One of Ashbery’s most important masterworks: Widely studied, critically admired, and essential to understanding one of the modern era’s most revolutionary poets

The Yale Series of Younger Poets champions the most promising new American poets. Awarded since 1919, the Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award in the United States.

John Ashbery's first book, Some Trees (1956) narrowly beat out a manuscript by fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara to win the renowned Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—after the book had been rejected in an early screening round. Competition judge W. H. Auden was perhaps the first to note, in his original preface to Some Trees, the meditative polyphony that decades of readers have come to identify as Ashbery’s unique style: “If he is to be true to nature in this world, he must accept strange juxtapositions of imagery, singular associations of ideas.”

John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preoccupation arises a poetry that passes beyond conventional limits into a highly individual realm of effectiveness, one that may be roughly likened to the visual world of Surrealist painting. Some will find Mr. Ashbery’s work difficult, even forbidding; but those who are sensitive to new directions in ideas and the arts will discover here much to quicken and delight them.

When Rivers and Mountains was published in 1966, American poetry was in a state of radical redefinition, with John Ashbery recognized as one of the leading voices in the New York School of poets. Ashbery himself had just returned to America from ten years abroad working as an art critic in France, and Rivers and Mountains, his third published collection of poems, is now considered by many critics to represent a pivotal transition point in his artistic career. The poet who would gain widespread acclaim with his multiple-award-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) is, in this collection, still very much engaged in the intimate, personal project of taking his poetry apart and putting it back together again, interrogating not just the act of writing but poetry itself—its purpose, its composition, its fundamental parts.

Nominated for a National Book Award by a panel of judges that included W. H. Auden and James Dickey, Rivers and Mountains includes two of Ashbery’s most studied and admired works. “Clepsydra,” which takes its name from an ancient device for measuring the passage of time, echoes both the physical form and the philosophical weight of a water clock in its contemplation of the experience of time as it passes. “The Skaters,” the long poem that closes the collection, was immediately praised as a masterpiece of modern American poetry, and is the work that perhaps most clearly introduces the voice for which Ashbery is now well known and loved: generous, restless, wide-ranging, and human.

Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Fellowships are awarded through two annual competitions: one open to citizens and permanent residents of the United States and Canada, and the other open to citizens and permanent residents of Latin America and the Caribbean.

James Schuyler and I began writing A Nest of Ninnies purely by chance," writes John Ashbery in his new introduction to this classic of American comic fiction. "We were in a car being driven by the young cameraman, Harrison Starr, with his father as a passenger in the front seat . . . Jimmy said, 'Why don't we write a novel?' And how do we do that, I asked. 'It's easy—you write the first line,' was his reply." The result is one of the strangest and most exuberant experiments in American literary history, a verbal tour de force of suburban Americana. First published in 1969, A Nest of Ninnies is a true gem-in-the-rough, the decades-long collaborative project from two of the great poetic minds of the twentieth century.

Ashbery (With Lee Hawood and Tom Raworth) published Penguin Modern Poets 19

A provocative, challenging masterpiece by John Ashbery that set a new standard for the modern prose poem

“The pathos and liveliness of ordinary human communication is poetry to me,” John Ashbery has said of this controversial work, a collection of three long prose poems originally published in 1972, adding, “Three Poems tries to stay close to the way we talk and think without expecting what we say to be recorded or remembered.”

The effect of these prose poems is at once deeply familiar and startlingly new, something like encountering a collage made of lines clipped from every page of a beloved book—or, as Ashbery has also said of this work, like flipping through television channels and hearing an unwritten, un-scriptable story told through unexpected combinations of voices, settings, and scenes.

In Three Poems, Ashbery reframes prose poetry as an experience that invites the reader in through an infinite multitude of doorways and reveals a common language made uncommonly real.

Poetry by John Ashbery. Drawings by Joe Brainard.

John Ashberry won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashberry reaffirms the poetic powers that have made him such an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. This new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been.

John Ashbery wins the National Book Award for Poetry

The National Book Critics Circle honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature.

Is poetry the act of putting something together, or the art of taking something apart? Houseboat Days, one of John Ashbery’s most celebrated collections, offers its own answer

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.”

As We Know presents 47 lyrical pieces together with a long poem, Litany. Here, as in the shorter lyrics, is a revelation of the self's progress toward identity--sometimes silence and solitude, sometimes through the cacophony of the modern urban world. --Viking Penguin/Penguin Books.

A captivating experiment in traditional poetic form, from one of the most untraditional American poets ever to set pen to paper

At first glance, John Ashbery’s Shadow Train seems to embrace the constraints of traditional poetic form—but closer reading reveals that this work is Ashbery at his revolutionary best. In fifty poems, each consisting solely of four connected quatrains, Ashbery apparently plays by the rules while simultaneously violating every single one. Over and over again, the familiar, almost sonnet-like sixteen-line form creates an outline of a poem within which, one would expect, poetry is meant to arrive—as a station waits for a train. And yet, as with many of the world’s greatest poems, the act of creating poetry also relies on the reading and the reader—in other words, as this collection’s signature poem “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” puts it, “the poem is / you.”

In Shadow Train, Ashbery demonstrates how language influences our experience of reality, creating it and sustaining it while also remaining mysterious and ineffable: constantly arriving, but impossible to catch.

Established in 1975, this $25,000 award recognizes the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous calendar year. The prize includes distribution of the winning book to hundreds of Academy of American Poets members.

The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize honors the memory of Lenore Marshall (1897-1971), a poet, novelist, essayist, and political activist

The prize was established in 1948 by Paul Mellon and was named after Carl Jung’s home in Switzerland. The Bollingen Prize for Poetry is awarded every two years for the best volume of poetry published in those years or for a poet’s lifetime achievement in his or her art. The poets, editors, critics, and teachers who have awarded and received the Bollingen Prize are at the root of its distinguished history. 

From the early virtuosity of Some Trees and The Tennis Court Oath through the triumphs of The Double Dream of Spring and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror to the latest brilliance of A Wave—each new collection of John Ashbery’s verse has broken new ground.

Now, from the whole range of a lifetime’s work, Ashbery has chosen his own selection of 138 poems, including short lyrics, haiku, prose poems, and many of his major long poems. Seeing these great works together in one volume, readers will be able to savor a distillation of John Ashbery’s work and appreciate fully how remarkable is his achievement.

created under the will of the late Ralph Hayes, an influential American business executive, and philanthropist. Hayes conceived the awards to reward and encourage the best of human performance worldwide. Hayes served on the board of directors of PNC Bank, Delaware's predecessor banks from 1935 to 1965. Through the Common Wealth Awards, he sought to recognize outstanding achievement in eight disciplines: dramatic arts, literature, science, invention, mass communications, public service, government, and sociology. The awards also provide an incentive for people to make future contributions to the world community.

In Ashbery’s 1987 collection, ballads, folklore, and fairy tales mesh with the anxieties and idioms of modern life

For a book by one of the leading avant-garde poets of modern literature, John Ashbery’s April Galleons is suffused with voices from the past. There are echoes of the Romantics in the elegiac “A Mood of Quiet Beauty” and “Vetiver,” allusions to ballads and folkloric epics in “Finnish Rhapsody” and “Forgotten Song,” and veiled references to legends, folk songs, and fairy tales. But as always with Ashbery, the modern world is the microphone through which these past voices are made to speak, amplified and invigorated by Ashbery’s signature wit and generosity of spirit.

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year in which it was first published, April Galleons is a must-read collection from a notable period in John Ashbery’s long and lauded career.

America's great poet and art critic, John Ashbery, presents some of his most provocative essays on art. Ashbery has long been one of America's most important art critics--first for the Paris Herald Tribune and later for New York and Newsweek. Illustrated.

refer to the description of Three Poems (1972) 

A quintessentially American epic poem that rewrites all the rules of epic poetry—starting with the one that says epic poetry can’t be about the writing of epic poetry itself

The appearance of Flow Chart in 1991 marked the kickoff of a remarkably prolific period in John Ashbery’s long career, a decade during which he published seven all-new books of poetry as well as a collected series of lectures on poetic form and practice. So it comes as no surprise that this book-length poem—one of the longest ever written by an American poet—reads like a rocket launch: charged, propulsive, mesmerizing, a series of careful explosions that, together, create a radical forward motion.

The prize honors a living U.S. poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition"; its value is $100,000 making it one of the richest literary prizes in the world. The prize has been called "among the most prestigious awards that can be won by an American poet.”

In John Ashbery’s haunting 1992 collection, just as in the traveler’s experience of a hotel, we recognize everything, and yet nothing is familiar—not even ourselves

Hotel Lautréamont invites readers to reimagine a book of poems as a collection of hotel rooms: each one empty until we enter it, and yet in truth abundantly furnished with associations, necessities, and echoes of both the known and the alien. The collection’s title poem is itself an evocative echo: Comte de Lautréamont was the pseudonym taken by Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, a radical nineteenth-century French writer about whom little is known except that he produced one remarkable pre-symbolist epic prose poem called The Songs of Maldoror and died of fever at the age of twenty-four in a hotel in Paris during Napoleon III’s siege of the city in 1870.

Addressed to lonely ghosts, lingering guests, and others, the poems in Hotel Lautréamont present a study of exile, loss, meaning, and the artistic constructions we create to house them.

John Ashbery's Houseboat Days, Shadow Train, and A Wave in a one-volume work

Witty yet heartbreaking, conversational yet richly lyrical, John Ashbery’s sixteenth poetry collection showcases a mastery uniquely his own

And the Stars Were Shining originally appeared in 1994, toward the midpoint of a startlingly creative period in Ashbery’s long career, during which the great American poet published no fewer than nine books in ten years. The collection brings together more than fifty compact, jewellike, intensely felt poems, including the well-known “Like a Sentence” (“How little we know, / and when we know it!”) and the lyrical, deeply moving thirteen-part title poem recognized as one of the author’s greatest. This collection is Ashbery at his most accessible, graceful, and elegiac.

A 1995 collection of poems that finds John Ashbery at his most conversational, funny, and surprising

In Can You Hear, Bird, John Ashbery’s seventeenth collection, language is both a plaything and a sandbox. The poems are arranged not in the order of their composition but alphabetically, by the first letter in their titles, like the neatly arrayed keys of some fabulous Seussical instrument. In line after line, Ashbery demonstrates his alertness to language as it is spoken, heard, broadcast, and dreamed—and sets himself the task of rewriting, redefining, and revising the American idiom we think we know so well. Can You Hear, Bird is a decisive example of the uniquely Ashberyan sensibility his many fans love, revealing a generous and acute chronicler of the everyday bizarre, an observant and humane humorist, and an ear trained on decoding our modern world’s beguiling polyphony 

Awarded annually at the discretion of the Poetry Society of America's Board of Governors for distinguished lifetime achievement in American Poetry.

Robert Mapplethorpe's reputation rests largely on a body of black and white sexual imagery, yet he was one of the most elegant still-life photographers. His flower studies, to which he sometimes referred to as his 'New York flowers' are slightly poisonous and very sexual. This will be the most decorative of all the Mapplethorpe books.

A collection of poems that recall, in their powerful transformations of language, the moment of clarity that arrives upon waking from a dream

One of John Ashbery’s most critically acclaimed collections since his iconic works of the mid-1970s, Wakefulness was praised in 1999 for its beauty and alertness. In these pages, the great poet is at once luring the reader into a vivid dream and waking us up with a jolt of recognition. In poems such as “The Village of Sleep,” “Shadows in the Street,” and “Wakefulness,” dreams, sleeplessness, and other transformational and liminal states are revealed to be part of a ceaseless continuity of accelerating changes. Even the most seemingly familiar phrases (“stop me if you’ve heard this one”) are ever in the process of changing their meanings, especially in Ashbery’s hands. And distinctive new realities are created constantly by the power of words, in strange and beautiful combinations. With every word and every line, Ashbery questions the real and summons a new reality.

John Ashbery’s wild, deliriously inventive book-length poem, inspired by the adventures of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls

Henry Darger, the prolific American outsider artist who died in 1973, leaving behind over twenty thousand pages of manuscripts and hundreds of artworks, is famous for the elaborate alternate universe he both constructed and inhabited, a “realm of the unreal” where a plucky band of young girls, the Vivian's, helps lead an epic rebellion against dark forces of chaos. Darger’s work is now renowned for its brilliant appropriation of cultural ephemera, its dense and otherworldly prose, and its utterly unique high-low juxtaposition of popular culture and the divine—some of the very same traits that decades of critics and readers have responded to in John Ashbery’s many groundbreaking works of poetry.

In Girls on the Run, Ashbery’s unmatched poetic inventiveness travels to new territory, inspired by the characters and cataclysms of Darger’s imagined universe. Girls on the Run is a disquieting, gorgeous, and often hilarious mash-up that finds two radical American artists engaged in an unlikely conversation, a dialogue of reinvention and strange beauty.

A mesmerizing, endlessly entertaining collection that shows John Ashbery at his most exuberant, honest, and inviting

John Ashbery’s nineteenth original collection of poetry, first published in 2000, might be one of the “Ashberyest” of his long and varied career. In these poems, the slippery pronouns (who is speaking, who is being spoken to?), the high-low allusions (Daffy Duck, please meet Rimbaud), and the twists of context (where are we anyway, and what’s happening here?) that have long been hallmarks of Ashbery’s poetry are on full, rambunctious display. Beginning with the book’s very title, Ashbery invites the reader into the world of his poetry like never before; each poem can be read as a postcard to experiences that could be yours, his, or anyone’s.

And yet the poems in Your Name Here are also personal and particular. The collection is dedicated to an old friend, and in the well-known “History of My Life,” Ashbery strikes a rare autobiographical chord.

Some of the best-known poems of Ashbery’s later career are here, including “Not You Again,” “Crossroads in the Past,” and “They Don’t Just Go Away, Either.” Polyphonic, deeply honest, and frequently very funny, Your Name Here is both wonder-filled and wonderful.

One of the greatest living poets in English here explores the work of six writers he often finds himself reading "in order to get started" when writing, poets he turns to as "a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down." Among those whom John Ashbery reads at such times are John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. Less familiar than some, under Ashbery's scrutiny these poets emerge as the powerful but private and somewhat wild voices whose eccentricity has kept them from the mainstream--and whose vision merits Ashbery's efforts, and our own, to read them well.

Deeply interesting in themselves, Ashbery's reflections on these poets of "another tradition" are equally intriguing for what they tell us about Ashbery's own way of reading, writing, and thinking. With its indirect clues to his work and its generous and infectious appreciation of a remarkable group of poets, this book conveys the passion, delight, curiosity, and insight that underlie the art and craft of poetry for writer and reader alike. Even as it invites us to discover the work of poets in Ashbery's other tradition, it reminds us of Ashbery's essential place in our own.

 Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a founding influence on the New York School of poetry, Ashbery's writing is by turns playful, touching, and strange, frequently subverting its own apparent claims to sentiment.

The Wallace Stevens Award is given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Established in 1994, the award carries a $100,000 stipend. Recipients are chosen by the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors.

a poet appointed to, or regarded unofficially as holding, an honorary representative position in a particular country, region, or group.

refer to The Vermont Notebook (1975) edition

John Ashbery’s restless, witty meditation on aging and the music of change: A must-read collection from America’s greatest modern poet

The child’s game Chinese Whispers, known in America as Telephone, is an exercise in transforming the recognizable into something beautifully strange. John Ashbery’s twenty-fourth collection of poems, Chinese Whispers, re-creates in every line the accidentally transformative logic of the language game for which the book is named. In sixty-three charged and often very funny poems, Ashbery confronts the relentlessness of age and time while demonstrating, in his unmistakable, self-reflexive style, the process by which a single thought unravels, multiplies, distends, travels, and finally arrives, changed and unfamiliar.

First published in 2002, shortly after Ashbery’s seventy-fifth birthday, Chinese Whispers is a collection in which fairy tales, mysteries, and magic dollhouses interleave effortlessly with the everyday of pancakes and popular culture. Ashbery’s language is absolutely recognizable from modern life as it is experienced, but at the same time is as dreamlike and disquieting as intercepted transmissions from another world.

Selected Prose contains a broad selection of texts by internationally acclaimed poet and critic John Ashbery. This third collection of Ashbery's critical writings dramatically expands the terrain covered by the first two, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987 and Other Traditions (first presented as the Norton Lectures at Harvard). These essays on writers, artists, filmmakers and the life of a poet provide insight into Ashbery's evolution as one of the major poets in English. Ashbery's criticism is as essential to the cultural history of the twentieth century as was that of T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. His unique sensibility has had a profound impact on the literature and arts of our time, and his influence is certain to be felt for decades to come. Editor Eugene Richie's introduction provides a meaningful context for fifty years' worth of critical and creative prose by one of America's finest poets.

This long-awaited volume, a new selection of his later poems, spans ten major collections by one of America's most visionary and influential poets. Chosen by the author himself, the poems in Notes from the Air represent John Ashbery's best work from the past two decades, from the critically acclaimed April Galleons and Flow Chart to the 2005 National Book Award finalist Where Shall I Wander.

While Ashbery has long been considered a powerful force in twentieth-century culture, Notes from the Air demonstrates clearly how important and relevant his writing continues to be, well into the twenty-first century. Many of the selections found here are regularly taught in university classrooms across the country, and critics and scholars vigorously debate his newest works as well as his classics. He has already published four major books since the turn of the new millennium, and, although 2007 marked his eightieth birthday, this legendary literary figure continues to write fresh, new, and vibrant poetry that remains as stimulating, provocative, and controversial as ever.

Notes from the Air reveals, for the first time in one volume, the remarkable evolution of Ashbery's poetry from the mid-1980s into the new century, and offers an irresistible sampling of some of the finest work by a poet the New York Times has called a "national treasure."

In 2008, the Library of America published John Ashbery: Collected Poems, 1956-1987, the first collection of a living poet ever published by the series.

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.

The Ambassador Book Award (1986-2011) was presented annually by the English Speaking Union. It recognized important literary and non-fiction works that contributed to the understanding and interpretation of American life and culture. Winners of the award were considered literary ambassadors who provide, in the best contemporary English, an important window on America to the rest of the world. A panel of judges selected books out of new works in the fields of fiction, biography, autobiography, current affairs, American studies and poetry.

Quick Question is dedicated to the painter Jane Freilicher, a testament to Ashbery's long-standing friendship with her stretching back to a close-knit group of artists and poets in early 50s New York. It was out of this coterie that a new sensibility arrived in American poetry, an enticing mixture of the comic and flamboyant. Ashbery has said that at Harvard in the late 40s he first realised that "nothing was too silly to bother with", that fun and high camp were worthy poetic goals.

An essential, vibrant collection of masterful translations by one of the finest poets at work today.

In this volume, Ashbery presents a wide selection of France's finest poets: Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, Paul Éluard, and its greatest living poet, Yves Bonnefoy. A rich array of 171 poems by twenty-four poets, this bilingual volume also features a selection from Ashbery's masterly translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations.

With more than twenty poetry collections to his name, John Ashbery is one of our most agile, philosophically complex, and visionary poets. In Breezeway, Ashbery’s powers of observation are at their most astute; his insight at its most penetrating. Demonstrating his extraordinary command of language and his ability to move fluidly and elegantly between wide-ranging thoughts and ideas—from the irreverent and slyly humorous to the tender, the sad, and the heartbreaking—Ashbery shows that he is a virtuoso fluent in diverse styles and tones of language, from the chatty and whimsical to the lyrical and urbane. Filled with allusions to literature and art, as well as to the absurdities and delights of the everyday world around us, Ashbery’s poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing all at once, the work of a master craftsman with a keen understanding of the age in which he lives and writes, an age whose fears and fragmentation he conjures and critiques with humor, pathos, and a provocative wit.

Vital and imaginative, Ashbery’s poems not only touch on the “big questions” and crises of life in the twenty-first century but also delicately capture the small moments between and among people. Imaginative, linguistically dazzling, and artistically ambitious, Breezeway is John Ashbery’s sharpest and most arresting collection yet.