Friday, January 9th: Introducing John Ashbery

Seventy-one years old and still going strong, John Ashbery is the sole living member of the New York School's first generation, and an elder statesman of American poetics. It's been more than fifty years since his debut collection, Some Trees (1956) — which W.H. Auden selected as that year's winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize (narrowly edging out his friend, Frank O'Hara's manuscript) — and thirty-four years since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which won the triple-crown of American literary honors (the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award), yet Ashbery's poetic development continues unabated.

We'll be focusing almost exclusively on poems from the first three decades of Ashbery's writing life, as contained in the recently-published collection, Collected Poems 1956-1987. Recordings of most of these works are available on PennSound's John Ashbery author page, and I cannot suggest strongly enough that you listen along with these MP3s as you read. I'll provide streaming links to one recording for each poem, however you're likely to find multiple versions of some of his best known poems in our archives, so please make use of those variations as you reread. On our last day addressing Ashbery, we'll read a few of his more recent poems.

Because it's not likely that everyone will be able to get their hands on The Last Avant-Garde in time for our section on Ashbery, I'm posting an excellent profile of the poet which originally appeared in The New Yorker in 2005:

• Larissa MacFarquhar, "Present Waking Life: Becoming John Ashbery" (PDF)

Please read that essay for Friday, along with the following poems in Collected Poems:

from Some Trees (1956)

Two Scenes (3) MP3
Popular Songs (3) MP3
The Instruction Manual (5) MP3
Glazunoviana (10) MP3
The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers (13)
Sonnet ("Each servant stamps the reader with a look") (18) MP3
And You Know (29) MP3

from The Tennis Court Oath (1962)

The Tennis Court Oath (43) MP3
"They Dream Only of America" (44) MP3
Thoughts of a Young Girl (45) MP3
"How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Diving Sepulcher . . ." (56) MP3
A White Paper (63)
Our Youth (71) MP3

from Rivers and Mountains (1966)

These Lacustrine Cities (125) MP3
Rivers and Mountains (126) MP3
Into the Dusk-Charged Air (131) MP3
The Ecclesiast (135) MP3
To a Waterfowl (922) MP3


Most of these recordings were taken from Ashbery's September 16, 1963 reading at the Living Theatre in New York City, which served as a triumphant homecoming for the poet after five year of living in Paris. You can listen to the rest of the reading here, and read the PennSound Daily entry discussing that historic recording here. Also, be sure to take a few minutes to listen to Kenneth Koch's introductory comments (linked below):

• Kenneth Koch introduces John Ashbery: MP3