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John Ashbery

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As We Know: Poems (Poets, Penguin) Kindle Edition

by John Ashbery (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 4 ratings

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Dating from one of the most studied creative periods of John Ashbery’s career, a groundbreaking collection showcasing his signature polyphonic poem “Litany”

First published in 1979, four years after Ashbery’s masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the poems in As We Know represent the great American poet writing at the peak of his experimental powers. The book’s flagship poem, the seventy-page “Litany,” remains one of the most exciting and challenging of Ashbery’s career. Presented in two facing columns, the poem asks to be read as independent but countervailing monologues, creating a dialogue of the private and the public, the human and the divine, the real and the unreal—a wild and beautiful conversation that contains multitudes.

As We Know also collects some of Ashbery’s most witty, self-reflexive interrogations of poetry itself, including “Late Echo” and “Five Pedantic Pieces” (“An idea I had and talked about / Became the things I do”), as well as a wry, laugh-out-loud call-and-response sequence of one-line poems on Ashbery’s defining subject: the writing of poetry (“I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well / But I was mistaken”). Perhaps the most admired poem in this much-discussed volume is “Tapestry,” a measured exploration of the inevitable distance that arises between art, audience, and artist, which the critic Harold Bloom called “an ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ for our time.”

Built of doubles, of echoes, of dualities and combinations, As We Know is the breathtaking expression of a singular American voice.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“It is, I think, Ashbery’s great gift, to have taught us to listen for the multiplicity, the plurality, of experience: as we know. As William James put it, ‘for every part, tho it may not be in actual or immediate connexion, is nevertheless in some possible or mediated connexion, with every other part, however remote, through the fact that each part hangs together with its very next neighbors in inextricable interfusion.’ Reading ‘Litany’ with John Ashbery is just that: an inextricable interfusion. Like singing along with life.” —Ann Lauterbach, Conjunctions

“Ashbery’s long poems are like letters to an intimate friend or lover, permitting the usual mixture of news and inconsequence, relying upon the friend’s good will, knowing that, within reason and cadence, nearly anything goes. . . . Ashbery’s poems turn and twist upon the question of self and the conditions it has to face. Mostly, they trace an elaborate and endlessly inventive circuit of consciousness as it tries to establish itself, working toward its proper tone. . . . He is a stylist, one of the best.” —Denis Donoghue, The New York Review of Books

About the Author

John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He has authored more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, his work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he has won numerous American literary awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a National Humanities Medal. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. For many years, Ashbery taught graduate and undergraduate poetry courses at Brooklyn College and Bard College, and his most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012. He lives in New York.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00MP21ORY
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Open Road Media (September 9, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 9, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2638 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 202 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,616,007 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,917 in American Poetry (Kindle Store)
- #11,230 in American Poetry (Books)

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John Ashbery

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John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia University, and went to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955, living there for much of the next decade.

His many collections include Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007), which was awarded the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the three major American prizes—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award—and an early book, Some Trees (1956), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. The Library of America published the first volume of his collected poems in 2008.

Active in various areas of the arts throughout his career, he has served as executive editor of Art News and as art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1985 to 1990. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He lives in New York.