Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Author: John Ashbery
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140586687
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Book Description
John Ashbery’s most renowned collection of poetry -- Winner of The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award First released in 1975, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is today regarded as one of the most important collections of poetry published in the last fifty years. Not only in the title poem, which the critic John Russell called “one of the finest long poems of our period,” but throughout the entire volume, Ashbery reaffirms the poetic power that made him an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. These are poems “of breathtaking freshness and adventure in which dazzling orchestrations of language open up whole areas of consciousness no other American poet as ever begun to explore” (The New York Times).

Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror 2

Author: Paul Legault
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781934200933
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
An uber-homage to primary texts and the brilliant white gay male poets who write them.

Parallel Movement of the Hands

Author: John Ashbery
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062968874
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Book Description
A stunning collection of work from beloved poet John Ashbery, his first posthumous book Renowned for his inventive mind, ambitious play with language, and dexterity with a wide range of tones and styles, John Ashbery has been a major artistic figure in the cultural life of our time. Parallel Movement of the Hands gathers unpublished, book-length projects and long poems written between 1993 and 2007, along with one (as yet) undated work, to showcase Ashbery’s diverse and multifaceted artistic obsessions and sources, from children’s literature, cliffhanger cinema reels, silent films, and classical music variations by Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny to the history of early photography. Ashbery even provides a fresh and humorous take on a well-worn parable from the Gospel of Matthew. These works demonstrate that while producing and publishing the shorter, discrete poems often associated with his late career, Ashbery continued to practice the long-form, project-based writing that has long been an important element of his oeuvre. Edited and introduced by Ashbery’s former assistant poet Emily Skillings and including a preface by acclaimed poet and novelist Ben Lerner, this compelling and varied collection offers new insights into the process and creative interests of a poet whose work continues to influence generations of artists and poets with its signature intertextuality, openness, and simultaneity. A landmark publication of never-before-seen works, this book will enlighten scholars as well as new readers of one of America’s most prominent and celebrated poets.

A Wave

Author: John Ashbery
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480459089
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Book Description
One of Ashbery’s most acclaimed and beloved collections since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, filled with his signature wit and generous intelligence The poems in John Ashbery’s award-winning 1984 collection A Wave address the impermanence of language, the nature of mortality, and the fluidity of consciousness—matters of life and death that in other hands might run the risk of sentimentality. For John Ashbery, however, these considerations provide an opportunity to display his prodigious poetic gifts: the unerring ear for our evolving modern language and its ever-expanding universe of meanings, the fierce eye trained on glimmers underwater, and the wry humor that runs through observations both surprising and familiar. As the poem “The Path to the White Moon” has it, “We know what is coming, that we are moving / Dangerously and gracefully / Toward the resolution of time / Blurred but alive with many separate meanings / Inside this conversation.” The long title poem of A Wave, which closes the book, is considered one of Ashbery’s most distinguished works, praised by critic Helen Vendler for its “genius for a free and accurate American rendition of very elusive inner feelings, and especially for transitive states between feelings.” Winner of both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize, this book is one to be read, reread, and remembered.

The Art of Parmigianino

Author: David Franklin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300103571
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
The beauty and range of the work of the sixteenth-century artist Parmigianino as painter, draughtsman, and printmaker make him one of the most remarkable figures of the Italian Renaissance. He was an artist who seemed to discover his style without any effort, and his art was universally recognized as being graceful, or full of grace. In his day, "grace" was understood to be a spiritual endowment, conferring qualities that could not be taught. It was one of the preconditions of natural genius, so highly valued among Renaissance artists. But nothing as effortlessly elegant as Parmigianino's drawings and paintings could have been achieved without effort. It is through a close study of the drawings, in particular, that one is able to discern the sources of Parmigianino's style and the creative struggles he endured. This illustrated study offers a comprehensive reassessment of his work as a draughtsman. More than eighty works on paper, selected from collections around the world, are discussed in detail. Among Renaissance artists, Parmigianino was perhaps more conscious than any of the potential of the graphic arts to convey, and indeed broadcast, complex ideas. He explored this potential himself, not only by means of his numerous drawings but also through the etchings he produced on his own (effectively introducing this print medium into Italian art) and through the engravings and chiaroscuro woodcuts that were made after his designs. In these media, his influence travelled farther and wider than it could have through his paintings alone. This book coinciding with the quincentenary of the artist's birth in Parma in 1503, accompanies an exhibition presented at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, from October 3, 2003 to January 4, 2004, and at The Frick Collection, New York, from January 27 to April 18, 2004.

Houseboat Days

Author: John Ashbery
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480459151
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Book Description
Is poetry the act of putting something together, or the art of taking something apart? Houseboat Days, one of John Ashbery’s most celebrated collections, offers its own answer Remarkable for its introspection and for the response it elicited when it was first published in 1977, Houseboat Days is Ashbery’s much-discussed follow-up to his 1975 masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and remains one of his most studied books to date. Houseboat Days begins with the moving, unforgettable poem “Street Musicians,” an allegory of artistic and personal loss that came ten years after the death of Ashbery’s friend and fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara. But while many of the poems in Houseboat Days are strikingly personal, especially when compared to Ashbery’s work from the 1950s and 1960s, the collection is less about the poet than about the act of writing poetry. In such widely anthologized poems as “Wet Casements,” “Syringa,” “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” and “What Is Poetry,” Ashbery embraces the challenge of his own ars poetica, exploring and exploding the trusses, foundations, and underground caverns that underlie the creative act, and specifically, the act of creating a poem. Marjorie Perloff of the Washington Post Book World called Houseboat Days “the most exciting, most original book of poems to have appeared in the 1970s.”

Flow Chart

Author: John Ashbery
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480459097
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
A quintessentially American epic poem that rewrites all the rules of epic poetry—starting with the one that says epic poetry can’t be about the writing of epic poetry itself The appearance of Flow Chart in 1991 marked the kickoff of a remarkably prolific period in John Ashbery’s long career, a decade during which he published seven all-new books of poetry as well as a collected series of lectures on poetic form and practice. So it comes as no surprise that this book-length poem—one of the longest ever written by an American poet—reads like a rocket launch: charged, propulsive, mesmerizing, a series of careful explosions that, together, create a radical forward motion. It’s been said that Flow Chart was written in response to a dare of sorts: Artist and friend Trevor Winkfield suggested that Ashbery write a poem of exactly one hundred pages, a challenge that Ashbery took up with plans to complete the poem in one hundred days. But the celebrated work that ultimately emerged from its squared-off origin story was one that the poet himself called “a continuum, a diary.” In six connected, constantly surprising movements of free verse—with the famous “sunflower” double sestina thrown in, just to reinforce the poem’s own multivarious logic—Ashbery’s poem maps a path through modern American consciousness with all its attendant noise, clamor, and signal: “Words, however, are not the culprit. They are at worst a placebo, / leading nowhere (though nowhere, it must be added, can sometimes be a cozy / place, preferable in many cases to somewhere).”

Versed

Author: Rae Armantrout
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819570915
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Book Description
"A collection of poetry organized in two sections. The first section, "Versed," play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks. The second section, "Dark Matter," alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as the author's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking."--Résumé de l'éditeur.

Self-portraits

Author: Vivian Maier
Publisher: powerHouse Books
ISBN: 1576876624
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 122

Book Description
The lifetime work of recently discovered street photographer Vivian Maier has captivated the world and spawned comparisons to photography's masters including Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Walker Evans and Weegee. Now, for the first time, Vivian Maier: Self-Portrait will present the fullest and most intimate portrait of the artist herself with approximately 60 never-before-seen black-and-white and colour self-portraits culled from the extensive Maloof archive, the preeminent collector of the work of Vivian Maier.

Why Poetry

Author: Matthew Zapruder
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062343092
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.