New Releases by John Ashbery

Uno de los libros más importantes de John Ashbery, ganador de los premios Pulitzer de poesía, National Book Critics Circle y National Book. «John Ashbery es hoy, sin duda, el poeta norteamericano por excelencia. [...] Poeta del torrente de lo mental, poeta total en muchos sentidos, John Ashbery es un poeta de lo cotidiano en el interior de las mentes». Luis Antonio de Villena, Babelia John Ashbery fue el poeta estadounidense más influyente de su tiempo. Considerado por el crítico Harold Bloom el último de los canónicos, su obra ha permeado de manera decisiva en nuevas generaciones de poetas -no solo en el ámbito anglosajón- y sigue siendo un referente ineludible a la hora de juzgar la poesía de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Una ola, por el que recibió los premios Lenore Marshall y Bollingen, es un libro sobre la muerte y la memoria en el que Ashbery destila toda su maestría en el manejo de la metáfora, el poema de largo aliento e incluso la prosa. De cada una de estas piezas, espléndidamente traducidas por Ignacio Infante, emana un hipnotismo intenso que, como una bella despedida, resuena en la memoria con el eco de una melodía persistente. Reseñas: «Pocos poetas poseen hoy día su misteriosa habilidad para socavar nuestras certidumbres, para articular tan plenamente las zonas más ambiguas de nuestra conciencia». Paul Auster «John Ashbery es un gran poeta. [...] Sabe y quiere ser todos los poetas a la vez, como Whitman quiso transportar en la canoa del pecho a todos los hombres». Antonio Lucas, El Mundo «Un genio enigmático de la poesía moderna cuya energía, audacia y dominio ilimitado del lenguaje elevaron el verso norteamericano a cotas brillantes y desconcertantes». The Guardian «Uno de los poetas norteamericanos más importantes del siglo XX». ABC «Desde la muerte de Wallace Stevens en 1955, estamos en la Era de Ashbery». Harold Bloom «Un poeta cuyos versos burlones, delicados y conmovedores lo convirtieron en una de las figuras más influyentes de la literatura estadounidense de finales del siglo XX y principios del XXI». The New York Times

The second volume of Library of America''s definitive edition, including the modern classic Flow Chart in a newly corrected text. Published for his ninetieth birthday, Library of America presents the second volume of John Ashbery’s collected poems, spanning a crucial and prolific decade in the poet’s work. The volume opens with the indispensable Flow Chart (1991), in a complete text for the first time. The other collections gathered here—Hotel Lautréamont (1992), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Can You Hear, Bird (1995), Wakefulness (1998), and Your Name Here (2000)—show Ashbery perfecting the playful, cerebral style that has made his poetry a genre unto itself, highly influential and often imitated. Long an art critic and one of the shrewdest observers of the American art scene, Ashbery engages with the renowned outsider artist Henry Darger in the fascinating book-length poem Girls on the Run (1999), inspired by the exuberant, unsettling fictional universe Darger created. The volume concludes with a selection of twenty-six previously uncollected poems. 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.

A bold, striking new collection of poems from one of America’s most influential and inventive poets. With more than twenty poetry collections to his name, John Ashbery is one of our most agile, philosophically complex, and visionary poets. In Breezeway, Ashbery’s powers of observation are at their most astute; his insight at its most penetrating. Demonstrating his extraordinary command of language and his ability to move fluidly and elegantly between wide-ranging thoughts and ideas—from the irreverent and slyly humorous to the tender, the sad, and the heartbreaking—Ashbery shows that he is a virtuoso fluent in diverse styles and tones of language, from the chatty and whimsical to the lyrical and urbane. Filled with allusions to literature and art, as well as to the absurdities and delights of the everyday world around us, Ashbery’s poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing all at once, the work of a master craftsman with a keen understanding of the age in which he lives and writes, an age whose fears and fragmentation he conjures and critiques with humor, pathos, and a provocative wit. Vital and imaginative, Ashbery’s poems not only touch on the “big questions” and crises of life in the twenty-first century, but also delicately capture the small moments between and among people. Imaginative, linguistically dazzling, and artistically ambitious, Breezeway is John Ashbery’s sharpest and most arresting collection yet.

El primer número de Buenos Aires Poetry incluye una entrevista realizada por Juan Arabia a John ASHBERY (máximo exponente de la escuela poética neoyorquina), material poético inédito de Dan FANTE y un estudio crítico sobre Jack KEROUAC, el Rock and Roll y la Profecía Whitmaniana. Además, una entrevista al director de la Fundación Raymond Williams, Derek TATTON, que con la ayuda de la Sociedad Raymond Williams (Nottingham Trent University, University of Birmingham) analiza las convergencias y balances de los estudios culturales en la época actual. En materia de poesía incluye la traducción al español del poema "Hotel Lautréamont", del mismo ASHBERY.

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.

Witty yet heartbreaking, conversational yet richly lyrical, John Ashbery’s sixteenth poetry collection showcases a mastery uniquely his own And the Stars Were Shining originally appeared in 1994, toward the midpoint of a startlingly creative period in Ashbery’s long career, during which the great American poet published no fewer than nine books in ten years. The collection brings together more than fifty compact, jewellike, intensely felt poems, including the well-known “Like a Sentence” (“How little we know, / and when we know it!”) and the lyrical, deeply moving thirteen-part title poem recognized as one of the author’s greatest. This collection is Ashbery at his most accessible, graceful, and elegiac.

Is poetry the act of putting something together, or the art of taking something apart? Houseboat Days, one of John Ashbery’s most celebrated collections, offers its own answer Remarkable for its introspection and for the response it elicited when it was first published in 1977, Houseboat Days is Ashbery’s much-discussed follow-up to his 1975 masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and remains one of his most studied books to date. Houseboat Days begins with the moving, unforgettable poem “Street Musicians,” an allegory of artistic and personal loss that came ten years after the death of Ashbery’s friend and fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara. But while many of the poems in Houseboat Days are strikingly personal, especially when compared to Ashbery’s work from the 1950s and 1960s, the collection is less about the poet than about the act of writing poetry. In such widely anthologized poems as “Wet Casements,” “Syringa,” “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” and “What Is Poetry,” Ashbery embraces the challenge of his own ars poetica, exploring and exploding the trusses, foundations, and underground caverns that underlie the creative act, and specifically, the act of creating a poem. Marjorie Perloff of the Washington Post Book World called Houseboat Days “the most exciting, most original book of poems to have appeared in the 1970s.”

A captivating experiment in traditional poetic form, from one of the most untraditional American poets ever to set pen to paper At first glance, John Ashbery’s Shadow Train seems to embrace the constraints of traditional poetic form—but closer reading reveals that this work is Ashbery at his revolutionary best. In fifty poems, each consisting solely of four connected quatrains, Ashbery apparently plays by the rules while simultaneously violating every single one. Over and over again, the familiar, almost sonnet-like sixteen-line form creates an outline of a poem within which, one would expect, poetry is meant to arrive—as a station waits for a train. And yet, as with many of the world’s greatest poems, the act of creating poetry also relies on the reading and the reader—in other words, as this collection’s signature poem “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” puts it, “the poem is / you.” In Shadow Train, Ashbery demonstrates how language influences our experience of reality, creating it and sustaining it while also remaining mysterious and ineffable: constantly arriving, but impossible to catch.

A mesmerizing, endlessly entertaining collection that shows John Ashbery at his most exuberant, honest, and inviting John Ashbery’s nineteenth original collection of poetry, first published in 2000, might be one of the “Ashberyest” of his long and varied career. In these poems, the slippery pronouns (who is speaking, who is being spoken to?), the high-low allusions (Daffy Duck, please meet Rimbaud), and the twists of context (where are we anyway, and what’s happening here?) that have long been hallmarks of Ashbery’s poetry are on full, rambunctious display. Beginning with the book’s very title, Ashbery invites the reader into the world of his poetry like never before; each poem can be read as a postcard to experiences that could be yours, his, or anyone’s. And yet the poems in Your Name Here are also personal and particular. The collection is dedicated to an old friend, and in the well-known “History of My Life,” Ashbery strikes a rare autobiographical chord. Some of the best-known poems of Ashbery’s later career are here, including “Not You Again,” “Crossroads in the Past,” and “They Don’t Just Go Away, Either.” Polyphonic, deeply honest, and frequently very funny, Your Name Here is both wonder filled and wonderful.

El número especial de Arthur RIMBAUD es un en homenaje al poeta francés que fue incluido en octubre de 2014 en la documentación del Musée Arthur Rimbaud de la ciudad de Charleville (Francia) lugar donde nació y descansan los restos de Rimbaud), y en La Librería de Poesía de Edimburgo (Scottish Poetry Library). Participan del número Neil Leadbeater, John Ashbery, Robert Darnton, Antonio Lastra, y Juan Arabia, entre otros.

An essential, vibrant collection of masterful translations by one of the finest poets at work today Collected French Translations: Prose, the second volume in a landmark two-volume selection of John Ashbery''s translations, focuses on prose writing. Ashbery''s own prose writings and engagement with prose writers—through translations, essays, and criticism—have had a profound impact on the cultural landscape of the past half century. This book presents his versions of, among others, the classic French fairy tale "The White Cat" by Marie-Catherine d''Aulnoy, as well as works by such innovative masters as Raymond Roussel and Giorgio de Chirico. Here are all of Roussel''s Documents to Serve as an Outline and extracts from his Impressions of Africa; selections from Georges Bataille''s darkly erotic first novella, L''abbé C; Antonin Artaud''s correspondence with the writer Jacques Rivière; Salvador Dalí on Willem de Kooning''s art; Jacques Dupin on Giacometti; and key theoretical and conceptual texts by Odilon Redon, Jean Hélion, Iannis Xenakis, and Marcelin Pleynet. Several of these twenty-nine prose pieces, by seventeen fiction writers, playwrights, artists, musicians, and critics, are previously unpublished or have been long unavailable. Many are modern classics, such as Pierre Reverdy''s Haunted House. This book provides fresh insight into the range of French cultural influence on Ashbery''s life and work in literature and the arts.

Hailed by Harold Bloom as "America’s greatest living poet," John Ashbery has won every major American literary award for his poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A beloved and gifted artist, Ashbery takes his place beside Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane in the canon of great American poets. With Quick Question, a new collection of poems published in time for his 85th birthday, John Ashbery proves that his creative power has only grown stronger with age.

The Tosti sisters of Paris, France, have come to the small, upstate New York village of Kelton for a change of pace. But when the pair enters the lives of Alice, an unfulfilled cellist, her brother Marshall, and Fabia and Victor, another sister and brother who are as bumbling as they are overindulged, it is certain that Kelton will never again be the same unassuming place.

Winner of the 2008 Griffin International Poetry Prize His long-awaited volume, a new selection of his later poems, spans ten major collections by one of America''s most visionary and influential poets. Chosen by the author himself, the poems in Notes from the Air represent John Ashbery''s best work from the past two decades, from the critically acclaimed April Galleons and Flow Chart to the 2005 National Book Award finalist Where Shall I Wander. While Ashbery has long been considered a powerful force in twentieth-century culture, Notes from the Air demonstrates clearly how important and relevant his writing continues to be, well into the twenty-first century. Many of the books from which these poems are drawn are regularly taught in university classrooms across the country, and critics and scholars vigorously debate his newest works as well as his classics. He has already published four major books since the turn of the new millennium, and, although 2007 marks his eightieth birthday, this legendary literary figure continues to write fresh, new, and vibrant poetry that remains as stimulating, provocative, and controversial as ever. Notes from the Air reveals, for the first time in one volume, the remarkable evolution of Ashbery''s poetry from the mid-1980s into the new century, and offers an irresistible sampling of some of the finest work by this "national treasure."

On the heels of his National Book Award-nominated "Where Shall I Wander" comes a breathtaking book of new poems from John Ashbery.

You meant more than life to me. I lived through you not knowing, not knowing I was living. I learned that you called for me. I came to where you were living, up a stair. There was no one there. No one to appreciate me. The legality of it upset a chair. Many times to celebrate we were called together and where we had been there was nothing there, nothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely, leaving no stare. When the sun was done muttering, in an optimistic way, it was time to leave that there. -- from "The New Higher"

Fifty years of writing on literature, film, and art by one of the most influential poets and critics of our time

Gathers the work of four of the ''first generation'' of New York poets: Frank O''Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. This anthology provides introductions to the poets'' work, and charts an exchange between experiment and the emergence of language poetry.

One of the greatest living poets in English here explores the work of six writers he often finds himself reading “in order to get started” when writing. Among those whom Ashbery reads at such times are John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert.

Poems "originally published in Adventures in Poetry magazine, 1970."

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.