John Ashbery – författare

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. His startling work alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) playful and recondite, affirms poetry's power to astonish and tackle fundamentals. Drawn from the work he published up to 1984, from the spare, beautiful lyrics of "Some Trees" and the disjunctive, experimentalism of "The Tennis Court Oath", to the powerful mediations on subjectivity of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and "A Wave", this collection makes a wide range of this poet's writing available.

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.

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.

A crackling, moving new collection from one of America''s greatest living poets.In over twenty-six original books, the poems of John Ashbery have long served as signposts guiding us through the delights, woes, hypocrisies, and uncertainties of living in the modern world. With language harvested from everyday speech, fragments of pop culture, objects and figures borrowed from art and literature, his work makes light out of darkness, playing with tone and style to show how even the seemingly frivolous stuff of existence can be employed to express the deepest levels of feeling.Commotion of the Birds showcases once again Ashbery''s mastery of a staggering range of voices and his singular lyric agility: wry, frank, contemplative, resigned, bemused, and ecstatic. The poet in this new collection is at once removed from and immersed in the terrain of his examination. Disarmingly conversational, he invites the reader to join him in looking out onto the future with humor, curiosity, and insight. The lines of these poems achieve a low-humming, thrilling point of vibration, a jostling of feathers before flight.

A stunning collection of work from beloved poet John Ashbery, his first posthumous book Renowned for his inventive mind, ambitious play with language, and dexterity with a wide range of tones and styles, John Ashbery has been a major artistic figure in the cultural life of our time. Parallel Movement of the Hands gathers unpublished, book-length projects and long poems written between 1993 and 2007, along with one (as yet) undated work, to showcase Ashbery''s diverse and multifaceted artistic obsessions and sources, from children''s literature, cliffhanger cinema reels, silent films, and classical music variations by Beethoven''s pupil Carl Czerny to the history of early photography. Ashbery even provides a fresh and humorous take on a well-worn parable from the Gospel of Matthew. These works demonstrate that while producing and publishing the shorter, discrete poems often associated with his late career, Ashbery continued to practice the long-form, project-based writing that has long been an important element of his oeuvre.Edited and introduced by Ashbery''s former assistant poet Emily Skillings and including a preface by acclaimed poet and novelist Ben Lerner, this compelling and varied collection offers new insights into the process and creative interests of a poet whose work continues to influence generations of artists and poets with its signature intertextuality, openness, and simultaneity. A landmark publication of never-before-seen works, this book will enlighten scholars as well as new readers of one of America''s most prominent and celebrated poets.

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.

“An entertaining and shrewd little book … Ashbery is an accomplished raconteur.” —Charles Simic, New York Review of BooksThe most influential American poet of his generation appraises the lesser-known writers who shaped his own confounding, infinitely inventive work.John Ashbery was the quintessential “difficult poet.” When asked to explain his work, he typically responded by insisting that his poetry was its own explanation. Fittingly, then, when he was invited to deliver the Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1989, Ashbery declined to spell out what he put on the page. Instead, he offered rapt audiences a tour of his influences, the authors he turned to as a “jumpstart for times when the batteries have run down.”The poets in Ashbery’s personal canon—John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert—were all tragic figures in their own way, plagued by mental illness or poverty, ridiculed or barely recognized in their own lives, and in some cases, all but forgotten today. More importantly for Ashbery, each wrote poetry that somehow defies the reader. Clare’s sometimes-monotonous naturalism, Roussel’s exhausting maze of parenthetical clauses, and Wheelwright’s eccentric Anglican mysticism do not invite casual reading. But under Ashbery’s tutelage, we experience the idiosyncratic brilliance of these “other traditions,” discovering how they shaped not only Ashbery’s poetics but also the broader trajectory of twentieth-century literature, from surrealism to New Criticism.With inimitable charm, wit, and erudition, the lectures collected in Other Traditions elevate the imperfect and peculiar, affirming the literary virtues of Ashbery’s difficult predecessors. The result is a revealing self-portrait of one of the giants of American poetry, if only through a convex mirror.

A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing—prose, poetry, and hybrid—from its most significant practitioners and innovators  A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century.Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature’s future.Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live.The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can’t be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.

John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preoccupation arises a poetry that passes beyond conventional limits into a highly individual realm of effectiveness, one that may be roughly likened to the visual world of Surrealist painting. Some will find Mr. Ashbery's work difficult, even forbidding; but those who are sensitive to new directions in ideas and the arts will discover here much to quicken and delight them.A 35th anniversary edition of classic work from a celebrated American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize, the national Book Award, and the national Book Critics Circle Award. John Ashbery's second book, The Tennis Court Oaths, first published by Wesleyan in 1962, remains a touchstone of contemporary avant-garde poetry.

An intimate and unique collection of the work of John Ashbery—a prolific poet and art critic—pairing poetry and art writings with playlists of music from his personal library.This book places poetry by Ashbery (1927–2017), gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing. In addition, as Ashbery loved music and listened to it while writing, the “playlists” here offer representative samplings of music from these same years, culled from Ashbery’s own library of recordings. Ashbery’s poetry is frequently described as ekphrastic, though, rather than writing a poem “based on'' or “inspired” by the content of an artwork of or piece of music, he engages with how the experience of seeing it and the artistic strategies employed offer ways of thinking about it and through it. Many of the observations from Ashbery’s art writing also offer keys to how we might read his poetry. Many of the recordings he listened to feature contemporary classical works that emphasize complex textures, disparate sounds, and disjunct phrases. Ashbery’s poetry similarly plays with a diversity of poetic textures and sudden turns such that a reader might construct multiple narratives or pathways of meaning. He rarely offers linear stories or focuses on evocative descriptions of a scene or object. In exploring this ekphrastic book project, the reader is invited to discover how, for Ashbery, these three forms might illuminate and inform one another.

After his spectacular early career, in which he became one of the best-loved and most controversial poets of his time, and his radical and productive middle years, John Ashbery continued effortlessly finding new directions in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, writing playfully, inventively. His language is exquisitely attuned to mundane reality, transforming it. Here in a single, substantial, authoritative, and helpfully annotated volume are seven complete books from this crucial period, starting with Flow Chart (1991), a tour de force that shows Ashbery's mastery of `the entire orchestral potential of the English language,' as Helen Vendler put it. It complements Ashbery's earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, offering a vision of the collective `dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.' The poems range across Ashbery's varied interests and obsessions - opera, film noir, French poetry, the visual arts. Everywhere is his boundless inventiveness, his pitch-perfect ear for American speech, his exuberant erudition. The book ends with twenty-six uncollected poems, among them `Hoboken', a collage that pillages Roget's Thesaurus, and much else.

Parallel Movement of the Hands collects five long, serial poems (and prose poems) which John Ashbery left unfinished and will become part of his archive at Harvard University's Houghton Library.'In-progress and realised' as their editor Emily Skillings puts it, these abundant poems are characteristic of the mature work of this American master, an adept of the glories of American speech, who is alert to its insinuating logics and its wild goose chases through popular culture and secret histories. In these poems, Carl Czerny rubs shoulders with the Hardy Boys, Robert Mapplethorpe and Eadweard Muybridge, all of them integrated into Ashbery's generous, omnivorous forms. 'How could I have had such a good idea?' the poet asks in 'The History of Photography'. So many good ideas, such a wealth of surprising points of departure.

One of the most significant poetic achievements of our time, John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award upon its publication in 1976. 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. This edition celebrates the 30th anniversary of this ground-breaking collection, and of Carcanet's long association with America's most important living poet.

»En vår tids motsvarighet, och i själva verket som jag ser det den enda tillgängliga, till de stora modernistiska nyskaparna från USA, Eliot, Pound eller Wallace Stevens« skrev poeten, översättaren och litteraturvetaren Göran Printz-Påhlson i en introducerande text om John Ashbery 1983.

Då hade John Ashbery redan varit verksam som poet i trettio år. Han hörde till de tongivande i den så kallade New York-skolan av poeter, konstnärer och kompositörer, tillsammans med bland andra John Cage. John Ashbery var också länge verksam som konstkritiker.

John Ashbery har på många sätt varit pionjär i att blanda högt och lågt i sitt språk: surrealismen, science fiction och olika former av populärkultur, bland annat tidiga flygarromaner och pysselböcker, utgjorde viktiga beståndsdelar i hans poesi. Men också det klassiska måleriet, som 1500-talsmålaren Parmigianino och hans självporträtt i en konvex spegel. Att ringa in hans poesi är inte helt lätt, och många har betonat dess komplexitet. Men samtidigt kan där finnas en alldeles självklar enkelhet:

Denna dikt förhåller sig till språket

på ett mycket enkelt plan.

Se, den talar till dig.

Det är en poesi att upptäcka och återupptäcka, en levande modern klassiker. Denna samling innehåller översättningar av bland andra Göran Printz-Påhlson, Tommy Olofsson och Vasilis Papageorgiou.

Rörligt, elegant och melankoliskt

Dagens Nyheter

nu har du chansen att försjunka i en ovanligt innehållsrik och skiftande diktbok som räcker hela livet.

Norrbottens-Kuriren

I John Ashberys dikter finns ett tilltal som är både behärskat och besvärligt, både självbiografiskt och mystifierande. Det är lika intelligent som det är känslomässigt

Jönköpings-Posten

Den läsare som första gången stiftar bekantskap med John Ashberys poesi riskerar att få för sig att den är svår, men poeten har gång på gång betonat att det inte finns några dolda betydelse i hans dikter, ”no hidden meanings”, och att de därför inte ropar efter fotnoter eller lärda förklaringar som exempelvis T.S. Eliots diktning. Vad som sker i den är emellertid att Ashbery gång på gång blandar bort korten, att han liksom fintar med en avsikt och ett identifierbart ämne för sin dikt, men att han strax därefter börjar tala om något helt annat. Han sätter helt enkel ett medvetande i rörelse.Ur Tommy Olofssons förord

Detta urval är en samling tolkningar av fyra olika översättare från åttiotalet och framåt, som engagerat sig i att presentera en av de största amerikanska poeterna för svenska läsare: Tommy Olofsson, Vasilis Papageorgiou, Göran Printz-Påhlson och Ragnar Strömberg.Tolkningarna är hämtade ur ett dussintaldiktsamlingar ur Ashberys rika produktion.

John Ashbery har på många sätt varit pionjär i att blanda högt och lågt i sitt språk: surrealismen, science fiction och olika former av populärkultur, bland annat tidiga flygarromaner och pysselböcker, utgjorde viktiga beståndsdelar i hans poesi. Men också det klassiska måleriet, som 1500-talsmålaren Parmigianino och hans självporträtt i en konvex spegel. Att ringa in hans poesi är inte helt lätt, och många har betonat dess komplexitet. Men samtidigt kan där finnas en alldeles självklar enkelhet:

Denna dikt förhåller sig till språket

på ett mycket enkelt plan.

Se, den talar till dig.

»En vår tids motsvarighet, och i själva verket som jag ser det den enda tillgängliga, till de stora modernistiska nyskaparna från USA, Eliot, Pound eller Wallace Stevens« skrev poeten, översättaren och litteraturvetaren Göran Printz-Påhlson i en introducerande text om John Ashbery 1983.

Då hade John Ashbery redan varit verksam som poet i trettio år. Han hörde till de tongivande i den så kallade New York-skolan av poeter, konstnärer och kompositörer, tillsammans med bland andra John Cage. John Ashbery var också länge verksam som konstkritiker.

Det är en poesi att upptäcka och återupptäcka, en levande modern klassiker. Denna samling innehåller översättningar av bland andra Göran Printz-Påhlson, Tommy Olofsson och Vasilis Papageorgiou.

John Ashbery (1917-2017), amerikansk poet och konstkritiker, belönad med bland annat både National Book Award och Pulitzerpriset för sin "Självporträtt i en konvex spegel". Mellan 1974 och 1990 undervisade han vid Brooklyn College i New York och var professor vid Bard College i språk och litteratur mellan 1990 och 2008. Sedan debuten i början av 1950-talet gav han ut ett trettiotal diktsamlingar.

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, poets he turns to as "a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down." Among those whom John Ashbery reads at such times are John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. Less familiar than some, under Ashbery's scrutiny these poets emerge as the powerful but private and somewhat wild voices whose eccentricity has kept them from the mainstream--and whose vision merits Ashbery's efforts, and our own, to read them well.Deeply interesting in themselves, Ashbery's reflections on these poets of "another tradition" are equally intriguing for what they tell us about Ashbery's own way of reading, writing, and thinking. With its indirect clues to his work and its generous and infectious appreciation of a remarkable group of poets, this book conveys the passion, delight, curiosity, and insight that underlie the art and craft of poetry for writer and reader alike. Even as it invites us to discover the work of poets in Ashbery's other tradition, it reminds us of Ashbery's essential place in our own.

Over forty new poems in verse and prose make up A Wave, John Ashbery's tenth collection. The title poem is a twenty-page meditation on change, loss and adjustment; it is a major poem that takes place alongside 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror'and 'Litany' as a challenging masterwork of modern American poetry.John Ashbery describes the way in which the rhythm of childhood memories permeates the verse of his long poem,'A Wave':'Waves have always been somehow embedded in my mind because I spent a great deal of my childhood on the edge of one of the great lakes, Lake Ontario, where my grandparents lived. They're not as big as the ones on the ocean but they do get to be pretty big and you hear them all day long, and their rhythm is something that has always been with me and keeps erupting in the poetry.'(talking to David Sexton, The Sunday Times, 16th June 1983)

The poems in Breezeway move lightly between the everyday world, with its pleasures and absurdities, and the worlds of literature and art, with theirs. John Ashbery’s poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing, the work of an old and always a new master with an uncanny understanding of our age, its fears and fragmentation, its fulfilments. Here is Mr Salteena and the station of the Metro, demystified Middle English mysticism and a peculiarly-paced samba, a drugstore, a supermarket, Batman and his dog Pastor Fido, all concluding in ‘A Sweet Disorder’, in which Herrick is decisively transformed: ‘Pardon my sarong. I’ll have a Shirley Temple.’