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Ashbery John
John Ashbery: Collected Poems, 1956-1987 (Library of America, No. 187)
 List Price: Price: $25.89 You Save: $14.11 (35%) DescriptionWith this volume, The Library of America inaugurates a collected edition of the works of America?s preeminent living poet. Beginning with Some Trees in 1956, John Ashbery has charted a profoundly original and individual course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, and alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language. This first volume of the collected Ashbery includes the complete texts of his first twelve books, including such groundbreaking collections as Rivers and Mountains, Three Poems, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975), and Houseboat Days. It also features an unprecedented gathering of more than sixty previously uncollected poems written over a period of four decades, a rare treasure trove for poetry lovers. This volume is a landmark portrait of a modern master.
Illuminations
 List Price: Price: $15.49 You Save: $9.46 (38%) Description"If we are absolutely modern—and we are—it's because Rimbaud commanded us to be."—John Ashbery, from the preface First published in 1886, Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations―the work of a poet who had abandoned poetry before the age of twenty-one―changed the language of poetry. Hallucinatory and feverishly hermetic, it is an acknowledged masterpiece of world literature, still unrivaled for its haunting blend of sensuous detail and otherworldly astonishment. In Ashbery's translation of this notoriously elusive text, the acclaimed poet and translator lends his inimitable voice to a venerated classic.W. H. Auden recognized the strong affinities between Ashbery's poetry and Rimbaud's Illuminations in his 1956 introduction to Ashbery's first book, Some Trees, noting that "the imaginative life of the human individual stubbornly continues to live by the old magical notions." And it is here, in the "crystalline jumble" and "disordered collection of magic lantern slides" of Illuminations, as Ashbery writes in the Preface, that we can rediscover this essential lineage. "Absolute modernity" was for Rimbaud "acknowledging the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second. [...] If we are absolutely modern―and we are―it's because Rimbaud commanded us to be." Ashbery's idiomatic and lyrical translations of these forty-four texts convey the originality of Rimbaud's vision to English-speaking readers of a new century.
Where Shall I Wander: New Poems
 List Price: Price: $2.33 You Save: $20.62 (90%) DescriptionYou meant more than life to me. I lived
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems (Poets, Penguin)
 List Price: Price: $8.60 You Save: $8.40 (49%) Description
Ashbery's Forms of Attention (Modern & Contemporary Poetics)
 List Price: Price: $18.95 You Save: $15.05 (44%) DescriptionA major contribution to Ashbery studies and to poetics in general. Andrew DuBois assesses John Ashbery’s career as a poet in the context of changes in 20th-century aesthetics, the rise of the information age, and the proliferation of aural and visual stimuli. The issue of attention, he argues, is useful not only for understanding the problems of perception and concentration in an age of information overload but also for understanding how Ashbery’s poetry and poetry in general contend with those issues. Ashbery’s art, DuBois demonstrates, embodies the conflicts between traditional and postmodern forms of communication. The lack of traditional narrative frameworks or forms in Ashbery’s poems creates problems of attention. This strategy places a heavy burden on the reader, since Ashbery’s content—a mélange of cultural references and sympathies—defies set forms. Yet Ashbery’s concern with traditional poetic conventions is still clear in his work, and it is the tension between past and present modes of poetic discourse that best describes Ashbery’s work as a poet. Among other subjects DuBois addresses Ashbery’s many roles—as theorist, postmodern metaphysical, and enemy of poetic decorum; his experiments in ekphrasis (poems that take other art works as their subjects); his prose; his mastery of the long form as a vehicle for extended meditation; and his use of stream-of-consciousness as a poetic strategy. In highlighting the major aesthetic and cultural impulses underlying Ashbery’s work, DuBois illuminates not only the lasting relevance of his poetry but also the larger issues of attention and perception in reading, thinking, and being in the postmodern era. Ashbery John News
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Xtra.caThe incomparable Robin Blaser influencing a huge group of Canadian and American writers such as George Bowering, Stan Persky, Daphne Marlatt, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Michael Ondaatje, Steve McCaffery, Erin Mouré, BP Nichol, Sharon Thesen, Phyllis Webb and Fanny Howe.