Your Name Here: Poems - Softcover

Ashbery, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857545206 ISBN 13: 9781857545203

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd, 2000

Synopsis

In "Your Name Here", a title suggested by bullfight posters hawked to tourists who then fill in their name as "terero", John Ashbery continues to examine preoccupations of age, loss, childhood memories and how the magic of dreams can transform daily living. In the opening poem he asks "Why do I tell you these things You are not even here". Yet via poems of conflicting styles and tone, Ashbery tells us very much more about his imaginings and invites the reader to "personalize" hsi words with their own associations.

About this title

About the Author:

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and educated at Harvard and Columbia. He is Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Professor of Language and Literature at Bard College and lives in New York City and Hudson, New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

Ashbery may be America's most influential living poet, and its most widely admired. Traditional critics like Harold Bloom admire his lyrical flourishes of prophecy and regret; experimentalists, quite as justly, praise his verbal outlandishness and tonal intricacy, his comic moments and slippery transitions. Both will find much to like in this 20th collection, which (like much of his '90s poetry) combines flamboyant, temporary poses with serious explorations of mortality and nostalgia: "If only I could get the tears out of my eyes it would be raining now," one page concludes: "I must try the new, fluid approach." Typically, a new Ashbery poem will zip and twist from context to context, person to person, from silly to sad to hopeful and back again. More than ever, Ashbery plays games with his readersAthough the games frequently get called off midplay: "Not You Again" begins "Thought I'd write you this poem. Yes,/ I know you don't need it.... Just want to kind of get it off my chest/ and drop it in the peanut dust." Readers bowled over by some parts of this volume may find Ashbery's lesser poems too much alike, their whimsical stanzas not quite adding up. But the best poems here are one of a kind: the hilarious (and atypically coherent) "Memories of Imperialism," for example, which imagines that Admiral Dewey (of Philippines fame) invented the Dewey decimal system. Among the jokes, mix-ups and quick costume changes, two constants are campy slang and a deep sense of loss: "If all you want is kittens, come back later... 'What if I said I want no kittens,/ just a big fat you?'" Some will see, in the book's many versions of "you," Ashbery's longtime partner Pierre Martory, who died in 1998, and to whom he dedicates the volume. A line of serious elegies and laments, emerging gradually and understatedly, leads at last to the astonishing, brief "Strange Cinema," also dedicated to Martory. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1857545206
• ISBN 13: 9781857545203
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64