Hotel Lautreamont

Ashbery John

The Count of Lautreamont – a nineteenth-century poet about whom little is known, except that he spent his brief adult life in various hotels in Paris, checking out of his transient existence at the age of 24 – is one of the forgotten presences alive in John Ashbery's collection. "Hotel Lautreamont" includes the poems and sequences he wrote during composition of his enormous poem "Flow Chart", published in 1991 to great critical puzzlement and acclaim.

The title poem "experiments" in pantoum form; and there are other demanding formal challenges. The poet proves as supple as Houdini in bringing them off. His obliquities are entertaining and eloquent. It is no longer necessary to describe him as 'obscure'or "difficult": his poetic strategies are now part of the mainstream of American and British writing. He is "quite simply the finest poet in English of his generation" (The Times)

About the Author

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He has published more than twenty collections of poetry, beginning in 1953 with "Turandot and Other Poems". In 1976, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. His art writings are collected in "Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987" (Carcanet, 1990) and his literary essays appear in the "Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Other Traditions" (Harvard University Press, 2000), and in "Selected Prose" (Carcanet, 2004). Widely honoured internationally, he is the recipient of the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry from theBavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Munich), the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome), and the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poesie (Brussels), all given for lifetime achievement. In 2002 he was named Officier of the Legion d'Honneur of the Republic of France. In 2012 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal, presented to him by President Obama at the White House. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

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