Selected Prose 1953-2003
John Ashbery has been called "the finest poet in English of his generation" ("The Times"). A broad selection of Ashbery's prose writings from 1957 to 2004 is collected here for the first time. Literary reviews and essays, articles on film, and key pieces of art criticism, some never before published, reveal a critical intelligence that has had a profound impact on the cultural landscape of the past half-century. His reviews of Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation and of de Chirico's Hebdomeros, as well as his essays on Raymond Roussel, are contemporary classics. Less familiar, but equally illuminating, are his discussions of Antonin Artaud, Jacques Rivette, Marianne Moore and Robert Mapplethorpe.
This collection of Ashbery's critical writings dramatically expands the terrain covered by his first two books of essays, "Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987" (Carcanet 1990) and "Other Traditions" (first presented as the Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1990).
Eugene Richie's introduction explores the cultural context of these writings, demonstrating not only their significance for Ashbery's poetic development, but their importance in the shaping of literature and the arts in the twenty-first century.
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.
