As We Know
John Ashbery
Availability:
Ebook in EPUB format. Available for immediate download after we receive your order
Ebook in EPUB format. Available for immediate download after we receive your order
Publisher:
Open Road Media
Open Road Media
DRM:
Watermark
Watermark
Publication Year:
2014
2014
ISBN-13:
9781480459052
Description:
<DIV><B>Dating from one of the most studied creative periods of John Ashbery’s career, a groundbreaking collection showcasing his signature polyphonic poem “Litany” </B><BR /><BR />First published in 1979, four years after Ashbery’s masterpiece <I>Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror</I>, the poems in <I>As We Know</I> represent the great American poet writing at the peak of his experimental powers. The book’s flagship poem, the seventy-page “Litany,” remains one of the most exciting and challenging of Ashbery’s career. Presented in two facing columns, the poem asks to be read as independent but countervailing monologues, creating a dialogue of the private and the public, the human and the divine, the real and the unreal—a wild and beautiful conversation that contains multitudes.<BR /> <BR /><I>As We Know</I> also collects some of Ashbery’s most witty, self-reflexive interrogations of poetry itself, including “Late Echo” and “Five Pedantic Pieces” (“An idea I had and talked about / Became the things I do”), as well as a wry, laugh-out-loud call-and-response sequence of one-line poems on Ashbery’s defining subject: the writing of poetry (“I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well / But I was mistaken”). Perhaps the most admired poem in this much-discussed volume is “Tapestry,” a measured exploration of the inevitable distance that arises between art, audience, and artist, which the critic Harold Bloom called “an ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ for our time.”<BR /> <BR />Built of doubles, of echoes, of dualities and combinations, <I>As We Know</I> is the breathtaking expression of a singular American voice.<BR /></DIV>