John Ashbery

The acclaimed American poet's seventh collection, portraying the new stirrings, the final whispers, the unvisited places, and the disguises of reality that identify an intensely individual vision

Poems

Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror

Selections from the first three decades of the poetry of John Ashbery, author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award The late John Ashbery was a poet whose “teasing, delicate, soulful lines made him one of the most influential figures of late-20th and early 21st century American literature.” (The New York Times) This important volume gathers work from his first ten collections of poetry, from Some Trees, which was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series (1956), to A Wave (1984). The 138 poems in this volume include short lyrics, haikus, prose poems, and many of Ashbery’s major long poems, including “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” offering a beautiful distillation of the first thirty years of his remarkable, groundbreaking work.

Selected Poems

Arthur Rimbaud

Presents a new translation of the author's collection of prose poems, rendered for a contemporary audience by a noted American poet.

Illuminations

Still a touchstone of contemporary avant-garde poetry today, this 35th anniversary edition of John Ashbery's second book celebrates an American poet who has won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award.

A Book of Poems

The Tennis Court Oath

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

Hotel Lautréamont

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

Three Poems

Most critics would agree that John Ashbery is one of 20th-century American poetry's finest voices. Perhaps his most admired book is Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a culmination of themes, styles, and forms with which the poet experimented over the course of two decades. Now, the poet's devoted readers can trace his development through the first five books of his poetry, collected here in one handy volume. The Mooring of Starting Out represents Ashbery's work from 1956 through 1972, comprising Some Trees, his first book; The Tennis Court Oath, written while he was living in Paris.

The Mooring Of Starting Out

James Schuyler

The insular tranquility of a group of suburban New Yorkers is shattered by two vivacious sisters from Paris in a comic novel about the pretensions of America's upper-middle-class by two of America's foremost poets.

A Novel

A Nest of Ninnies

With this volume, published in 2008, John Ashbery became the first living poet to have his work collected in the Library of America series. Beginning with Some Trees in 1956, John Ashbery charted a profoundly original and individual course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, and alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language. This first volume of the collected Ashbery includes the complete texts of his first twelve books, including such groundbreaking collections as Rivers and Mountains, Three Poems, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975), and Houseboat Days. It also features an unprecedented gathering of more than sixty previously uncollected poems written over a period of four decades, a rare treasure trove for poetry lovers. This volume is a landmark portrait of a modern master. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987 (LOA #187)

A collection of Ashbery's poems offers original explorations of the modes of intellectual perception and the pathways of subjective experience

Houseboat Days

John Ashbery’s wild, deliriously inventive book-length poem, inspired by the adventures of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls Henry Darger, the prolific American outsider artist who died in 1973, leaving behind over twenty thousand pages of manuscripts and hundreds of artworks, is famous for the elaborate alternate universe he both constructed and inhabited, a “realm of the unreal” where a plucky band of young girls, the Vivians, helps lead an epic rebellion against dark forces of chaos. Darger’s work is now renowned for its brilliant appropriation of cultural ephemera, its dense and otherworldly prose, and its utterly unique high-low juxtaposition of popular culture and the divine—some of the very same traits that decades of critics and readers have responded to in John Ashbery’s many groundbreaking works of poetry. In Girls on the Run, Ashbery’s unmatched poetic inventiveness travels to new territory, inspired by the characters and cataclysms of Darger’s imagined universe. Girls on the Run is a disquieting, gorgeous, and often hilarious mash-up that finds two radical American artists engaged in an unlikely conversation, a dialogue of reinvention and strange beauty.

A Poem

Girls on the Run

Some Trees

Frank O'Hara

Kenneth Koch

Barbara Guest

Alejandro Morellón

Juan F. Rivero

Ojeda, Mónica

Carlos Recamán

Leonor Saro

Antología

La escuela poética de Nueva York

Selected Later Poems

Notes from the Air

Selected Prose (Poets on Poetry)

David Bergman

America's great poet and art critic, John Ashbery, presents some of his most provocative essays on art. Ashbery has long been one of America's most important art critics--first for the Paris Herald Tribune and later for New York and Newsweek. Illustrated.

Art Chronicles, 1957-1987

Reported Sightings

Poems deal with such topics as war, family, learning, aging, music, love, prison, and youth

John Ashbery

Books

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