Can You Hear, Bird
After John Ashbery's 216-page poem "Flow Chart" (1991) and the munificence of "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992) and "And the Stars were Shining" (1994), "Can You Hear, Bird" provides an A to Y of poems, moments in which voices, images and tones come in for Ashbery's wily attentions. The poems are generally short. But when we get to T, "Tuesday Evening" occurs. Tuesday evenings are long in Ashbery's America. This Tuesday begins in tight rhymed quatrains; as the evening extends, the verse relaxes to elicit and swallow up more and more, until only rhyme pins together the abundance of impulse and reflection. An ars poetica seems to emerge:
An alphabet is forming words. We who watch them
never imagine pronouncing them, and another opportunity
is missed. You must be awake to catch them –
them, and the scent they give off with impunity.
We all tagged along, and in the end there was nothing
to see – nothing and a lot. A lot in terms of contour, texture,
world. That sort of thing. The real fun and its clothing
Ashbery's urbane imagination remains subject to time's encroachment and the heart's vagaries. "He is quite simply the finest poet in English of his generation", The Times said.
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.
