Back Collected Poems 1956–1987

John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956–1987

Edited by Mark Ford

“This major book, the first collection from The Library of America by a living poet, offers a view of Ashbery’s artistic development over many decades…. He is, according to both his admirers and his critics, the towering figuring in contemporary American poetry.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews Remembering John Ashbery: LOA’s 2008 interview
June 8, 2022

News Remembering John Ashbery: Writers pay tribute
June 7, 2022

Influences Shane McCrae: My war with John Ashbery
October 16, 2020

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With this volume The Library of America inaugurates a collected edition of the works of America’s preeminent living poet. Long associated with the New York School that came to the fore in the 1950s, John Ashbery has charted a profoundly original course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language and its unexpected permutations.

As the poet David Shapiro has written, “The poems of Ashbery may seem so open that they become, like Hamlet, that rare inexhaustible thing, the irreducible fact of great art.” This first volume of the collected Ashbery includes the texts of his first twelve books: Some Trees (1956), selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets; The Tennis Court Oath (1962); Rivers and Mountains (1966); The Double Dream of Spring (1970); Three Poems (1972), saluted by John Hollander as “a meditational masterpiece”; The Vermont Notebook (1975), presented with the original art by Joe Brainard; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976); Houseboat Days (1977); As We Know (1979); Shadow Train (1981); A Wave (1984); and April Galleons (1987). In addition it presents an unprecedented gathering of more than sixty previously uncollected poems written over a period of four decades.

To read Ashbery’s work in sequence is to marvel at his refusal to rest on what has already been accomplished, his insistence on constantly renewed modes of expression. It is to become aware as well of the way his poetry chronicles life as really lived—“the way things have of enfolding / When your attention is distracted for a moment”—amid the surfaces of the quotidian (waking, dreamt, imagined, remembered) and the equally pervasive, equally elusive and deceptive surfaces of language. Through all his metamorphoses he has continued to work with incomparable freedom and humor: Ashbery (in the words of James Longenbach) “is constitutionally incapable of narrowing the possibilities for poetry.”

Mark Ford, volume editor, is the author of two acclaimed collections of poetry, Landlocked and Soft Sift, and the critical study Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams. His book-length interview with John Ashbery, John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford, was published in 2003. He contributes regularly to the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books, and is currently a senior lecturer at University College London.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Interviews Remembering John Ashbery: LOA’s 2008 interview
June 8, 2022

News Remembering John Ashbery: Writers pay tribute
June 7, 2022

Influences Shane McCrae: My war with John Ashbery
October 16, 2020

Interviews Mark Ford: Echoes and experimentation in John Ashbery’s “most expansive decade”
December 21, 2017

News John Ashbery translates Rimbaud’s Illuminations, “the book that made poetry modern”
September 7, 2017
Table of Contents

Some Trees (1956)

Two Scenes
Popular Songs
Eclogue
The Instruction Manual
The Grapevine
A Boy
Glazunoviana
The Hero
Poem
Album Leaf
The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers
Pantoum
Grand Abacus
The Mythological Poet
Sonnet
Chaos
The Orioles
The Young Son
The Thinnest Shadow
Canzone
Errors
Illustration
Some Trees
Hotel Dauphin
The Painter
And You Know
He
Meditations of a Parrot
Sonnet
A Long Novel
The Way They Took
The Pied Piper
Answering a Question in the Mountains
A Pastoral
Le livre est sur la table

The Tennis Court Oath (1962)

The Tennis Court Oath
“They Dream Only of America”
Thoughts of a Young Girl
America
Two Sonnets
To Redouté
Night
“How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher . . . ”
Rain
A White Paper
Leaving the Atocha Station
White Roses
The Suspended Life
A Life Drama
Our Youth
The Ticket
An Additional Poem
Measles
Faust
The Lozenges
The Ascetic Sensualists
Landscape
A Last World
The New Realism
The Unknown Travelers
Europe
To the Same Degree
The Passive Preacher
The Shower
Idaho

Rivers and Mountains (1966)

These Lacustrine Cities
Rivers and Mountains
Last Month
Civilization and Its Discontents
If the Birds Knew
Into the Dusk-Charged Air
The Ecclesiast
The Recent Past
The Thousand Islands
A Blessing in Disguise
Clepsydra
The Skaters

The Double Dream of Spring (1970)

The Task
Spring Day
Plainness in Diversity
Soonest Mended
Summer
It Was Raining in the Capital
Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Song
Decoy
Evening in the Country
For John Clare
French Poems
The Double Dream of Spring
Rural Objects
Years of Indiscretion
Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape
Sunrise in Suburbia
Definition of Blue
Parergon
The Hod Carrier
An Outing
Some Words
Young Man with Letter
Clouds
The Bungalows
The Chateau Hardware
Sortes Vergilianae
Fragment

Three Poems (1972)

The New Spirit
The System
The Recital

The Vermont Notebook (1975)

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)

As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat
Worsening Situation
Forties Flick
As You Came from the Holy Land
A Man of Words
Scheherazade
Absolute Clearance
Grand Galop
Poem in Three Parts
Voyage in the Blue
Farm
Farm II
Farm III
Hop o’ My Thumb
De Imagine Mundi
Foreboding
The Tomb of Stuart Merrill
Tarpaulin
River
Mixed Feelings
The One Thing That Can Save America
Tenth Symphony
On Autumn Lake
Fear of Death
Ode to Bill
Lithuanian Dance Band
Sand Pail
No Way of Knowing
Suite
Märchenbilder
City Afternoon
Robin Hood’s Barn
All and Some
Oleum Misericordiae
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Houseboat Days (1977)

Street Musicians
The Other Tradition
Variant
Collective Dawns
Wooden Buildings
Pyrography
The Gazing Grain
Unctuous Platitudes
The Couple in the Next Room
The Explanation
Loving Mad Tom
Business Personals
Crazy Weather
On the Towpath
Melodic Trains
Bird’s-Eye View of the Tool and Die Co.
Wet Casements
Saying It to Keep It from Happening
Daffy Duck in Hollywood
All Kinds of Caresses
Lost and Found and Lost Again
Two Deaths
Houseboat Days
Whether It Exists
The Lament upon the Waters
Drame Bourgeois
And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name
What Is Poetry?
And Others, Vaguer Presences
The Wrong Kind of Insurance
The Serious Doll
Friends
The Thief of Poetry
The Ice-Cream Wars
Valentine
Blue Sonata
Spring Light
Syringa
Fantasia on “The Nut-Brown Maid”

As We Know (1979)

Litany
Sleeping in the Corners of Our Lives
Silhouette
Many Wagons Ago
As We Know
Figures in a Landscape
Statuary
Otherwise
Five Pedantic Pieces
Flowering Death
Haunted Landscape
My Erotic Double
I Might Have Seen It
The Hills and Shadows of a New Adventure
Knocking Around
Not Only / But Also
Train Rising Out of the Sea
Late Echo
And I’d Love You To Be in It
Tapestry
The Preludes
A Box and Its Contents
The Cathedral Is
I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well
Out Over the Bay the Rattle of Firecrackers
We Were on the Terrace Drinking Gin and Tonics
Fallen Tree
The Picnic Grounds
A Sparkler
The Wine
A Love Poem
There’s No Difference
Distant Relatives
Histoire Universelle
Hittite Lullaby
In a Boat
Variations on an Original Theme
Homesickness
The Configuration
Metamorphosis
Their Day
A Tone Poem
The Other Cindy
No, But I Seen One You Know You Don’t Own
The Shower
Landscapeople
The Sun
The Plural of “Jack-in-the-Box”

Shadow Train (1981)

The Pursuit of Happiness
Punishing the Myth
Paradoxes and Oxymorons
Another Chain Letter
The Ivory Tower
Every Evening When the Sun Goes Down
The Freedom of the House
A Pact with Sullen Death
White-Collar Crime
At the Inn
The Absence of a Noble Presence
The Prophet Bird
Qualm
Breezy Stories
Oh, Nothing
Of the Islands
Farm Film
Here Everything Is Still Floating
Joe Leviathan
Some Old Tires
A Prison All the Same
Drunken Americans
Something Similar
Penny Parker’s Mistake
Or in My Throat
Untilted
At Lotus Lodge
Corky’s Car Keys
Night Life
Written in the Dark
Caesura
The Leasing of September
On the Terrace of Ingots
Tide Music
Unusual Precautions
Flow Blue
Hard Times
“Moi, je suis la tulipe . . . ”
Catalpas
We Hesitate
The Desperado
The Image of the Shark Confronts the Image of the Little Match Girl
Songs Without Words
Indelible, Inedible
School of Velocity
Frontispiece
Everyman’s Library
Shadow Train
But Not That One
The Vegetarians

A Wave (1984)

At North Farm
Rain Moving In
The Songs We Know Best
When the Sun Went Down
Landscape (After Baudelaire)
Just Walking Around
A Fly
The Ongoing Story
Thank You For Not Cooperating
But What Is the Reader To Make of This?
Down by the Station, Early in the Morning
Around the Rough and Rugged Rocks the Ragged Rascal Rudely Ran
More Pleasant Adventures
Purists Will Object
Description of a Masque
The Path to the White Moon
Ditto, Kiddo
Introduction
I See, Said the Blind Man, as He Put Down His Hammer and Saw
Edition Peters, Leipzig
37 Haiku
Haibun
Haibun 2
Haibun 3
Haibun 4
Haibun 5
Haibun 6
Variation on a Noel
Staffage
The Lonedale Operator
Proust’s Questionnaire
Cups with Broken Handles
Just Someone You Say Hi To
They Like
So Many Lives
Never Seek to Tell Thy Love
Darlene’s Hospital
Destiny Waltz
Try Me! I’m Different!
One of the Most Extraordinary Things in Life
Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are
Trefoil
Problems
A Wave

April Galleons (1987)

Vetiver
Riddle Me
Morning Jitters
A Snowball in Hell
Dreams of Adulthood
A Mood of Quiet Beauty
When half the time they don’t know themselves . . .
Adam Snow
Forgotten Song
Finnish Rhapsody
Forgotten Sex
Insane Decisions
No I Don’t
Posture of Unease
Alone in the Lumber Business
Vaucanson
Unreleased Movie
Disguised Zenith
Railroad Bridge
October at the Window
No Two Alike
Amid Mounting Evidence
Letters I Did or Did Not Get
Frost
Life as a Book That Has Been Put Down
Too Happy, Happy Tree
Song of the Windshield Wipers
The Mouse
Song: “Mostly Places . . . ”
Sighs and Inhibitions
Someone You Have Seen Before
Ostensibly
Becalmed on Strange Waters
The Big Cloud
Not a First
Polite Distortions
Fourth Prize
Some Money
Winter Weather Advisory
Never To Get It Really Right
Gorboduc
The Romantic Entanglement
Wet Are the Boards
And Some Were Playing Cards, and Some Were Playing Dice
Fall Pageant
One Coat of Paint
Offshore Breeze
Savage Menace
The Leopard and the Lemur
By the Flooded Canal
Bilking the Statues
The Ice Storm
April Galleons

Uncollected Poems

Seasonal
Lost Cove
A Sermon: Amos 8:11–14
Elegy
A Fable
Song from a Play
Why We Forget Dreams
For a European Child
Friar Laurence’s Cell
From a Diary
The Dolors of Columbine
A Dream
Turandot
White
The Minstrel Boy
Chinatown
Abstentions
April Fool’s Day
The Poems
The Night Cry
Evening Quatrains
Fortune
To a Waterfowl
A Vase of Flowers
The Young Prince and the Young Princess
Maintenance
The Adirondacks
Late December
Copy of a Copy
Undated
Balance of Payments
Blackthorn
Upper Silesia
Faster than Birds Can Fly
One Hundred Multiple-Choice Questions
“I open my eyes to the strange unhappiness of autumn”
Scenery
The Enchanted Lake
Nouvelles Pièces Froides
All the Sonatas
Sponge
Aurora de ti Misma
Dangling Modifiers
Fretwork
Happy Autumn Fields
Stance
Once Upon a Time
“Kannst du die alten Lieder noch Spielen?”
Morning in Helsinki
Winter Scene
Background Music
The Foggiest
Shining the Blue
The Strayed Reveller
Endless Variation
Nothing to Steal
The Bushiness of Infinity
Dream Overture
Imperfect Sympathies
The Good Old Days
Art Songs
Drab Shutters
“Meanwhile / far above / the street”
Deep in My Heart, Dear
Minor Traveler

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N° 187 Library of America Series

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