As We Know
by John Ashbery
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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 show more 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. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
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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178+ Works 6,538 Members
John Ashbery was born on July 28, 1927 in Rochester, New York. He received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and a master's degree in English from Columbia University. After graduating, he wrote advertising copy for Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill. In 1955, he won the Yale Younger Poets prize for his first collection, Some Trees. show more While on a Fulbright scholarship to Paris, he began writing art criticism and editing small journals. After about a decade in France, he returned to New York, where he became executive editor of ARTnews and continued to work as an arts journalist. After ARTnews was sold in 1972, he taught and wrote art criticism. He wrote several collections of poetry including Houseboat Days, Flow Chart, And the Stars Were Shining, and Turandot and Other Poems. He received a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. He also received the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry in 1992, the Ambassador Book Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2011. In 1993, the French government made him a Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He also translated the poems of Pierre Martory. He died on September 3, 2017 at the age of 90. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.50)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 1
