Back Collected Poems 1991–2000

John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1991–2000

Edited by Mark Ford

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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After receiving wide acclaim and numerous awards during the early and middle years of his career, John Ashbery continued to strike out in new directions in the 1990s, writing in a style at once playful and cerebral, relaxed and precise, dreamlike in its imagery and associations yet exquisitely attuned to mundane reality. Here in one authoritative annotated volume are seven complete collections from this crucial period in which he solidified his standing among the greatest of American poets.

The volume begins with the landmark book-length poem Flow Chart (1991), a stunning tour de force that reveals Ashbery’s mastery of “the entire orchestral potential of the English language,” as Helen Vendler writes. Weaving a spell through its long lines, which unfold in mesmerizing and surprising ways, Flow Chart offers an account of the poet’s mind that complements Ashbery’s earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror but also provides a vision of the collective “dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.” As Benjamin Kunkel observes, “Anyone who cares about what’s going on in American literature must sit down . . . and read the poem through.” Prepared in consultation with the author, this edition restores a missing page—thirty-eight lines in all—inadvertently dropped during the revision process of the poem for its first publication.

Ashbery’s poems from the 1990s range brilliantly across his varied interests and obsessions—opera, film noir, French poetry, and the visual arts, most notably the work of the outsider artist Henry Darger, the point of departure for the book-length poem Girls on the Run (1999). In evidence at every turn are Ashbery’s seemingly boundless inventiveness, a pitch-perfect ear for American speech, and an exuberant erudition that transports the reader to unexpected places.

Rounding out the volume is a selection of twenty-six uncollected poems, among them “Hoboken,” a collage poem that mischievously pillages Roget’s Thesaurus, “The Hailstorm in Belgrade, May 24th 1937,” inspired by a remote memory of a Life magazine article Ashbery read as a nine-year-old, and “Victrola floribunda,” first published opposite a reproduction of a painting of an imaginary flower by the artist Dorothea Tanning, for which it provided the name.

Mark Ford, editor, is the author of three acclaimed collections of poetry, Landlocked, Soft Sift, and Six Children; his Selected Poems was published in 2014. His book-length interview, John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford, was published in 2003. His most recent book is Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (2016).

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

Hotel Lautréamont (1992)

Light Turnouts
And Forgetting
The Large Studio
The Garden of False Civility
Autumn Telegram
Notes from the Air
Still Life with Stranger
Hotel Lautréamont
On the Empress’s Mind
The Phantom Agents
From Estuaries, from Casinos
Cop and Sweater
Musica Reservata
Susan
The King
The Whole Is Admirably Composed
By Forced Marches
Autumn on the Thruway
The Little Black Dress
Part of the Superstition
The Art of Speeding
American Bar
From Palookaville
Another Example
Avant de Quitter Ces Lieux
The White Shirt
Baked Alaska
Private Syntax
Not Now but in Forty-five Minutes
In Another Time
Withered Compliments
The Wind Talking
Joy
Irresolutions on a Theme of La Rochefoucauld
A Call for Papers
Love’s Old Sweet Song
Wild Boys of the Road
Le Mensonge de Nina Petrovna
Of Linnets and Dull Time
Korean Soap Opera
A Driftwood Altar
Poem at the New Year
Central Air
The Youth’s Magic Horn
Brute Image
Of Dreams and Dreaming
Seasonal
Kamarinskaya
Elephant Visitors
The Great Bridge Game of Life
The Departed Lustre
Villanelle
A Sedentary Existence
Erebus
The Old Complex
Where We Went for Lunch
As Oft It Chanceth
Retablo
A Mourning Forbidding Valediction
I Found Their Advice
French Opera
A Stifled Notation
Haunted Stanzas
Livelong Days
Quartet
[untitled]
Oeuvres Complètes
Just Wednesday
In My Way / On My Way
No Good at Names
Film Noir
In Vain, Therefore
The Beer Drinkers
That You Tell
A Hole in Your Sock
And Socializing
Revisionist Horn Concerto
The Woman the Lion Was Supposed to Defend
Harbor Activities
It Must Be Sophisticated
Alborada
How to Continue

And the Stars Were Shining (1994)

Token Resistance
Spring Cries
The Mandrill on the Turnpike
About to Move
Ghost Riders of the Moon
The Love Scenes
Just What’s There
Title Search
Free Nail Polish
Till the Bus Starts
The Ridiculous Translator’s Hopes
The Story of Next Week
A Hundred Albums
A Waltz Dream
Falls to the Floor, Comes to the Door
The Lounge
The Improvement
“The Favor of a Reply
A Held Thing
Strange Things Happen at Night
World’s End
Ice Cream in America
Works on Paper I
Local Time
Well, Yes, Actually
My Gold Chain
Footfalls
Weather and Turtles
Sometimes in Places
William Byrd
Assertiveness Training
Like a Sentence
Two Pieces
The Friendly City
The Desperate Hours
The Decline of the West
The Archipelago
Gummed Reinforcements
Spotlight in America
What Do You Call It When
Pleasure Boats
Pretty Questions
Pathless Wanderings
On First Listening to Schreker’s Der Schatzgraber
Dinosaur Country
Leeward
Paraph
Not Planning a Trip Back
Myrtle
Man in Lurex
In the Meantime, Darling
Just for Starters
Bromeliads
Commercial Break
Sicilian Bird
Mutt and Jeff
Coventry
And the Stars Were Shining

Can You Hear, Bird (1995)

A Day at the Gate
A New Octagon
A Poem of Unrest
A Waking Dream
Abe’s Collision
Allotted Spree
*Andante Misterioso [duplicates Sicilian Bird in And the Stars]
Angels (you
Anxiety and Hardwood Floors
At First I Thought I Wouldn’t Say Anything About It
At Liberty and Cranberry
Atonal Music
Awful Effects of Two Comets
…by an Earthquake
By Guess and by Gosh
Can You Hear, Bird
Cantilever
Chapter II, Book 35
Chronic Symbiosis
Collected Places
Coming Down from New York
Dangerous Moonlight
Debit Night
Do Husbands Matter?
Dull Mauve
Eternity Sings the Blues
Fascicle
Five O’Clock Shadow
From the Observatory
Fuckin’ Sarcophagi
Getting Back In
Gladys Palmer
*Heavenly Arts Polka [duplicates A Waltz Dream in And the Stars]
Hegel
I Saw No Need
I, Too
In an Inchoate Place
In Old Oklahoma
Like a Sentence [duplicated from And the Stars]
Limited Liability
Love in Boots
Love’s Stratagem
Many Are Dissatisfied
Military Pastoral
My Name Is Dimitri
My Philosophy of Life
Nice Morning Blues
No Earthly Reason
No Longer Very Clear
Obedience School
Ode to John Keats
Of a Particular Stranger
Operators Are Standing By
Others Shied Away
Palindrome
Penthesilea
Plain as Day
Point Lookout
Poor Knights of Windsor
Quick Question
Reverie and Caprice
Safe Conduct
Salon de Thé
See How You Like My Shoes
Sleepers Awake
Something Too Chinese
Swaying, the Apt Traveler Exited My House
Taxi in the Glen
The Blot People
The Captive Sense
The Confronters
The Desolate Beauty Parlor on Beach Avenue
The Faint of Heart
The Green Mummies
The Latvian
The Military Base
The Peace Plan
The Penitent
The Problem of Anxiety
The Sea
The Shocker
The Waiting Ceremony
The Walkways
The Water Carrier
Theme
Three Dusks
Today’s Academicians
Touching, the Similarities
Tower of Darkness
Tremendous Outpouring
Tuesday Evening
Twilight Park
Umpteen
What the Plants Say
When All Her Neighbors Came
Where It Was Decided We Should Be Taken
Woman Leaning
Yes, Dr. Genzmer, How May I Be of Assistance to You? What! You Say the
Patient Has Escaped?
Yesterday, for Instance
You Dropped Something
You, My Academy
You Would Have Thought
Young People

Wakefulness (1998)

Wakefulness
Baltimore
Palindrome of Evening
Cousin Sarah’s Knitting
Last Night I Dreamed I Was in Bucharest
Added Poignancy
Quarry
Laughing Gravy
From Such Commotion
Moderately
Alive at Every Passage
The Burden of the Park
At the Station
Another Kind of Afternoon
Tangled Star
Deeply Incised
Tropical Sex
The Friend at Midnight
Stung by Something
The Last Romantic
Shadows in the Street
The Earth-Tone Madonna
Dear Sir or Madam
The Laughter of Dead Men
Discordant Data
Bogus Inspections
Floatingly
Tenebrae
Outside My Window the Japanese…
Any Other Time
Probably Based on a Dream
The Village of Sleep
In My Head
The Spacious Firmament
Proximity
Going Away Any Time Soon
Like America
New Constructions
Whiteout
A French Stamp
One Man’s Poem
The Pathetic Fallacy
From Old Notebooks
Many Colors
Autumn in the Long Avenue
Snow
Within the Hour
The Dong with the Luminous Nose
Come On, Dear
Gentle Reader
Homecoming

Girls on the Run (1999)

Your Name Here (2000)

This Room
If You Said You Would Come with Me
A Linnet
The Bobinski Brothers
Not You Again
Terminal
Merrily We Live
Brand Loyalty
Rain in the Soup
Bloodfits
Implicit Fog
Dream Sequence (Untitled)
What Is Written
Caravaggio and His Followers
Industrial Collage
Frogs and Gospels
Weekend
Get Me Rewrite
Invasive Procedures
Paperwork
The History of My Life
Toy Symphony
Memories of Imperialism
Strange Occupations
Full Tilt
The File on Thelma Jordan
Two for the Road
Heartache
The Fortune Cookie Crumbles
Onion Skin
Redeemed Area
Variations on “La Folia”
De Senectute
The Gods of Fairness
Who Knows What Constitutes a Life
Sacred and Profane Dances
Here We Go Looby
Avenue Mozart
Life Is a Dream
Vowels
Beverly of Graustark
The Pearl Fishers
They Don’t Just Go Away, Either
Conventional Wisdom
And Again, March Is Almost Here
A Descent into the Maelstrom
Sonatine Mélancolique
Stanzas before Time
A Postcard from Pontevedra
A Suit
Crossroads in the Past
The Water Inspector
Cinéma Vérité
The Old House in the Country
Autumn Basement
Hang-Up Call
Lost Profile
How Dangerous
Humble Pie
More Hocketing
Amnesia Goes to the Ball
Railroaded
Honored Guest
Our Leader Is Dreaming
Last Legs
Lemurs and Pharisees
The Underwriters
Pale Siblings
Nobody Is Going Anywhere
Poem on Several Occasions
Slumberer
Pot Luck
Short-Term Money
Vendanges
Small City
Vintage Masquerade
To Good People Who Should Be Going Somewhere Else
Another Aardvark
Has to Be Somewhere
The Don’s Request
Strange Cinema
A Star Belched
When Pressed
The Impure
Crowd Conditions
Enjoys Watching Foreign Films
Fade In
Over at the Mutts’
Pastilles for the Voyage
Of the Light
Your Name Here

Uncollected Poems

Hoboken
Call It “Untitled”
La singe d’une nuit d’été
Fruit and Tea
Two Norwegian Moods
Tahiti Trot
Tin Steamboat
My Favorite Dress
Yes, I Have Been Reading
Often in Sorting Out
The Dissolving Bride
Shadows on the Street
Media Runner
The Hailstorm in Belgrade, May 24th, 1937
Victrola floribunda
The Green Dress
Hierarchy of the Unexpected
Welcome to Entropy
Invitation to a Wooing
These Symptoms I Know So Well
Vauban
Greased Lightning
A Leap in Time
Befuddled
A Lot of Catching Up To Do
The Lyricist

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