Carcanet Press - The New York Poets: an anthology

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Contents
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Audio

"They Dream Only Of America"

They dream only of America
To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass:
"This honey is delicious
Though it burns the throat."

And hiding from darkness in barns
They can be grownups now
And the murderer's ash tray is more easily--
The lake a lilac cube.

He holds a key in his right hand.
"Please," he asked willingly.
He is thirty years old.
That was before

We could drive hundreds of miles
At night through dandelions.
When his headache grew worse we
Stopped at a wire filling station.

Now he cared only about signs.
Was the cigar a sign?
And what about the key?
He went slowly into the bedroom.

"I would not have broken my leg if I had not fallen
Against the living room table. What is it to be back
Beside the bed? There is nothing to do
For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it.

And I am lost without you."

John Ashbery

For the first time, The New York Poets gathers in a single volume the best work of four extraordinary poets: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. By the early 1950s all four were settled in Manhattan, collaborating, competing and encouraging each other's radical experiments with language and form. Much of their work reflects their participation in the creative energies of the New York art scene, 'the floods of paint', to quote James Schuyler, 'in whose crashing surf we all scramble'. Believing that anything could be material for a poem, they transformed American poetry with their irreverent wit and daring.

Mark Ford's anthology is an essential introduction to four poets whose work has influenced poetry around the world. It includes detailed background information and a substantial bibliography.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Mark Ford

Select Bibliography

Frank O'Hara

Autobiographia Literaria

Poem (At night Chinamen jump)

Poem (The eager note on my door said "Call me/)

Memorial Day 1950

A Pleasant Thought from Whitehead

Blocks

Homosexuality

Meditations in an Emergency

Music

Poem (There I could never be a boy,)

To the Harbormaster

At the Old Place

My Heart

To the Film Industry in Crisis

Radio

In Memory of My Feelings

A Step Away from Them

Why I Am Not a Painter

Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's

Anxiety

A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island

To Gottfried Benn

The Day Lady Died

Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul

Joe's Jacket

You Are Gorgeous and I'm Coming

Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!)

Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)

Steps

Ave Maria

Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)

First Dances

Fantasy

John Ashbery

The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers

Some Trees

The Painter

"They Dream Only of America"

A Last World

These Lacustrine Cities

from The Skaters

Soonest Mended

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

Definition of Blue

The One Thing That Can Save America

City Afternoon

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Street Musicians

Pyrography

Wet Casements

Daffy Duck in Hollywood

As We Know

At North Farm

A Driftwood Altar

The History of My Life

Kenneth Koch

Fresh Air

You Were Wearing

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

The Circus

Fate

The Simplicity of the Unknown Past

To Marina

Days and Nights

1. The Invention of Poetry

2. The Stones of Time

3. The Secret

4. Out and In

5. Days and Nights

One Train May Hide Another

A Time Zone

James Schuyler

February

May 24th or so

Buried at Springs

Empathy and New Year

An East Window on Elizabeth Street

A Gray Thought

To Frank O'Hara

Shimmer

October

The Bluet

Hymn to Life

June 30,1974

Korean Mums

Wystan Auden

Dining Out With Doug and Frank

The Payne Whitney Poems

Trip

We Walk

Arches

Linen

Heather and Calendulas

Back

Blizzard

February 13,1975

Sleep

Pastime

What

The Snowdrop

En Route to Southampton

Faure's Second Piano Quartet

Index of First Lines

Index of Titles

John Ashbery

John Ashbery is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, most recently Quick Question (January 2013). He is the recipient of many honours, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a MacArthur ‘genius’ award. Born in Rochester, New York, he was educated at Harvard and Columbia. In ... read more

Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch is grouped with John Ashbery , Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler , a grouping which tends to underplay the real differences between each poet's projects; their collaborations were inventive because of their differences, not their similarities, and what marks all four is the ability to work at tangents without ... read more

Frank O'Hara

Born in Maryland in 1926, Frank O'Hara studied first music, then English, at Harvard, publishing his first book of poems in 1952. He worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, edited Art News, wrote extensively on painting, and pursued his interest in theatre. He died in 1966. Most ... read more

James Schuyler

James Schuyler was born in Chicago on 9 November 1923. He attended Bethany College of West Virginia from 1941 to 1943. In the late 40s he moved to New York City where he worked for NBC and befriended W. H. Auden. He later moved to Italy, where he lived in Auden's ... read more

Mark Ford

Mark Ford was born in 1962. His publications include two collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto & Windus 1991, 1998) and Soft Sift (Faber & Faber 2001, Harcourt Brace 2003); a critical biography of the French poet, playwright and novelist Raymond Roussel ( Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams , Faber ... read more

Praise for John Ashbery 'Praised as a magical genius, cursed as an obscure joker, John Ashbery writes poetry like no one else.' The Independent 'Great poetry, as T.S. Eliot said, can communicate before it is understood: Ashbery communicates in a way that both pays homage to language and transcends it at the same time.' The Guardian 'John Ashbery's Collected Poems 1956-1987, edited by Mark Ford (Carcanet), was a book I found inexhaustible. Possibly the greatest living English-speaking poet and one of the most prolific, Ashbery takes language to its limits, so that words serve as pointers to shifting experiences that elude description. Containing his masterpiece 'Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror', one of the most penetrating 20th-century meditations on what it means to be human, this collection succeeded in stirring my thoughts as well as delighting me.' John Gray The Guardian Books Of The Year 2010 'The language of [John Ashbery's] books is informed by his roving enthusiasms for particular composers. His tastes are both eclectic and out-of-the-way.'- Michael Glover, 'A blue rinse for the language,' The Independent, 13 November, 1999 'The careering, centrifugal side of Girls on the Run is one of its most effective tools in creating its special ainbience of good-humoured menace ... Ashbery has made the slush of signification, the realm where words slip, slide, perish and decay, uniquely his own.' - David Wheatley, Times Literary Supplement, 30 June, 2000 'In his seventies John Ashbery offers a sprightly and energetic alternative. Instead of being sluggish he demands that the self must be even more alert, more vigilant, more attentive to the world around it, not indifferent to and weary of it. Alert, vigilant, attentive ... Wakefulness, the brilliantly evocative title of Ashbery's collection.' - Stephen Matterson, 'The Capacious Art of Poetry,' Poetry Ireland Review 62, 114 'Harold Bloom regards [John Ashbery] as something akin to a genius...' - Michael Glover, 'The poet as frustrated composer,' Book and Poetry Review section, The Independent, 14 August, 1998 '...Ashbery is still exuberantly dedicated to the truthful rendering of experience as a flow of sensations that defy interpretation. Consciousness is not so much a stream as a series of jump-cuts from one haunting or zany impression to the next. His best poems have a weirdly, intriguingly satisfying quality.' - Alan Brownjohn, 'Creating a sensation,' Book and Poetry Review section, The Sunday Times, 10 January, 1999

'Stemming in part from Mallarme and in part from Whitman, Ashbery's work creates a tension in which the fine networks of linguistic reverie are balanced by the strong sense of American tradition.'- Peter Ackroyd, 'Books of the Year,' The Times Literary Supplement, 4 December, 1992 '...an Ashbery [poem] does not stand on its own but floats off into the reader's limitless consciousness like a balloon. Balloons can be very beautiful, inspire longing and also make you smile.'- Grey Gowrie, 'Where the commonplace is wonderful,' Book and Poetry Review section, The Daily Telegraph, 5 October, 1996 'John Ashbery's distinctiveness as a poet paradoxically resides in his ability to evade all single identities; like Whitman, he feels most fully himself when he contains multitudes ... [Ashbery] deploys a staggering variety of dictions, ranging from fragments of novelettish narratives to lyrical dream-visions, from the cliché of public speech to scraps of surrealist collage...'- Mark Ford, 'Free-wheeling towards the abyss,' Times Literary Supplement, 27 December, 1991 'Notoriously hard to characterise, Ashbery's poetry has been likened to many things - a spiritual experience or an animated cartoon ... No poet's lines are more accommodating to other voices and idioms ... Like restless guests, his subjects arrive and mingle, don unlikely disguises and abruptly announce they are "off on some expedition"...Such poise lends authority to his "positive melancholy," makes even his excesses ... masterly, and ensures that The Ashbery remains the destination of choice, the place "where everything gets unravelled just right."'- Julian Loose, Book and Poetry Review section, The Guardian, 3 November, 1992 'The Mooring of Starting Out is filled with illustrations glimpsed through luminous, funny, formidably intelligent and often heartbreaking poems.'- Andrew Zawacki, 'A wave of music,' Times Literary Supplement, 12 June, 1998 'John Ashbery is probably the most highly regarded living poet in America ... The "story" element in Ashbery comes over in fragmented and non-consequential ways, but the fragments have a strong power of visual evocation, and a startling precision of outline ... His focus is on a bravura artifice, a depersonalised surface crackling with "possibility," a brilliant randomness in which analogy with Action Painting asserts itself with special force...'- Claude Rawson, 'A poet in the postmodern playground,' Times Literary Supplement, 4 July, 1986 Praise for Frank O'Hara 'O'Hara's hip, glamorous, freewheeling self-celebrations both reflected and helped disseminate a new kind of confidence and daring in American poetry.' Mark Ford 'Wonderful, original poems... He was an essential contact-man between the worlds of painting and poetry. And he suggested a rich and fascinating dialogue between them.' Eavan Boland

The London Review of Books :
Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara and Schuyler: a quartet of sublime jokers who imagined a city into existence. read more

Gareth Twose, Poetry Nottingham , Issue 58: Winter 2004
What is different and innovative about the new Carcanet anthology, The New York Poets , is it allows the reader to see how the quartet of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler functioned, creatively, (and albeit briefly) as a group, a collective entity. read more

English poetry was languishing in the Fifties. read more

The London Review of Books :
Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara and Schuyler: a quartet of sublime jokers who imagined a city into existence. read more

Frank O'Hara reads 'Ode to Joy' (2:27 mins)

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The New York Poets: an anthology John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler Edited by Mark Ford RRP: GBP£ 14.95 Discount: 10% You Save: GBP£ 1.50 Price: GBP£ 13.45 Available Paperback ISBN: 978 1 857547 34 4 Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, American, Anthologies Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Published: March 2004 216 x 135 mm 224 pages Publisher: Carcanet Press Description Excerpt Authors Contents Reviews Audio "They Dream Only Of America" They dream only of America To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass: "This honey is delicious Though it burns the throat." And hiding from darkness in barns They can be grownups now And the murderer's ash tray is more easily-- The lake a lilac cube. He holds a key in his right hand. "Please," he asked willingly. He is thirty years old. That was before We could drive hundreds of miles At night through dandelions. When his headache grew worse we Stopped at a wire filling station. Now he cared only about signs. Was the cigar a sign? And what about the key? He went slowly into the bedroom. "I would not have broken my leg if I had not fallen Against the living room table. What is it to be back Beside the bed? There is nothing to do For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it. And I am lost without you." John Ashbery For the first time, The New York Poets gathers in a single volume the best work of four extraordinary poets: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. By the early 1950s all four were settled in Manhattan, collaborating, competing and encouraging each other's radical experiments with language and form. Much of their work reflects their participation in the creative energies of the New York art scene, 'the floods of paint', to quote James Schuyler, 'in whose crashing surf we all scramble'. Believing that anything could be material for a poem, they transformed American poetry with their irreverent wit and daring. Mark Ford's anthology is an essential introduction to four poets whose work has influenced poetry around the world. It includes detailed background information and a substantial bibliography. Table of Contents Introduction - Mark Ford Select Bibliography Frank O'Hara Autobiographia Literaria Poem (At night Chinamen jump) Poem (The eager note on my door said "Call me/) Memorial Day 1950 A Pleasant Thought from Whitehead Blocks Homosexuality Meditations in an Emergency Music Poem (There I could never be a boy,) To the Harbormaster At the Old Place My Heart To the Film Industry in Crisis Radio In Memory of My Feelings A Step Away from Them Why I Am Not a Painter Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's Anxiety A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island To Gottfried Benn The Day Lady Died Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul Joe's Jacket You Are Gorgeous and I'm Coming Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!) Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun) Steps Ave Maria Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!) First Dances Fantasy John Ashbery The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers Some Trees The Painter "They Dream Only of America" A Last World These Lacustrine Cities from The Skaters Soonest Mended Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape Definition of Blue The One Thing That Can Save America City Afternoon Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror Street Musicians Pyrography Wet Casements Daffy Duck in Hollywood As We Know At North Farm A Driftwood Altar The History of My Life Kenneth Koch Fresh Air You Were Wearing Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams The Circus Fate The Simplicity of the Unknown Past To Marina Days and Nights 1. The Invention of Poetry 2. The Stones of Time 3. The Secret 4. Out and In 5. Days and Nights One Train May Hide Another A Time Zone James Schuyler February May 24th or so Buried at Springs Empathy and New Year An East Window on Elizabeth Street A Gray Thought To Frank O'Hara Shimmer October The Bluet Hymn to Life June 30,1974 Korean Mums Wystan Auden Dining Out With Doug and Frank The Payne Whitney Poems Trip We Walk Arches Linen Heather and Calendulas Back Blizzard February 13,1975 Sleep Pastime What The Snowdrop En Route to Southampton Faure's Second Piano Quartet Index of First Lines Index of Titles John Ashbery John Ashbery is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, most recently Quick Question (January 2013). He is the recipient of many honours, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a MacArthur ‘genius’ award. Born in Rochester, New York, he was educated at Harvard and Columbia. In ... read more Kenneth Koch Kenneth Koch is grouped with John Ashbery , Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler , a grouping which tends to underplay the real differences between each poet's projects; their collaborations were inventive because of their differences, not their similarities, and what marks all four is the ability to work at tangents without ... read more Frank O'Hara Born in Maryland in 1926, Frank O'Hara studied first music, then English, at Harvard, publishing his first book of poems in 1952. He worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, edited Art News, wrote extensively on painting, and pursued his interest in theatre. He died in 1966. Most ... read more James Schuyler James Schuyler was born in Chicago on 9 November 1923. He attended Bethany College of West Virginia from 1941 to 1943. In the late 40s he moved to New York City where he worked for NBC and befriended W. H. Auden. He later moved to Italy, where he lived in Auden's ... read more Mark Ford Mark Ford was born in 1962. His publications include two collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto & Windus 1991, 1998) and Soft Sift (Faber & Faber 2001, Harcourt Brace 2003); a critical biography of the French poet, playwright and novelist Raymond Roussel ( Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams , Faber ... read more Praise for John Ashbery 'Praised as a magical genius, cursed as an obscure joker, John Ashbery writes poetry like no one else.' The Independent 'Great poetry, as T.S. Eliot said, can communicate before it is understood: Ashbery communicates in a way that both pays homage to language and transcends it at the same time.' The Guardian 'John Ashbery's Collected Poems 1956-1987, edited by Mark Ford (Carcanet), was a book I found inexhaustible. Possibly the greatest living English-speaking poet and one of the most prolific, Ashbery takes language to its limits, so that words serve as pointers to shifting experiences that elude description. Containing his masterpiece 'Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror', one of the most penetrating 20th-century meditations on what it means to be human, this collection succeeded in stirring my thoughts as well as delighting me.' John Gray The Guardian Books Of The Year 2010 'The language of [John Ashbery's] books is informed by his roving enthusiasms for particular composers. His tastes are both eclectic and out-of-the-way.'- *Michael Glover, 'A blue rinse for the language,' The Independent, 13 November, 1999* 'The careering, centrifugal side of Girls on the Run is one of its most effective tools in creating its special ainbience of good-humoured menace ... Ashbery has made the slush of signification, the realm where words slip, slide, perish and decay, uniquely his own.' - *David Wheatley, Times Literary Supplement, 30 June, 2000* 'In his seventies John Ashbery offers a sprightly and energetic alternative. Instead of being sluggish he demands that the self must be even more alert, more vigilant, more attentive to the world around it, not indifferent to and weary of it. Alert, vigilant, attentive ... Wakefulness, the brilliantly evocative title of Ashbery's collection.' - *Stephen Matterson, 'The Capacious Art of Poetry,' Poetry Ireland Review* 62, 114** 'Harold Bloom regards [John Ashbery] as something akin to a genius...' - *Michael Glover, 'The poet as frustrated composer,' Book and Poetry Review section, The Independent, 14 August, 1998* '...Ashbery is still exuberantly dedicated to the truthful rendering of experience as a flow of sensations that defy interpretation. Consciousness is not so much a stream as a series of jump-cuts from one haunting or zany impression to the next. His best poems have a weirdly, intriguingly satisfying quality.' - *Alan Brownjohn, 'Creating a sensation,' Book and Poetry Review section, The Sunday Times, 10 January, 1999* 'Stemming in part from Mallarme and in part from Whitman, Ashbery's work creates a tension in which the fine networks of linguistic reverie are balanced by the strong sense of American tradition.'- *Peter Ackroyd, 'Books of the Year,' The Times Literary Supplement, 4 December, 1992* '...an Ashbery [poem] does not stand on its own but floats off into the reader's limitless consciousness like a balloon. Balloons can be very beautiful, inspire longing and also make you smile.'*- Grey Gowrie, 'Where the commonplace is wonderful,' Book and Poetry Review section, The Daily Telegraph, 5 October, 1996* 'John Ashbery's distinctiveness as a poet paradoxically resides in his ability to evade all single identities; like Whitman, he feels most fully himself when he contains multitudes ... [Ashbery] deploys a staggering variety of dictions, ranging from fragments of novelettish narratives to lyrical dream-visions, from the cliché of public speech to scraps of surrealist collage...'*- Mark Ford, 'Free-wheeling towards the abyss,' Times Literary Supplement, 27 December, 1991* 'Notoriously hard to characterise, Ashbery's poetry has been likened to many things - a spiritual experience or an animated cartoon ... No poet's lines are more accommodating to other voices and idioms ... Like restless guests, his subjects arrive and mingle, don unlikely disguises and abruptly announce they are "off on some expedition"...Such poise lends authority to his "positive melancholy," makes even his excesses ... masterly, and ensures that The Ashbery remains the destination of choice, the place "where everything gets unravelled just right."'*- Julian Loose, Book and Poetry Review section, The Guardian, 3 November, 1992* 'The Mooring of Starting Out is filled with illustrations glimpsed through luminous, funny, formidably intelligent and often heartbreaking poems.'*- Andrew Zawacki, 'A wave of music,' Times Literary Supplement, 12 June, 1998* 'John Ashbery is probably the most highly regarded living poet in America ... The "story" element in Ashbery comes over in fragmented and non-consequential ways, but the fragments have a strong power of visual evocation, and a startling precision of outline ... His focus is on a bravura artifice, a depersonalised surface crackling with "possibility," a brilliant randomness in which analogy with Action Painting asserts itself with special force...'*- Claude Rawson, 'A poet in the postmodern playground,' Times Literary Supplement, 4 July, 1986* Praise for Frank O'Hara 'O'Hara's hip, glamorous, freewheeling self-celebrations both reflected and helped disseminate a new kind of confidence and daring in American poetry.' Mark Ford 'Wonderful, original poems... He was an essential contact-man between the worlds of painting and poetry. And he suggested a rich and fascinating dialogue between them.' Eavan Boland The London Review of Books : Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara and Schuyler: a quartet of sublime jokers who imagined a city into existence. read more The London Review of Books : Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara and Schuyler: a quartet of sublime jokers who imagined a city into existence. read more The London Review of Books : Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara and Schuyler: a quartet of sublime jokers who imagined a city into existence. read more Gareth Twose, Poetry Nottingham , Issue 58: Winter 2004 What is different and innovative about the new Carcanet anthology, The New York Poets , is it allows the reader to see how the quartet of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler functioned, creatively, (and albeit briefly) as a group, a collective entity. read more English poetry was languishing in the Fifties. read more The London Review of Books : Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara and Schuyler: a quartet of sublime jokers who imagined a city into existence. read more Frank O'Hara reads 'Ode to Joy' (2:27 mins)	Share this... 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The New York Poets: an anthology

John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler

Edited by Mark Ford