Carcanet Press - The New York Poets: an anthology

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Excerpt
Authors
Contents
Awards
Reviews
Audio

"They Dream Only Of America"

They dream only of America
To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass:
"This honey is delicious
Though it burns the throat."

And hiding from darkness in barns
They can be grownups now
And the murderer's ash tray is more easily--
The lake a lilac cube.

He holds a key in his right hand.
"Please," he asked willingly.
He is thirty years old.
That was before

We could drive hundreds of miles
At night through dandelions.
When his headache grew worse we
Stopped at a wire filling station.

Now he cared only about signs.
Was the cigar a sign?
And what about the key?
He went slowly into the bedroom.

"I would not have broken my leg if I had not fallen
Against the living room table. What is it to be back
Beside the bed? There is nothing to do
For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it.

And I am lost without you."

John Ashbery

For the first time, The New York Poets gathers in a single volume the best work of four extraordinary poets: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. By the early 1950s all four were settled in Manhattan, collaborating, competing and encouraging each other's radical experiments with language and form. Much of their work reflects their participation in the creative energies of the New York art scene, 'the floods of paint', to quote James Schuyler, 'in whose crashing surf we all scramble'. Believing that anything could be material for a poem, they transformed American poetry with their irreverent wit and daring.

Mark Ford's anthology is an essential introduction to four poets whose work has influenced poetry around the world. It includes detailed background information and a substantial bibliography.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Mark Ford

Select Bibliography

Frank O'Hara

Autobiographia Literaria

Poem (At night Chinamen jump)

Poem (The eager note on my door said "Call me/)

Memorial Day 1950

A Pleasant Thought from Whitehead

Blocks

Homosexuality

Meditations in an Emergency

Music

Poem (There I could never be a boy,)

To the Harbormaster

At the Old Place

My Heart

To the Film Industry in Crisis

Radio

In Memory of My Feelings

A Step Away from Them

Why I Am Not a Painter

Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's

Anxiety

A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island

To Gottfried Benn

The Day Lady Died

Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul

Joe's Jacket

You Are Gorgeous and I'm Coming

Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!)

Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)

Steps

Ave Maria

Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)

First Dances

Fantasy

John Ashbery

The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers

Some Trees

The Painter

"They Dream Only of America"

A Last World

These Lacustrine Cities

from The Skaters

Soonest Mended

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

Definition of Blue

The One Thing That Can Save America

City Afternoon

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Street Musicians

Pyrography

Wet Casements

Daffy Duck in Hollywood

As We Know

At North Farm

A Driftwood Altar

The History of My Life

Kenneth Koch

Fresh Air

You Were Wearing

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

The Circus

Fate

The Simplicity of the Unknown Past

To Marina

Days and Nights

1. The Invention of Poetry

2. The Stones of Time

3. The Secret

4. Out and In

5. Days and Nights

One Train May Hide Another

A Time Zone

James Schuyler

February

May 24th or so

Buried at Springs

Empathy and New Year

An East Window on Elizabeth Street

A Gray Thought

To Frank O'Hara

Shimmer

October

The Bluet

Hymn to Life

June 30,1974

Korean Mums

Wystan Auden

Dining Out With Doug and Frank

The Payne Whitney Poems

Trip

We Walk

Arches

Linen

Heather and Calendulas

Back

Blizzard

February 13,1975

Sleep

Pastime

What

The Snowdrop

En Route to Southampton

Faure's Second Piano Quartet

Index of First Lines

Index of Titles

John Ashbery

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. His books of poetry include Breezeway ; Quick Question ; Planisphere ; Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize; A Worldly Country ; Where Shall I Wander ; and Self-Portrait in ... read more

Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch is grouped with John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler, a grouping which tends to underplay the real differences between each poet's projects; their collaborations were inventive because of their differences, not their similarities, and what marks all four is the ability to work at tangents without ... read more

Frank O'Hara

Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1926, and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He served in the US navy (1944-46) in the South Pacific, and attended the universities of Harvard and Michigan. In 1951 O’Hara settled in Manhattan, and soon became a central figure in a number of the ... read more

James Schuyler

James Schuyler was born in Chicago on 9 November 1923. He attended Bethany College of West Virginia from 1941 to 1943. In the late 40s he moved to New York City where he worked for NBC and befriended W. H. Auden. He later moved to Italy, where he lived in Auden's ... read more

Mark Ford

Mark Ford was born in 1962. His publications include two collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto & Windus 1991, 1998) and Soft Sift (Faber & Faber 2001, Harcourt Brace 2003); a critical biography of the French poet, playwright and novelist Raymond Roussel ( Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, Faber ... read more

Awards won by John Ashbery Winner, 1997 Gold Medal for Poetry Winner, 2001 Wallace Stevens Award Winner, 1995 Robert Frost Medal Winner, 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror) Winner, 1976 National Book Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror) Winner, 1976 Pulitzer Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror)

Praise for John Ashbery 'That Ashbery had these several extended works underway simultaneously testifies not only to his unflagging fealty to the form but also to his extravagantly various powers of invention and intelligence... Even as the references that undergird these projects range from the reassuringly familiar to the dauntingly obscure, as is typical with Ashbery, they characterize a rarefied mental atmosphere, one in which the poet's droll self-awareness deflates what otherwise might be pretension... Ashbery recognized the porous border between decision and delusion, between finality and its seeming appearance. This collection of unfinished works allows readers to tread that border as well.'

Albert Mobilio, Poetry

'This is an exciting missing piece of the jigsaw for Ashbery enthusiasts. Here language fizzes with a vital "off-kilter quality" and an Ashberian state of open-ended possibility.'

The Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin

'I'll keep returning to The Wave, knowing that each time I do, I'll connect with poems, and lines in poems, I haven't noticed before and recconect with those that have resonated already'
Pam Thompson, The North
'John Ashbery's final collection of poetry disguises itself well as a mid-career high. The energy and modernity of his strange little worlds tell nothing of his age.'
Stand Magazine

  'More than a century after Arthur Rimbaud composed his Illuminations they are reborn in John Ashbery's magnificent translation. It is fitting that the major American poet since Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens should give us this noble version of the precursor of all three.'
Harold Bloom
'A fine collection of poems rooted in 21st-century America.'
Robert McCrum, The Observer
  'More than a century after Arthur Rimbaud composed his Illuminations they are reborn in John Ashbery's magnificent translation. It is fitting that the major American poet since Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens should give us this noble version of the precursor of all three.'
Harold Bloom
'Quick Question, with the hushed intensity of its music and great lyric beauty, could only be Ashbery.'
Ian Thomson, Financial Times The book invites the reader to poetic gluttony. It serves as a corrective to the monoglot provincialism by which the Anglophone world is still bedevilled.
Sean O'Brien, Independent 'The lyrics in Breezeway, a new collection by the octogenarian poet John Ashbery are as good as his finest. I especially like the final poem, poignantly reprising the last line of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale', "Do I wake or sleep?"'
Salley Vickers, The Observer - The New Review, 29.11.2015.
  'John Ashbery's Collected Poems 1956-1987, edited by Mark Ford (Carcanet), was a book I found inexhaustible. Possibly the greatest living English-speaking poet and one of the most prolific, Ashbery takes language to its limits, so that words serve as pointers to shifting experiences that elude description. Containing his masterpiece 'Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror', one of the most penetrating 20th-century meditations on what it means to be human, this collection succeeded in stirring my thoughts as well as delighting me.'
John Gray The Guardian Books Of The Year 2010
   'The careering, centrifugal side of Girls on the Run is one of its most effective tools in creating its special ainbience of good-humoured menace ... Ashbery has made the slush of signification, the realm where words slip, slide, perish and decay, uniquely his own.'
David Wheatley, Times Literary Supplement, 30 June, 2000
   'In his seventies John Ashbery offers a sprightly and energetic alternative. Instead of being sluggish he demands that the self must be even more alert, more vigilant, more attentive to the world around it, not indifferent to and weary of it. Alert, vigilant, attentive ... Wakefulness, the brilliantly evocative title of Ashbery's collection.'
Stephen Matterson, 'The Capacious Art of Poetry,' Poetry Ireland Review 62, 114
    'The Mooring of Starting Out is filled with illustrations glimpsed through luminous, funny, formidably intelligent and often heartbreaking poems.'
Andrew Zawacki, 'A wave of music,' Times Literary Supplement, 12 June, 1998
Praise for Frank O'Hara '... a remarkable new poetry - both modest and monumental, with something basically usable about it - not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a liveable space.'
John Ashbery 'O'Hara's hip, glamorous, freewheeling self-celebrations both reflected and helped disseminate a new kind of confidence and daring in American poetry.' Mark Ford

Frank O'Hara reads 'Ode to Joy' (2:27 mins)

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The New York Poets: an anthology John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler Edited by Mark Ford 10% off Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, American, Anthologies Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (224 pages) (Pub. Mar 2004) 9781857547344 £14.95 £13.45 Digital access available through Exact Editions Description Excerpt Authors Contents Awards Reviews Audio "They Dream Only Of America" They dream only of America To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass: "This honey is delicious Though it burns the throat." And hiding from darkness in barns They can be grownups now And the murderer's ash tray is more easily-- The lake a lilac cube. He holds a key in his right hand. "Please," he asked willingly. He is thirty years old. That was before We could drive hundreds of miles At night through dandelions. When his headache grew worse we Stopped at a wire filling station. Now he cared only about signs. Was the cigar a sign? And what about the key? He went slowly into the bedroom. "I would not have broken my leg if I had not fallen Against the living room table. What is it to be back Beside the bed? There is nothing to do For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it. And I am lost without you." John Ashbery For the first time, The New York Poets gathers in a single volume the best work of four extraordinary poets: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. By the early 1950s all four were settled in Manhattan, collaborating, competing and encouraging each other's radical experiments with language and form. Much of their work reflects their participation in the creative energies of the New York art scene, 'the floods of paint', to quote James Schuyler, 'in whose crashing surf we all scramble'. Believing that anything could be material for a poem, they transformed American poetry with their irreverent wit and daring. Mark Ford's anthology is an essential introduction to four poets whose work has influenced poetry around the world. It includes detailed background information and a substantial bibliography. Table of Contents Introduction - Mark Ford Select Bibliography Frank O'Hara Autobiographia Literaria Poem (At night Chinamen jump) Poem (The eager note on my door said "Call me/) Memorial Day 1950 A Pleasant Thought from Whitehead Blocks Homosexuality Meditations in an Emergency Music Poem (There I could never be a boy,) To the Harbormaster At the Old Place My Heart To the Film Industry in Crisis Radio In Memory of My Feelings A Step Away from Them Why I Am Not a Painter Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's Anxiety A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island To Gottfried Benn The Day Lady Died Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul Joe's Jacket You Are Gorgeous and I'm Coming Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!) Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun) Steps Ave Maria Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!) First Dances Fantasy John Ashbery The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers Some Trees The Painter "They Dream Only of America" A Last World These Lacustrine Cities from The Skaters Soonest Mended Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape Definition of Blue The One Thing That Can Save America City Afternoon Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror Street Musicians Pyrography Wet Casements Daffy Duck in Hollywood As We Know At North Farm A Driftwood Altar The History of My Life Kenneth Koch Fresh Air You Were Wearing Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams The Circus Fate The Simplicity of the Unknown Past To Marina Days and Nights 1. The Invention of Poetry 2. The Stones of Time 3. The Secret 4. Out and In 5. Days and Nights One Train May Hide Another A Time Zone James Schuyler February May 24th or so Buried at Springs Empathy and New Year An East Window on Elizabeth Street A Gray Thought To Frank O'Hara Shimmer October The Bluet Hymn to Life June 30,1974 Korean Mums Wystan Auden Dining Out With Doug and Frank The Payne Whitney Poems Trip We Walk Arches Linen Heather and Calendulas Back Blizzard February 13,1975 Sleep Pastime What The Snowdrop En Route to Southampton Faure's Second Piano Quartet Index of First Lines Index of Titles John Ashbery John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. His books of poetry include Breezeway ; Quick Question ; Planisphere ; Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize; A Worldly Country ; Where Shall I Wander ; and Self-Portrait in ... read more Kenneth Koch Kenneth Koch is grouped with John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler, a grouping which tends to underplay the real differences between each poet's projects; their collaborations were inventive because of their differences, not their similarities, and what marks all four is the ability to work at tangents without ... read more Frank O'Hara Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1926, and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He served in the US navy (1944-46) in the South Pacific, and attended the universities of Harvard and Michigan. In 1951 O’Hara settled in Manhattan, and soon became a central figure in a number of the ... read more James Schuyler James Schuyler was born in Chicago on 9 November 1923. He attended Bethany College of West Virginia from 1941 to 1943. In the late 40s he moved to New York City where he worked for NBC and befriended W. H. Auden. He later moved to Italy, where he lived in Auden's ... read more Mark Ford Mark Ford was born in 1962. His publications include two collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto & Windus 1991, 1998) and Soft Sift (Faber & Faber 2001, Harcourt Brace 2003); a critical biography of the French poet, playwright and novelist Raymond Roussel ( Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, Faber ... read more Awards won by John Ashbery Winner, 1997 Gold Medal for Poetry Winner, 2001 Wallace Stevens Award Winner, 1995 Robert Frost Medal Winner, 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror) Winner, 1976 National Book Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror) Winner, 1976 Pulitzer Award (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror) Praise for John Ashbery 'That Ashbery had these several extended works underway simultaneously testifies not only to his unflagging fealty to the form but also to his extravagantly various powers of invention and intelligence... Even as the references that undergird these projects range from the reassuringly familiar to the dauntingly obscure, as is typical with Ashbery, they characterize a rarefied mental atmosphere, one in which the poet's droll self-awareness deflates what otherwise might be pretension... Ashbery recognized the porous border between decision and delusion, between finality and its seeming appearance. This collection of unfinished works allows readers to tread that border as well.' Albert Mobilio, Poetry 'This is an exciting missing piece of the jigsaw for Ashbery enthusiasts. Here language fizzes with a vital "off-kilter quality" and an Ashberian state of open-ended possibility.' The Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 'I'll keep returning to The Wave, knowing that each time I do, I'll connect with poems, and lines in poems, I haven't noticed before and recconect with those that have resonated already' Pam Thompson, The North 'John Ashbery's final collection of poetry disguises itself well as a mid-career high. The energy and modernity of his strange little worlds tell nothing of his age.' Stand Magazine 'More than a century after Arthur Rimbaud composed his Illuminations they are reborn in John Ashbery's magnificent translation. It is fitting that the major American poet since Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens should give us this noble version of the precursor of all three.' Harold Bloom 'A fine collection of poems rooted in 21st-century America.' Robert McCrum, The Observer 'More than a century after Arthur Rimbaud composed his Illuminations they are reborn in John Ashbery's magnificent translation. It is fitting that the major American poet since Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens should give us this noble version of the precursor of all three.' Harold Bloom 'Quick Question, with the hushed intensity of its music and great lyric beauty, could only be Ashbery.' Ian Thomson, Financial Times The book invites the reader to poetic gluttony. It serves as a corrective to the monoglot provincialism by which the Anglophone world is still bedevilled. Sean O'Brien, Independent 'The lyrics in Breezeway, a new collection by the octogenarian poet John Ashbery are as good as his finest. I especially like the final poem, poignantly reprising the last line of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale', "Do I wake or sleep?"' Salley Vickers, The Observer - The New Review, 29.11.2015. 'John Ashbery's Collected Poems 1956-1987, edited by Mark Ford (Carcanet), was a book I found inexhaustible. Possibly the greatest living English-speaking poet and one of the most prolific, Ashbery takes language to its limits, so that words serve as pointers to shifting experiences that elude description. Containing his masterpiece 'Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror', one of the most penetrating 20th-century meditations on what it means to be human, this collection succeeded in stirring my thoughts as well as delighting me.' John Gray The Guardian Books Of The Year 2010 'The careering, centrifugal side of Girls on the Run is one of its most effective tools in creating its special ainbience of good-humoured menace ... Ashbery has made the slush of signification, the realm where words slip, slide, perish and decay, uniquely his own.' David Wheatley, Times Literary Supplement, 30 June, 2000 'In his seventies John Ashbery offers a sprightly and energetic alternative. Instead of being sluggish he demands that the self must be even more alert, more vigilant, more attentive to the world around it, not indifferent to and weary of it. Alert, vigilant, attentive ... Wakefulness, the brilliantly evocative title of Ashbery's collection.' Stephen Matterson, 'The Capacious Art of Poetry,' Poetry Ireland Review 62, 114 'The Mooring of Starting Out is filled with illustrations glimpsed through luminous, funny, formidably intelligent and often heartbreaking poems.' Andrew Zawacki, 'A wave of music,' Times Literary Supplement, 12 June, 1998 Praise for Frank O'Hara '... a remarkable new poetry - both modest and monumental, with something basically usable about it - not only for poets in search of a voice of their own but for the reader who turns to poetry as a last resort in trying to juggle the contradictory components of modern life into something like a liveable space.' John Ashbery 'O'Hara's hip, glamorous, freewheeling self-celebrations both reflected and helped disseminate a new kind of confidence and daring in American poetry.' Mark Ford Frank O'Hara reads 'Ode to Joy' (2:27 mins)	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! The Carcanet Blog We've Moved! read more Books of the Year read more One Little Room: Peter McDonald read more Collected Poems: Mimi Khalvati read more Invisible Dog: Fabio Morbito, translated by Richard Gwyn read more Dante's Purgatorio: Philip Terry read more
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The New York Poets: an anthology

John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler

Edited by Mark Ford