Houseboat Days: Poems
By John Ashbery
4/5
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About this ebook
Remarkable for its introspection and for the response it elicited when it was first published in 1977, Houseboat Days is Ashbery’s much-discussed follow-up to his 1975 masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and remains one of his most studied books to date.
Houseboat Days begins with the moving, unforgettable poem “Street Musicians,” an allegory of artistic and personal loss that came ten years after the death of Ashbery’s friend and fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara. But while many of the poems in Houseboat Days are strikingly personal, especially when compared to Ashbery’s work from the 1950s and 1960s, the collection is less about the poet than about the act of writing poetry. In such widely anthologized poems as “Wet Casements,” “Syringa,” “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” and “What Is Poetry,” Ashbery embraces the challenge of his own ars poetica, exploring and exploding the trusses, foundations, and underground caverns that underlie the creative act, and specifically, the act of creating a poem. Marjorie Perloff of the Washington Post Book World called Houseboat Days “the most exciting, most original book of poems to have appeared in the 1970s.”
John Ashbery
<p><strong>John Ashbery </strong>was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including <em>Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; </em>and <em>Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, </em>which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.</p>
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Reviews for Houseboat Days
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ashbery’s poetry slips off the page so effortlessly that it seems unnatural at times. His work is at once influenced by almost everyone before and wholly original. Anyone looking to see the direction modern poetry is taking need look no further. The two pieces most worthy of note are “Melodic Trains” and “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.”
Book preview
Houseboat Days - John Ashbery
Street Musicians
One died, and the soul was wrenched out
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on
The same corners, volumetrics, shadows
Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever
Called, through increasingly suburban airs
And ways, with autumn falling over everything:
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is. The other beached
Glimpses of what the other was up to:
Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.
So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself
In November, with the spaces among the days
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.
Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.
The Other Tradition
They all came, some wore sentiments
Emblazoned on T-shirts, proclaiming the lateness
Of the hour, and indeed the sun slanted its rays
Through branches of Norfolk Island pine as though
Politely clearing its throat, and all ideas settled
In a fuzz of dust under trees when it’s drizzling:
The endless games of Scrabble, the boosters,
The celebrated omelette au Cantal, and through it
The roar of time plunging unchecked through the sluices
Of the days, dragging every sexual moment of it
Past the lenses: the end of something.
Only then did you glance up from your book,
Unable to comprehend what had been taking place, or
Say what you had been reading. More chairs
Were brought, and lamps were lit, but it tells
Nothing of how all this proceeded to materialize
Before you and the people waiting outside and in the next
Street, repeating its name over and over, until silence
Moved halfway up the darkened trunks,
And the meeting was called to order.
I still remember
How they found you, after a dream, in your thimble hat,
Studious as a butterfly in a parking lot.
The road home was nicer then. Dispersing, each of the
Troubadours had something to say about how charity
Had run its race and won, leaving you the ex-president
Of the event, and how, though many of those present
Had wished something to come of it, if only a distant
Wisp of smoke, yet none was so deceived as to hanker
After that cool non-being of just a few minutes before,
Now that the idea of a forest had clamped itself
Over the minutiae of the scene. You found this
Charming, but turned your face fully toward night,
Speaking into it like a megaphone, not hearing
Or caring, although these still live and are generous
And all ways contained, allowed to come and go
Indefinitely in and out of the stockade
They have so much trouble remembering, when your forgetting
Rescues them at last, as a star absorbs the night.
Variant
Sometimes a word will start it, like
Hands and feet, sun and gloves. The way
Is fraught with danger, you say, and I
Notice the word fraught
as you are