Product Description
Many contemporary critics have been interested in Martin Heidegger's phenomenology and have recognized its importance for literary theory. As a continuation of theoretical explorations, this study undertakes a discussion of poetic visions of reality in the works of contemporary hyper-realistic poets, Czeslaw Milosz and John Ashbery. It breaks new ground by applying the key Heideggerian terms, Dasein, space, time, and culture to explore the reality created by and/or alluded to in the contemporary poetry of Milosz and Ashbery. In its final synthesis, the study proposes the comprehensive concept of ontological transcendence as a model to analyze multidimensional contemporary poetry. ... Read more

Product Description
'Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror'was the first of John Ashbery's books to be published in Britain by Carcanet, and this is its third printing. Since it originally appeared here in 1977, three further collections have followed: 'As We Know', 'Shadow Train' and 'A Wave'. 'Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror'was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. The long title poem, a meditation on Parmigianino's famous self-portrait, has become Ashbery's best-known poem. It is accompanied here by a number of shorter pieces - playful, witty, elusive. ... Read more

Product Description
I got kind of frenzied after the waiting
had stopped, but now am cool as a suburban garden
in some lost city. When it came time for my speech
I could think of nothing, of course.
I gave a little talk about the onion - how its flavor
inspires us, its shape informs our architecture.
There were so many other things I wanted to say, too,
but, dandified, I couldn't strut,
couldn't sit down for all the spit and polish.
Now it's your turn to say something about the wall
in the garden. It can be anything.
- from "Terminal"

In his twentieth collection, John Ashbery continues to examine the themes that have preoccupied him of late: age and its inevitable losses, memories of childhood, the transforming magic of dreams in daily living. Your Name Here offers souvenirs to readers, inviting them to "personalize" the poems with their own associations and memories. Ashbery's masterful voice is heard with renewed vigor and poigancy in these beautiful poems.
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Customer Reviews (4)

Redeemed Area
Ashbery's writing with the crackle of someone just starting out. It's like now that he knows he's in the canon (thanks, Bloom), he can really go looby and make English swing. The autumn leaves fall a little lighter in these poems; reverie (always present) takes a back seat to inspired goofiness. I've admired other Ashbery books--this one I loved. It's made my own elite canon of bathroom reading and not a poem's let me down. I hope I grow old just like this.

Peremptory splendours abound
We've always been sleepily ardent in our admiration of John Ashbery, a boosterism which borders on a fanatical apathy: his perky atonality has a certain depressingly insistent gaiety about it. We value the kinky ecumenism between the patois and the mandarin, the somewhat dopey collision between the vernacular and the highfalutin. We can't wait until the biography comes out, along with its subject, so we can gain some insight into his methods.

We have here lyrics of a rehearsed suddenness, of a customary unpredictability: language whose smooth bumps and well-paved potholes inspire both fearer and farer, both reader and rider, to explore more deeply the simplistic intricacies of Ashbery's frabjously deadpan patois. The images collide in an amiable showdown, a triumphantly graceful slapstick, a dreadfully solemn opera bouffe, which we cannot readily forget. Herein we have the greeting and the greening of a life with all its happy calamities and soulshattering lucky breaks -- an ennui that is at least as jazzy as those halcyon ecstasies of yore, those drab celebrations of the past's disastrous victories.

Negative Capability
Aw nerts this guy is too much for me. I feel like one of the girls with names like Linda, Ruth, and Pat from the 1940s who stand next to an airplane when this poet comes along from the next century. "Your Name Here", the very title, suggests his "negative capability" is acting up again, with results typically mind-blowing, keeping everyone guessing. I rank this almost on the level of the great "Can You Hear, Bird."

Not his best
I disagree with the review below.

Flow Chart was a bore.

His best work recently is in "Can You Here, Bird" and a few books around that time.

His last two, including this one, seem lacking (though this new one has a handful of very good ones).

But if you dig Ashbery, pick it up anyway and see if you disagree. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Fairfield Porter by Fairfield Porter
Gives an good overview of the artist's paintings and thoughts. The images are good, but unfortunatelly some of them are in black and white.

A useful catalogue of the artist's work
This a very slim but large, almost square format publication, was published to accompany an exhibition of Porter's work in Boston 1983 and travelling elsewhere to conclude in New York in 1984. It opens with an introduction to the man Fairfield Porter, followed by an essay discussing his devolvement as an artist and what influenced him. This is followed by Jottings from a Diary, comments by John Bernard Myers. The main text concludes with a conversation between the artist and Paul Cummings. The book concludes with a detailed chronology, a comprehensive bibliography, and a list of the works exhibited.

The book is illustrated throughout with full page plates, mostly in full colour but still with several in black and white. The reproductions are good, and convey the sense of light apparent in the artist's work, and the large square format of the book allows most of them to be reproduced at a good size. What comes across very clearly is the subtle simplicity of Porter's painting, and his sensitive and economic drawing of the human figure.

While I have no quibble with the reproduction of the paintings, I do find the presentation of the text leaves much to be desired. Set in an oversized Pica like font with two unjustified columns to the page, massive paragraph spacing and too much white space evenly distributed, it has an amateurish appearance.

In the apparent absence of any other realistically available publications illustrating Porter's work this is a very useful publication.
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Product Description
Critics, scholars, students, and other readers of contemporary poetry have long appreciated Ashbery's uncanny mastery of the cadence and lyricism of colloquial speech, but they have been less sensitive to the equally important influences in his work of such "outsider" French poets as Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, and Isidore Ducasse (a/k/a Count de Lautréamont). These sometimes overlooked presences are wonderfully alive in this collection of lyric poems, which first appeared in 1992. Now back in print, Hotel Lautréamont underscores Ashbery's ability to be both tragic and playful, dense and volatile, passionate and impersonal. As David Herd observed in New Statesman and Society, this is "a poetry fully and startlingly engaged with the way things happen."
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Customer Reviews (2)

Ashbery Deserves Better
This intriguing, surreal book of poems does not deserve the nasty treatment dished out by the (until now) sole reviewer of this book.I was appalled not just by the mean-spirited nature of the review but also by how strikingly different my impression of Hotel Lautreamont is.It is as though we read two different books.Whatever grudge the earlier reviewer is obviously harboring toward Mr. Ashbery, please do not let this pedantic vocabulary fetishist deter you from a truly rewarding experience.

PS:The uninformed slur on General Grant is worthy of a duel!

Yes
As daring as Ulysses Grant, as timorous as Tennyson, as bold as Beddoes, this imbroglio of tepid vignettes, this rebarbative hymnal of blithe spirituals, never ceases to fascinate the "hypocrite lecteur" -- until, of course, it does. ... Read more

Product Description
Jess: To and From the Printed Page focuses on the artist simply known as "Jess" (1923-2004), and celebrates his lively and lifelong dialogue with poets, poetry and printed matter. Published to accompany the iCI touring exhibition, it features collages made for publication, the books and magazines in which they were reproduced, as well as many previously unreproduced paintings, drawings and assemblages. The book offers a fresh perspective on Jess's work by specifically addressing the interrelation between his art and the California literary culture of which he was a part. It also explores the intimacy of the collaborations and conversations in which he participated over five decades, and points to his effect on younger artists today--through his use of "pop" materials in collage and paint, his early homoerotic themes and his enjoyment of the book format as a compositional vehicle. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Keep Your Eyes Open...
...next time you stroll through a museum. You might make a discovery. I did, this morning. The De Young Museum of San Francisco has three paintings by "Jess", two of which I think are staggeringly good, figurative paintings built with almost bas-relief impasto. I bought this book at the museum store, and I've just begun to live with it.

Much to my surprise, I knew this guy Jess years ago in San Francisco. He was the marriage-partner of the poet Robert Duncan. I didn't enjoy Duncan's poetry, and I suppose I let it show. In any case, we were civil but no more, and I completely ignored the partner's art openings.

My loss.

Jess was born in 1923. His birth name was Burgess Collins. He was a brilliant chemist and worked on the Manhatten Project in the production of plutonium. After 1945, he continued in plutonium science with the Hanford Atomic Energy Project. In 1949, he had an epiphany; he found himself conscience-stricken over the destructive powers of nuclear weapons. He abandoned science entirely and turned to art.

Our gain.

A master of collage
I came across one small work by Jess while visiting a small museum recently, and was utterly taken by its mysterious quality, both erotic & ominous, achieved through collage of kitschy figures with more subtle, understated images. I'd never seen anything quite like it & immediately wanted to know more about the man & his work. This volume is the perfect introduction to both.

The longtime companion of poet Robert Duncan, Jess dropped his last name when he cut ties with his disapproving family. Openly gay long before it was common or safe, his art reflects his life -- although sexuality is just one of his subjects. He was clearly a student of surrealism, incorporating it into his art, sometimes for individual pieces, sometimes to illustrate small magazines.

And his interests are definitely wide-ranging! For example, he recreates text in several Dick Tracy comic strips, creating the satiric & thought-provoking new comic strip, "Tricky Cad." Many of his magazine covers & illustrations have an eerie, otherworldly atmosphere drawing upon alchemical & occult sources. All of his work is infused with intelligence & vision.

Some may believe that anyone can create collage, that it requires no real talent. Well, anyone can create bad or inept collage, and all too many do -- formulaic Victorian fluff & dunce caps, alas! But this is collage at its finest, truly raising the bar, demonstrating that it's art. Highly recommended!
... Read more

Product Description
There are curved stories here, intrigues and quests whose exuberance of plot and sense of farcical immersion in the world of appearances is rendered with a light touch and a sure command of tone, staging the conflict between the mind's drift and the "inflexible etiquette" of form (Gerard Manley Hopkins's "soft sift / In an hourglass"). The making of these condensed dramas is often the unmaking of the person speaking, whose "frets and fresh starts" reveal an original sensibility concerned not with self-display but with a general comedy of wrong moves. Intrepid, cross-pollinated, oblique, Mark Ford has been called an American Philip Larkin and an English John Ashbery, but in fact he is like no one else, and only occasionally like himself. ... Read more

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"James Schuyler and I began writing A Nest of Ninnies purely by chance," writes John Ashbery in his new introduction to this classic of American comic fiction. "We were in a car being driven by the young cameraman, Harrison Starr, with his father as a passenger in the front seat . . . Jimmy said, 'Why don't we write a novel?' And how do we do that, I asked. 'It's easy—you write the first line,' was his reply." The result is one of the strangest and most exuberant experiments in American literary history, a verbal tour de force of suburban Americana. First published in 1969, A Nest of Ninnies is a true gem-in-the-rough, the decades-long collaborative project from two of the great poetic minds of the twentieth century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Uncle Albert Says: abandon yourself to the pleasures of farce
If you love farce from Faydeau through Wodehouse through Joe Keenan (Blue Heaven, Putting on the Ritz, and the first few years of Frasier) you'll love this book. If you don't, please don't read it. I picked it up because it's by two of the '50s era New York School poets, Ashbery and Schuyler. I happen to enjoy that school of poetry, even more than I love their contemporary West Coast poets like Ginsberg, Corso, and company (and I love those too). This is the sort of delightful ego exercise on the part of the author(s) where you turn the key and let the author do the driving--at any speed he wishes. In the end, none of the characters are important, no great moral lessons are learned, what happens and where it happens are more decorative than narrative or metaphorical. You have drinks with a friend and during the course of the evening, the friend tells you this long involved story that is fascinating because he's your friend. And when the evening ends and you both go your separate ways, it was a great evening for no reason more complicated than you spent it with a great friend, who can tell some whopping good stories. Dump all that earnest book-reading you picked up in school and church and let yourself go; read this book and others like it (see Faydeau, Wodehouse, Keenan and company) as one of the top five pleasures of life. You've already abandoned yourself to numbers one and two and survived, right?

Honey I wrote a novel
This novel doesn't exactly break the sound barrier -- Auden went a little overboard in calling it a minor classic -- but is "likable enough," like Hillary Clinton, and has the unpredictability of the game it started as. Ashbery and Schuyler wrote it one sentence at a time: A. started with "Alice was tired," and it blossomed, to the extent that it did, from there. The first third is fairly choppy as a result; however, as the novel progresses it settles into its narrative arc, and the closing scenes are excellent conventional farce. (A plot summary would be inappropriate: one of the pleasures of this book is figuring out where it's trying to go.) The writing is spirited and sporadically brilliant -- both authors won Pulitzers in poetry -- but not very interesting as prose. On the whole, this book is recommended for Ashbery or Schuyler fans, connoisseurs of camp, and those with an interest in how novels are constructed. Others might find it self-indulgent.

Auden was right
This book deserves to be recognized as the "minor classic" W. H. Auden thought it was destined to become.The high camp of much of the proceedings only makes the book more profound in its investigation of the contemporary manners of negotiating affect through objects.In this it looks back to Wilde and Henry James, as it does also in its arch staging of the objectification of a mystified "Europe."Entirely fascinating, urbanely hilarious.

a good romp
Who would think that two experimental poets could write a comic novel without stylistic pretensions? There's nothing profound here, just a quick read with plenty of laughs. The title conveys the substance fairly well:Schuyler and Ashbery have created a cast of middle- to upper-class foolsfor whom they have little respect. This could, of course, be fairlytiresome ("aren't the bourgeosie so silly!"), if it weren't forthe authors' keen sense of humor. Think of this as a detailed pitch for agood Woody Allen movie, or a Firbank novel for the mid-twentieth century. ... Read more

Product Description
Originally published by Black Sparrow Press in 1975, and long out of print, "The Vermont Notebook" combines the writing of the American master John Ashbery with the ink drawings of Joe Brainard (1942-1994). This is Ashbery at his wacky best, from long lists that seem to make some sense, to short lists that seem to make no sense, to made-up diary entries. Here we find Joe Brainard's version of Americana. Combined, there is a wonderful innocence to this book that is found in the work of both of these artists. Joe Brainard's popularity is soaring to new heights as the traveling retrospective of his career captivates museum-goers throughout the United States, and this publication will be a valuable addition to the available publications of his work.

Poetry by John Ashbery. Drawings by Joe Brainard.
49 b&w.
6.75 x 9.5 in. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Ashbery and Brainard
In 1975, the American poet John Ashbery published "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." This difficult book established Ashbery's reputation as a major American poet. The book received the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Ashbery published another book in 1975 which did not receive any accolades. This was a short book, "The Vermont Notebook" published with drawings by the American artist, Joe Brainard (1942 -- 1994) who had been born in Tulsa but had long called New England home."The Vermont Notebook" was published by Joe Martin and Black Sparrow Press -- Martin would achieve fame as the publisher of Charles Bukowski -- although portions of the book had appeared earlier in little magazines. "The Vermont Notebook" quickly became an obscurity in the stream of Ashbery's poetry.

In 2001, this little book was republished in the edition I am reviewing here. In 2008, "The Vermont Notebook" was included in the Library of America's collection of Ashbery's collected poems, 1956 -- 1987, guaranteeing the work's accessibility for future readers.

The collaboration between Ashbery and Brainard is pure delight.Ashbery wrote "The Vermont Notebook" while taking a bus trip through New England. The book is written in a free-flow spontaneous style, a type of "spontaneous prose" that Jack Kerouac and other beat writers had attempted some years earlier. The book also has elements of a collage as Ashbery lifed passages and paragraphs from earlier writings by himself and by others. The several paragraphs at the end of the book, for example, which discuss conservation efforts at the Marine Ecology Station in Marco, Maine, are taken from an article titled "Fishing improves at Marco."

The book flits from one subject to another with lightness, wit, and free association. It begins with a simple reference to "The climate, the cities, the houses, the streets, the stores, lights,people." It then proceeds with increasingly long lists of places, scenes, businesses, people, games, crimes, and other things and activities that Ashbery loosely associates with New England. It is Walt Whitman but with an airy touch. This is followed by musings of different subjects, with no rigorously logical order, from Ashbery comparing himself to "a dump", to ruminations on Charles Ives, to travel, nature, small towns, shopping malls,love, sex, a poodle parlor, nature, suburbia, cigarettes, postcards to friends and much else. The work includes a short poem called "The Fairies Song" which captures much of the feel of the volume.It concludes:

"We dance on hills above the wind
And leave our footsteps there behind.
We raise their tomatoes.
The clear water in the chipped basin reflects it all:
A spoiled life, alive, and streaming with light."

Joe Brainard's drawings, which appear on almost every page are the perfect complement to Asbery's musings. In their simple and frequently prosaic character, Brainard offers an earthy commentary on Ashbery's fancy. Brainard gives the reader simple rural scenes, the sun and the rain, farms, items of old clothes, the poodle, a naked man,lovers kissing. Besides flowers, fish, fishermen, and farms, Brainard offers a drawing of a commode and of the door to a men's room. Brainard's drawings and Ashbery's text intertwine to create a work of whimsy and gaiety.

Many readers have difficulty with Ashbery's "Self-Portrait" and the other volumes of poetry for which he is famous. But it is difficult to avoid being enchanted by this little, formerly obscure little book. In its deftness and lightness of touch, together with Brainard's drawings, this book is an accessible introduction to Ashbery and his art, even for readers who are puzzled by the bulk of his other poetry.

Robin Friedman
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Product Description
And the Stars Were Shining, John Ashbery's sixteenth collection, strikes out into new territory and engages the reader in unexpected ways. In their relative brevity they display all the valiant wit and rich lyric intensity which readers know from Ashberry's expansive longer work.
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Customer Reviews (2)

Chasing Meaning Out Of Assumed Appearances
And The Stars Were Shining By John Ashbery

John Ashbery's penchant for the long, discursively philosophic poem has sometimes served to distract critical attention from his mastery of intensely conceived shortlyrics.

We all have a favourite Ashbery flavour, and mine is the gin-fizzdynamic at work in the relative brevity displayed by the best of theshorter poems gathered in this collection. In fact, I would argue that youwould have to go back to Houseboat Days (1977), to find a comparablesuccess in terms of Ashbery's ability to compress poetic experience into anaccommodatingly resonant tension-field. With Ashbery's method there isalways the danger that expansiveness contributes to fluctuating air-pocketsin the poem's flight-path, and the reader's encounter with inconsistentlysustained epics like Flow Chart is one of locating pivotal wobble in thestratosphere of Ashbery's poetics.

Ashbery's lyric concerns areinvariably with retrieving the moment from unrecorded notice. It's thetransient nature of experience underscored by a deep sense of loss whichfires Ashbery into attempting to arrest whatever proves meaningful to hisimpulsive plot. As he writes in 'The Improvement':

"We never live longenough in our lives/ to know what today is like./ Shards, smiling beaches,/abandon us somehow even as we converse with them./ And the leopard istransparent, like iced tea."

Ashbery's acute sense of being disinheritedfrom the world of things, and the poem is an attempt to establish discoursewith this aesthetic, has him incessantly preoccupied with chasing meaningout of assumed appearances. His way is to puzzle worry into potentialexistential crisis:

"Nothing seems strong enough for/ this life tomanage, that sees beyond/ into particles forming some kind of entity -/ Sowe get dressed kindly, crazy at the moment./ A life of afterwordsbegins."

('The Improvement')

Ashbery's disorientated, upended approachto his subject matter imparts the feel of innovative modernism to his work.And while his poetry is personal by way of its predominantly quietdisclosures: 'I never get hangovers until late afternoon/ and then it'slike a souvenir, an arrangement,' he is never confessional in the manner ofRobert Lowell or Sylvia Plath. Ashbery's quiet presence permeates, butnever crowds his lyrics. Some of the finest poems to be found in thiscollection, 'Works On Paper I,' 'Ghost Riders Of The Moon,' 'Free NailPolish,' 'Local Time,' 'My Gold Chain' succeed by playing enigmaticnarrative against specific visual imagery. In the best of Ashbery theabstract and the concrete unite to impart allusive mystery to the poem. Theending of 'Works On Paper I' perfectly demonstrates what Ashbery doesbest.

"Those who wish to remain naked are coaxed out of laughter/ withtea and nobody's nose is to the grindstone/ anymore, I bet, and you canfigure out these shivering trees./ But the owner of the bookstore know thatthe flea was blown/ out of all proportion,/ with September steps to go downin passing/ before the tremendous dogs are unleased."

Here thejuxtaposition of the disarmingly casual and the lyrically authoritativecombine to create Ashbery's inimitable tang of urbane poetry, a genre heorchestrates with consummate ease throughout this sparkling collection. Ifby comparison the long title poem suffers from a characteristic lack offocus, then the poem's obliqueness and obscurity are counterpointed byAshbery's inexhaustibly pitched poetic eloquence.

JEREMY REED

One of the most personal poetry voices keeps showing charm.
And the stars were shining seems to be a minor Ashberry's work, but don'tbe confused...a great poet is always great. This book is especiallydelightful. Ashberry plays with the dazed reader making a strange andconfusing mixture of images and sounds (something like watching "LostHighway", by David Lynch), painting everything with his particularsense of humour and his vision of life. A bit flamboyant, but completelygreat. To miss it is a crime, as every vulgarity. ... Read more