John Ashbery Book order (chronological)

Featuring masterful translations, this vibrant collection showcases the work of one of today's finest poets. The selections highlight the poet's skill in capturing the essence and nuances of the original texts, offering readers a rich and immersive experience. Each piece reflects a deep understanding of language and emotion, making this collection a vital addition for lovers of poetry and translation alike.

This book presents poetry by Ashbery (1927-2017) from his later collections alongside contemporaneous art writing. It also includes "playlists" featuring music from Ashbery's own collection, reflecting his love for music while writing. His poetry is often described as ekphrastic; however, instead of merely being inspired by art or music, Ashbery engages with the experience of seeing and the artistic strategies involved, offering new ways to contemplate both. Insights from his art writing provide keys to interpreting his poetry. The music he favored often includes contemporary classical works characterized by complex textures and disjunct phrases, mirroring the qualities found in his poetry. Ashbery's work plays with diverse poetic textures and sudden shifts, allowing readers to construct multiple narratives and meanings. He rarely presents linear stories or focuses solely on evocative descriptions. This exploration invites readers to see how poetry, art, and music illuminate and inform each other in Ashbery's work. In the introduction by Mónica de la Torre, she delves into the connection between these three muses and the ekphrastic experience of engaging with Ashbery's poetry.

Collects five long, serial poems which the American master John Ashbery left unfinished.

A capsule of the imaginative life of the individual, Some Trees is the 52nd volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets   Comparing him to T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Burt writes that Ashbery is “the last figure whom half of the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible.” After the publication of Some Trees, selecting judge W. H. Auden famously confessed that he didn’t understand a word of it. Most reviews were negative. But in this first book of poems from one of the century’s most important poets, one finds the seeds of Ashbery’s oeuvre, including the influence of French surrealists—many of whom he translated—and abstract expressionism.

John Ashberry won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashberry reaffirms the poetic powers that have made him such an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. This new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been.

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.

Die Sammlung bietet einen Einblick in die Gedichte John Ashberys aus verschiedenen Schaffensperioden, von surrealistischen Anfängen bis hin zu späteren Texten, und zeigt die Vielfalt eines der bedeutendsten US-amerikanischen Dichter der Gegenwart.

During his career John Ashbery has been hailed as the eminence grise of postmodernism, championed by W.H. Auden and has carried off every major literary prize. Drawn from the work he published up to 1984, this collection makes a wide range of this poet's writing available.

A captivating experiment in traditional poetic form, from one of the most untraditional American poets ever to set pen to paperAt 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.