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    As We Know: Poems
    As We Know: Poems
    As We Know: Poems
    Ebook218 pages2 hours

    As We Know: Poems

    By John Ashbery

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Dating from one of the most studied creative periods of John Ashbery’s career, a groundbreaking collection showcasing his signature polyphonic poem “Litany”

    First published in 1979, four years after Ashbery’s masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the poems in As We Know 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.
     
    As We Know 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.”
     
    Built of doubles, of echoes, of dualities and combinations, As We Know is the breathtaking expression of a singular American voice.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459052
    As We Know: Poems
    Author

    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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    • 4/5
      This collection didn't manage to appeal to me, something in the poems kept me at arm's length, or - more likely - it's the other way around. Litany was lost on me; even when listening to a live reading of the poem, I can't wrap my head around listening to two separate streams of thought simultaneously. Late Echo was the first poem in the collection that had an impact on me, and I found his short series of one-sentence (two if you count the title) poems - The Cathedral Is, I Had Thought things Were Going Along Well, Out Over the Bay the Rattle of Firecrackers, and We Were on the Terrace Drinking Gin and Tonics - impressed me for some reason. Other than that, a great collection of poems, but not for me at this time.

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    As We Know - John Ashbery

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