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The New York Poets: an anthologyJohn Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and James SchuylerEdited by Mark Ford
Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, American, Anthologies
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (224 pages) (Pub. Mar 2004) 9781857547344 £14.95 £13.45
"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
Awards won by John Ashbery
Winner, 1997 Gold Medal for Poetry
Winner, 2001 Wallace Stevens Award
Winner, 1995 Robert Frost Medal
Winner, 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror)
Winner, 1976 National Book Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror)
Winner, 1976 Pulitzer Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror)
Praise for John Ashbery
'That Ashbery had these several extended works underway simultaneously testifies not only to his unflagging fealty to the form but also to his extravagantly various powers of invention and intelligence... Even as the references that undergird these projects range from the reassuringly familiar to the dauntingly obscure, as is typical with Ashbery, they characterize a rarefied mental atmosphere, one in which the poet's droll self-awareness deflates what otherwise might be pretension... Ashbery recognized the porous border between decision and delusion, between finality and its seeming appearance. This collection of unfinished works allows readers to tread that border as well.'
Albert Mobilio, Poetry 'This is an exciting missing piece of the jigsaw for Ashbery enthusiasts. Here language fizzes with a vital "off-kilter quality" and an Ashberian state of open-ended possibility.' The Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 'I'll keep returning to The Wave, knowing that each time I do, I'll connect with poems, and lines in poems, I haven't noticed before and recconect with those that have resonated already' Pam Thompson, The North 'John Ashbery's final collection of poetry disguises itself well as a mid-career high. The energy and modernity of his strange little worlds tell nothing of his age.' Stand Magazine 'More than a century after Arthur Rimbaud composed his Illuminations they are reborn in John Ashbery's magnificent translation. It is fitting that the major American poet since Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens should give us this noble version of the precursor of all three.' Harold Bloom 'A fine collection of poems rooted in 21st-century America.' Robert McCrum, The Observer 'More than a century after Arthur Rimbaud composed his Illuminations they are reborn in John Ashbery's magnificent translation. It is fitting that the major American poet since Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens should give us this noble version of the precursor of all three.' Harold Bloom 'Quick Question, with the hushed intensity of its music and great lyric beauty, could only be Ashbery.' Ian Thomson, Financial Times The book invites the reader to poetic gluttony. It serves as a corrective to the monoglot provincialism by which the Anglophone world is still bedevilled. Sean O'Brien, Independent 'The lyrics in Breezeway, a new collection by the octogenarian poet John Ashbery are as good as his finest. I especially like the final poem, poignantly reprising the last line of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale', "Do I wake or sleep?"' Salley Vickers, The Observer - The New Review, 29.11.2015. '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 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 '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 Praise for Frank O'Hara '... a remarkable new poetry - both modest and monumental, with something basically usable about it - not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a liveable space.' John Ashbery '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 |
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