you're doing!

This collection is tough but rewarding. And in the end it might be both satisfying and dissatisfying, enlightening and mystifying-but surely it is exquisite.

*
"If by chance you should become diverted or distracted for a moment from awareness of your imprisonment by some pleasant or interesting occurrence, there is always the shape of the individual day to remind you."
*
"Force and mastery are required, they are ready in fact, but to use them deeply without excuses is a way of intermittent life, and the point was that the moments of awareness have to be continuous if they are to exist at all. Thus the sadness as I look out over all this and realize that I can never have any of it, even though I have it all as I in fact do. To be living, in each other, the perfect life but without happiness."
*
"There must be nothing resembling nostalgia for a past which in any case never existed. It is like standing up because you've been sitting all day and are tired of it."

[Ben Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perfect, warm bath of empathy. Kinda like a bath your attentiveness is bound to slip in and out with the ebbs and flows of this one, but just makes future rereadings more worthwhile.

[David Kellogg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this book twice before, years and years ago, but reread it recently. This is such a strong book, exactly the kind of thing that some people hate about John Ashbery, but really an amazing piece of work. There's a kind of sharp clarity to the language even as the subjects remain elusive.

Someone once said that Ashbery is difficult not because his references are challenging or that he seems distant -- that's the challenge of Eliot and, in a different way, Pound -- but that he's so very intimate, he acts like you're already in his head. He's the friendliest, wackiest poet on the planet. A sentence will start riding one thought-train and end riding another, and you'll finish the sentence having completely missed when or how it jumped the tracks -- you'll just know you're going to another town. The impressions one gets from the total experience are poignant, heartbreaking even, though the effect of any one sentence tends to be eerily calm.

[Michael Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

“...the idea of the spectacle as something to be acted out and absorbed still hung in the air long after the last spectator had gone home to sleep.” p. 118

Definitely a GOAT candidate

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Incredible ! I love it but also o my word Ashbery’s Three Poems stretch to 118 pages, prose, and they’re mercilessly brilliant but I’m never going to be able to do this properly on one reading. They’re something like theses on poetic practice which develop into the practice of Living with the Problem of Meaning. I love John as ever and he really drops some of his sweetest lines here

In you I fall apart, and outwardly am a single fragment, a puzzle to itself. But we must learn to live in others, no matter how abortive or unfriendly their cold, piecemeal renderings of us: they create us.

The wisdom here is enormous and as I have said too much to digest in a single reading. I leave with near the beginning of The New Spirit:

You are my calm world. This is my happiness. To stand, to go forward into it. The cost is enormous. Too much for one life.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are dense. They appear in paragraph form and wax more philosophically than most poetry of his that I have read up to this point. That being said, I particularly enjoyed the first two poems, "The New Spirit" and "The System", with "The Recital" seeming more like an afterthought.

I'd recommend this book to poetry lovers, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it to readers who are more into the novel and prose.

[Descending Angel · Rating 1 out of 5]

These three prose poems read more like essays that never get to a point. Not for me. Even know this is my 5th poetry collection of ashbery, the jury is still out if he was as great as people like harold bloom thought he was. though I have enjoyed some of what I've read by him and I'm still willing to give what people say is his masterpiece "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" a try and his later work after "convex" when he had an audience.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’d like to argue that all John Ashbery’s poems could be framed by a poetics of the asymptote. How they move, the conceptual distance they take, their pushiness, positioning the reader closer and closer to the poet’s thinking, though constantly aware one thought can benefit from being contradicted by another equally valid thought. I imagine this graphed out, so it’s a line of poetic rhetoric. And if it was possible to translate the sensation of reading with the sensation of a line on the x-y axis, the resulting concept would be the literal sensation of an asymptote, especially the part where it’s almost touching the x or y axis. And in Three Poems it’s Ashbery’s opening poem, “The New Spirit,” that demonstrates the viability of asymptote reading. Bringing the reader close, and then acknowledging the reader still didn’t get close enough. But don’t be disappointed, reader. There’s still more to read even closer for. Because the poem is long!! Then there’s “The System,” which reveals loving another person, and eventually yourself like it was the experience of traveling an asymptote seeing both the transitive and the intransitive verb forms love can take.

So, OMG. Yes. This book is abstract. Beyond your wildest dreams, or the abstracted understanding you have of “dreaming” or the peak reading experience you had once, that you described to your friends as “dreaming.” But you were just at a Barnes & Noble reading the opening pages of Catcher in the Rye. And you were actually too old to be reading it in earnest, but sometimes days are like that. Everyone you know reads often and enthusiastically, just for that fleeting moment. But it’s weird calling a fleeting moment a dream. But calling anything something that you know at heart is weird, that’s John Ashbery’s master move all the way through all three of the poems in this book.

The poems might make you wonder: should there be a distance between author, John Ashbery, and his speculations about you, the one reading his book? Is it possible that what Ashbery would envision for you must by necessity, by reality, collapse into what is actually a subjective moment experienced by Ashbery who’s thinking through his life, and imagining this is how you think through your life? If you’re reading (like I was) for the nature of an asymptote, are you destined to be disappointed, because, in the end, it’s going to turn into a subjective I-you-but-actually-a-conversation-with-the-self? I would say resist that reading. You can, because you’re the one doing the reading! And it’s more interesting to track what happens as the poems (especially “The System”) tie "I" and "you" together, Ashbery to reader, Ashbery to an objective sense Ashbery might discover about Ashbery. The poem goes on, and it effectively blurs the distance between whatever I and you might amount to. But I think staring into the blur part of the reading process. Because Ashbery’s poems know there’s no way for the poet, John Ashbery, to know how anyone else reads, especially you, the one reading. He can speculate in optimistic, Ashberian terms for what he would like to think readers do. But the only thing Ashbery can imagine for a reader is that they’re basically the reader Ashbery is when he’s reading.

Please, whoever is reading this review, recognize that the nature of any asymptote is nearness, everything I’m describing might be abstract. But even abstraction can be attracted to what’s around it. Think of all those men signing the Declaration of Independence. Who must have let it slip they were attracted to the other men, their “intellect,” which is abstract, I suppose. Like a system of motivations, but you’re calling it love. Or, as Ashbery describes it a tree whose limbs are constantly branching into candelabras, until the tree appears to be pushing up towards the sky. Where multiplicity speaks to the concept of love, nearing its voluminous nature, like the asymptote nearing its axis, where in both cases everything appears like a graphical representation of “never,” but in artful terms.

Or rhetorical terms. And in a grounded reading of the book, that would be the consistent feature of Three Poems. A rhetoric of hopefulness curtailed by skepticism. Or hopefulness beholden to the inherent human doubt, or the inherent human self-consciousness that is like the human nature part of hope. Ashbery addresses all of this so much better than me. Or he addresses it so consistently, and doubt comes to feel inescapable. It has an artful consistency. Like, do you, reader of this review, feel a new realization about what a book of poems could be. A new realization that writing about closeness while the closeness gets progressively closer would feel like paradox? If you can at least perceive that possibility, then you are in “The New Spirit,” as Ashbery terms it in his first poem. If you can relate to that moment in your life that existed in an overwhelm of all your previousnesses, compartmentalized in little cubby holes, each labeled “previous to this.” And all this compartmentalization felt like “a fresh start.” Then you’re getting even closer to that moment that’s like the new spirit of being present. The “system” that everyone around you is cycling through.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, so beautiful...

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes John Ashbery so great is he gets you to notice things, to see them in a different way, which is mainly a matter of him showing you what's right in front of your face. It's hard to describe Ashbery's style—bulky free-verse, florid writing making reference to nature, often addressing 'you,' the reader. I don't know much about art movements, but I read somewhere that Ashbery is an Abstract Expressionist poet: he uses abstractions as a special way of noticing.

To see how his style works, it's best to quote from him. Here are some representative passages from the first poem in the collection, "The New Spirit":

We judge not, lest we be judged, yet we are judged all the same, without noticing, until one day we wake up a different color, the color of the filter of the opinions and ideas everyone has ever entertained about us. And in this form we must prepare, now, to try to live.

If that passage moves you in any way, here's another:

They told this tale long ago
The legend of the children, in which they get closer
To the darkness, but go on living.
The motion of the story is moving though not
getting nearer.

If there were to be a kind of thesis to this collection, it would be that. We are on a journey, all of us, but we're like children moving forward in the darkness, making progress—but the journey is the reward.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who has a large view of what poetry can be. If you're fine with mostly big-block paragraphs as verse, then you'll be fine with this. And if you're fine with abstraction, philosophy, if you wouldn't get frustrated by the sheer length of these poems; they're quite long. I'm happy I discovered Ashbery for myself and want to read the collection that won him the Pulitzer Prize. The collection is titled Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror .

[Jeffrey Powanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

"From the outset it was apparent that someone had played a colossal trick on something."-from "The System" by John Ashbery

If someone told me that John Ashbery's book Three Poems was a meaningless prank, I might appreciate it more. In fact, I might even find Ashbery's audacity hilarious. However, lacking an explicit admission from Ashbery of his devilishness (he died in 2017), I'm at a loss to describe my feelings for his famous book of prose poems.

The book is only 118 pages long. It contains exactly three poems, as advertised. The three poems are "The New Spirit" (50 pages), "The System" (54 pages), and "The Recital" (only 12 pages).

The poems contain conventionally-formed sentences, with subject and predicate, but even if I read them over and over for several years I might never be able to make sense of them. Perhaps other readers can immerse themselves in the metaphors, the similes, the beautiful abstractions about everything we know or believe about sex, love, memory, happiness, and death for long periods. I can't. I read the book in very brief spurts, consuming a paragraph or two before putting it down again. Perhaps that inattentive approach partly contributed to my puzzled reaction.

I enjoyed Three Poems in the same way I enjoyed Picasso's Cubism or other forms of abstract art. Ashbery gives you an impression of reality without representing its physical details. Three Poems is elegant, playful, intellectual, and passionate. However, despite the beauty of Ashbery's marvelous prose, the book is ultimately inscrutable, like an unknown city at night.

[Wesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most important books in my artistic development. I read this after "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," and, while I didn't really understand that collection upon first reading, it was these three prose-poems that revealed the overwhelming beauty and complexity of Ashbery's famously discursive, shadowy, all-encompassing aesthetic, which seemingly allows him to write without writing anything at all. This gives the work endless re-reading value, but because the underlying thematic considerations are so interesting, you *want* to re-read it over and over, because you truly feel as though there is a truth the author is trying to communicate, that could only have ever been communicated in this way. Indispensable!

[Mark Babcock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ashbery's first long prose poems. They're the only long poems I've read up to this point. After this you should check out Flow Chart, though people dis that book, I don't know why. I re-read Ashbery all the time and always come away with new ideas and insights. In my opinion the greatest poet of the late 20th century, with Wallace Stevens being the greatest of the first half. Read it.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought poems had to rhyme 9/10

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

he’s really him

[Mascifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read sections from this every day. The cover is totally wrecked and spine is falling apart. so many dog-eared pages and penciled highlights. One of the most meaningful pieces of prose poetry I have ever read.

"one day the unmistakable dry but deep accent is heard:
“You waited too long. And now you are going to be rewarded by my attention. Make no mistake: it will probably seem to you as though nothing has changed; nothing will show in the outward details of your life and each night you will creep tired and enraged into bed. Know however that I am listening. From now on the invisible bounty of my concern will be there to keep you company, and as you mature it will unlock more of the same space for you so that eventually all your territory will have become rightfully yours again.""

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just reread this and it amazed me. Three really long poems written primarily in prose paragraphs that have a strange, spacey and warped analytical style to them. Almost like trying to write a history book without any proper nouns, all these vague notions moving around in lushly abstract descriptions. I'd imagine this book is pretty easy to hate but you have to admit that it's a totally new arena for poetry that Ashbery just opened up, unlike anything that came before.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the structure of this book and the way that Ashbery was able to sustain such lengthy pieces that felt complete. However, I found all three pieces a bit depressing. I didn't feel uplifted by the time I finished reading "The New Spirit" (the first of this trilogy) and I felt my expectations were not met.

Worth the read, again for structure, but probably not a re-read.

[Cory]

I don't know that I understand this book at all, but I feel like it's rerouting my brain in a positive way. I don't think it's something to be deciphered, necessarily, but rather simply absorbed. So I've been reading it in the bath: a soak of Epsom salts and Ashbery for what ails me.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Halfway through this collection... I'm tagging Three Poems as "read," but in all honesty I can't muster the enthusiasm/motivation/courage/attention/energy to keep reading. I'll try again in another dozen years.

[Gary McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a trippy read. Takes some patience. But it's fucking brilliant... I think.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This: this is an example of leaving out.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

another one of those- i can't believe i've lived this long and NOT read this book.

[crista]

Ever thought about the moon, how well it fits what it has to light?

[A L]

Wow! I started to get a sense of what he's up to in these prose blocks: they're reflective on art as a process; they stage the process of a vision coming into being and the contradictions it leads to, almost as a ritual. There's a lot of the occult/spiritual things here too.