Book description
John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets.
In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the
contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as
conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These
linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even
anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of
dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preoccupation
arises a poetry that passes beyond conventional limits into a highly
individual realm of effectiveness, one that may be roughly likened to
the visual world of Surrealist painting. Some will find Mr. Ashbery's
work difficult, even forbidding; but those who are sensitive to new
directions in ideas and the arts will discover here much to quicken and
delight them.
A 35th anniversary edition of classic work from a celebrated American
poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize, the national Book Award, and
the national Book Critics Circle Award. John Ashbery's second book, The
Tennis Court Oaths, first published by Wesleyan in 1962, remains a
touchstone of contemporary avant-garde poetry. "The dimensions of
Ashbery's artistic intelligence are an extraordinary feeling for
language tone and rhythm, a powerful memory for his experience of art,
an imagination that is more auditory than visual, [and] an apparently
limitless capacity for astonishingly fresh verbal combinations . . .
Ashbery's poetry demands not only reading with highest concentration but
persistent rereading: the mastering of it becomes a kind of spiritual
experience." --Richard Kostelanetz, New York Times JOHN ASHBERY,
a native of Rochester, New York, has lived since 1958 in Paris, where he
is art critic for the New York herald tribune European edition and for
Art International of Zurich. He spent two earlier years in France as a
Fulbright fellow, in Montpellier and Paris; he has also been connected
with Art News in New York and with two American publishing houses,
Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill. He is a graduate of Harvard and
has done advanced work at Columbia and N. Y.U., specializing in French
literature. His poems have appeared in various magazines and in
privately printed collections. The present book is his second. Its
predecessor was Some Trees (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1956)-
"the most beautiful first book to appear in America," said
Poetry Magazine, "since [Wallace Stevens'] Harmonium."
