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Houseboat Days
This reissue of a book of thirty-nine poems, first collected in 1977, reminds us of Ashbery's astonishing explorations (to use Donald Barthelme's words) of places where no one has ever been. "Wet Casements," "Syringa," "Loving Mad Tom," and the long "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid,'" which concludes the book, are among the riches in a collection of dazzling eloquence and power.
88 pages, Paperback
First published September 19, 1977
About the author
John Ashbery
299 books482 followersFormal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror
(1975).
From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.
From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.
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November 13, 2023
Houseboat Days
"Houseboat Days" was the first book of John Ashbery that I read many years ago. I was fascinated and frustrated by it then and still am. I wanted to focus on this book in reading the Library of America's collection of Asbery's poems from 1956 -- 1987.
Ashbery (1927 -- 2017) received wide recognition with his book "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1975) which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The long title poem of the volume, which is based upon a 1524 painting by Parmigianino, remains Ashbery's masterpiece.
"Houseboat Days" (1977) was Ashbery's next book of poems following "Self-Portrait" and was itself a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The volume consists of 39 poems, including a long final poem, "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid'" based upon a 16th Century ballad. The poem is a dialogue between characters denominated "He" and "She" on the battle of the sexes, followed by a concluding section in prose. Ashbery made liberal use of lines from his earlier poetry. This long work has not attained the stature of the "Self-Portrait." Instead, the "Houseboat Days" collection is known for its shorter poems.
Ashbery's poetry is difficult, dense, and disjointed. I think it should be read with a sense of play and freedom and that the temptation to paraphrase should be avoided. In its meditative, philosophical character, Ashbery's work follows on that of Wallace Stevens, the poet who most influenced Ashbery. This is avant-garde modernistic writing, and Ashbery wants to help himself and the reader see the world anew without cliches or preconceptions. Yet Ashbery is deeply rooted in his past, and many of his works evidence a sense of nostalgia. The language of his poems shifts, frequently mid-stream, from passages of beauty and formalism to colloquialisms and platitudes. Tenses and pronouns likewise shift repeatedly. There is a sense of plurality, of everydayness, and of finding joy in the commonplace that I think works in these poetic meditations.
Each reader will probably find individual poems in "Houseboat Days" to enjoy and will find others to pass over. I think it is important not to get frustrated or to press too hard in one's reading. The poems that I enjoyed included the title poem, "Houseboat Days", the first two poems, "Street Musicians" and "The Other Tradition", Pyrography", "And Ut Pictura Poesis is her Name", "Loving Mad Tom", and "Syringia". I was able to respond to these poems with some effort. I will discuss three of these poems very briefly below.
"Houseboat Days" seems to be a key poem on the value of understanding change and accepting life as it comes. The poem is critical of a narrow view of reasoning and of the "insincerity of arguing on behalf of one's/ sincere convictions, true or false in themselves." Ashbery writes further: "But I don't set much stock in things/Beyond the weather and the certainties of living and dying:/The rest is optional."
Ashbery wrote the poem "Pyrography" at the invitation of the United States Department of the Interior to celebrate the Bicentennial in 1976. This poem seems to be a journey across America, in both time and place. The poem emphasizes the importance of the everyday parts of life that do not get recounted in histories: "To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today,/It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details/So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative/Would have that flat sandpapered look the sky gets/Out in the middle west toward the end of summer."
In "Syringia" Ashbery retells the myth of Orpheus in a deflated way with himself as hero. Euridyce appears in the poem but her role is downplayed. Ashbery describes Orpheus's power of song, and how this was the cause of his destruction by the gods: "Some say it was for his treatment of Euridyce./ But probably the music had more to do with it,and/The way music passes,emblematic/Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it/And say it is good or bad. You must/Wait till it's over.'The end crowns all'". As the poem progresses, Ashbery becomes Orpheus, dealing with the difficult subjects of modernity and everydayness.
Ashbery's poetry may not be for every reader. Most readers will want to explore his work and this volume selectively. "Houseboat Days" remains a good introduction to Ashbery. Those readers wanting to explore modernistic sensibilities in poetry will find this collection rewarding.
Robin Friedman
"Houseboat Days" was the first book of John Ashbery that I read many years ago. I was fascinated and frustrated by it then and still am. I wanted to focus on this book in reading the Library of America's collection of Asbery's poems from 1956 -- 1987.
Ashbery (1927 -- 2017) received wide recognition with his book "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1975) which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The long title poem of the volume, which is based upon a 1524 painting by Parmigianino, remains Ashbery's masterpiece.
"Houseboat Days" (1977) was Ashbery's next book of poems following "Self-Portrait" and was itself a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The volume consists of 39 poems, including a long final poem, "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid'" based upon a 16th Century ballad. The poem is a dialogue between characters denominated "He" and "She" on the battle of the sexes, followed by a concluding section in prose. Ashbery made liberal use of lines from his earlier poetry. This long work has not attained the stature of the "Self-Portrait." Instead, the "Houseboat Days" collection is known for its shorter poems.
Ashbery's poetry is difficult, dense, and disjointed. I think it should be read with a sense of play and freedom and that the temptation to paraphrase should be avoided. In its meditative, philosophical character, Ashbery's work follows on that of Wallace Stevens, the poet who most influenced Ashbery. This is avant-garde modernistic writing, and Ashbery wants to help himself and the reader see the world anew without cliches or preconceptions. Yet Ashbery is deeply rooted in his past, and many of his works evidence a sense of nostalgia. The language of his poems shifts, frequently mid-stream, from passages of beauty and formalism to colloquialisms and platitudes. Tenses and pronouns likewise shift repeatedly. There is a sense of plurality, of everydayness, and of finding joy in the commonplace that I think works in these poetic meditations.
Each reader will probably find individual poems in "Houseboat Days" to enjoy and will find others to pass over. I think it is important not to get frustrated or to press too hard in one's reading. The poems that I enjoyed included the title poem, "Houseboat Days", the first two poems, "Street Musicians" and "The Other Tradition", Pyrography", "And Ut Pictura Poesis is her Name", "Loving Mad Tom", and "Syringia". I was able to respond to these poems with some effort. I will discuss three of these poems very briefly below.
"Houseboat Days" seems to be a key poem on the value of understanding change and accepting life as it comes. The poem is critical of a narrow view of reasoning and of the "insincerity of arguing on behalf of one's/ sincere convictions, true or false in themselves." Ashbery writes further: "But I don't set much stock in things/Beyond the weather and the certainties of living and dying:/The rest is optional."
Ashbery wrote the poem "Pyrography" at the invitation of the United States Department of the Interior to celebrate the Bicentennial in 1976. This poem seems to be a journey across America, in both time and place. The poem emphasizes the importance of the everyday parts of life that do not get recounted in histories: "To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today,/It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details/So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative/Would have that flat sandpapered look the sky gets/Out in the middle west toward the end of summer."
In "Syringia" Ashbery retells the myth of Orpheus in a deflated way with himself as hero. Euridyce appears in the poem but her role is downplayed. Ashbery describes Orpheus's power of song, and how this was the cause of his destruction by the gods: "Some say it was for his treatment of Euridyce./ But probably the music had more to do with it,and/The way music passes,emblematic/Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it/And say it is good or bad. You must/Wait till it's over.'The end crowns all'". As the poem progresses, Ashbery becomes Orpheus, dealing with the difficult subjects of modernity and everydayness.
Ashbery's poetry may not be for every reader. Most readers will want to explore his work and this volume selectively. "Houseboat Days" remains a good introduction to Ashbery. Those readers wanting to explore modernistic sensibilities in poetry will find this collection rewarding.
Robin Friedman
April 1, 2022
Just been thinking about Douglas Crase's essay/introduction to Ashbery as the year turns over. Happened to come upon it as I was rejecting the usual suspect interpreters (Perloff, Bloom, et. al) and Crase introduced the language of ions, and ionization (heterolytic cleavage and heterolytic substitution, with their echo of Roman Jakobson on metonymy) to describe language in Ashbery. Writing in the mid-Seventies, Ashbery had been reading Quiller-Couch's, and then again, Robert Graves' anthologies of ballads, titling poems after (oftentimes anonymous) ballads from the 16th and 17th centuries, finding in them that tension Graves speaks of as signature to the anonymous poem. Here, from "Fantasia on the Nut-Brown Maid"
He
And last, perhaps, as darkness
Begins to infuse the lawns and silent streets
And the remote estuary, and thickens here, you mention
The slamming of a door I wasn't supposed to know about,
That took years. Each of us circles
Around some simple but vital missing piece of information,
And, at the end, as now, finding no substitute,
Writes his own mark grotesquely with a stick in snow,
The signature of many connected seconds of indecision.
What I am writing to say is, the timing, not
The contents, is what matters. All this could have happened
Long ago, or at least on some other day,
And not meant much except insofar as the eye
Extracts a progress from almost anything. But then
It wouldn't have become a toy.
And all the myths,
Legends and misinterpretations, would have scattered
At a single pistol shot. And it would no longer know what I know.
As usual, Crase is onto something. That sinuous ionization occurs in this passage for me where one kind of phrase becomes another. Suburban laws and streets become "a remote estuary," oddly, "the slamming of a door I wasn't supposed to know about about" thus sliding into understatement, some form of irony. Cleavage and substitution -- cleavage that in taking something away exposes something, substitution that in short order combines with whatever had been exposed in the sheering. The sheering then up against "That took years." Ashbery loves this shifting up a register to reflect on what he's just been doing: "Each of us circles | Around some simple but vital missing piece of information" The language of substitution enters, then a lugubrious collapse: "as now" referring directly to the composition, "finding no substitute | Writes his own mark grotesquely with a stick in snow," a bit of maudlin hyperbole, before the capper: "signature of many connected seconds of indecision." No wonder the rebus is the crucial figure in this "Fantasia" on what's hidden in these old ancient ballads (their having been written by women? about a mixed-race servant?) Ashbery developed a strong technique here that it's impossible to observe him ever moving away from -- the long contour map.
He
And last, perhaps, as darkness
Begins to infuse the lawns and silent streets
And the remote estuary, and thickens here, you mention
The slamming of a door I wasn't supposed to know about,
That took years. Each of us circles
Around some simple but vital missing piece of information,
And, at the end, as now, finding no substitute,
Writes his own mark grotesquely with a stick in snow,
The signature of many connected seconds of indecision.
What I am writing to say is, the timing, not
The contents, is what matters. All this could have happened
Long ago, or at least on some other day,
And not meant much except insofar as the eye
Extracts a progress from almost anything. But then
It wouldn't have become a toy.
And all the myths,
Legends and misinterpretations, would have scattered
At a single pistol shot. And it would no longer know what I know.
As usual, Crase is onto something. That sinuous ionization occurs in this passage for me where one kind of phrase becomes another. Suburban laws and streets become "a remote estuary," oddly, "the slamming of a door I wasn't supposed to know about about" thus sliding into understatement, some form of irony. Cleavage and substitution -- cleavage that in taking something away exposes something, substitution that in short order combines with whatever had been exposed in the sheering. The sheering then up against "That took years." Ashbery loves this shifting up a register to reflect on what he's just been doing: "Each of us circles | Around some simple but vital missing piece of information" The language of substitution enters, then a lugubrious collapse: "as now" referring directly to the composition, "finding no substitute | Writes his own mark grotesquely with a stick in snow," a bit of maudlin hyperbole, before the capper: "signature of many connected seconds of indecision." No wonder the rebus is the crucial figure in this "Fantasia" on what's hidden in these old ancient ballads (their having been written by women? about a mixed-race servant?) Ashbery developed a strong technique here that it's impossible to observe him ever moving away from -- the long contour map.
August 22, 2016
Houseboat Days collects some of my favorite Ashbery poems. It was nice to have an excuse to read them in order when I found a third-print edition at Tim's Used Books in Provincetown, MA. I appreciate the shoutout to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in the long last piece, "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid.'" I vacationed there two Christmases ago. And I like some lines that follow the name-drop:
Spiraling like fish,
Toward a distant, unperceived surface, was all
The reflection there was. Somewhere had its opaque
Momentary existence.
The vague, pretty figure shows one of Ashbery's best poetic registers, the casual meditation on time. Nature imagery, as here, often accompanies these meditations. Elsewhere he mixes mathematics with meteorology, household patter with professional jargon. I especially like it when he caricatures classical poetic figures. He uses puns, aural tricks, and Romantic apostrophe in unexpected places. Drawing on formal traditions gives his poems a sense of varied eloquence.
Due to the nature of his style and the magnitude of his talent, it's hard to pick favorites from this collection. "Wet Casements" and "Saying It to Keep It from Happening" have so far held up best to rereading. The closing poem, while hard to do in one sitting, makes for a really profound linguistic experience. It looks like a wild riff on the dialogue format and spills into prose at the end, as if the speakers ("He" and "She" – really a formal device) only find more to express as their conversation goes on. More than a dialogue between speakers, the piece explores poetic forms by elaborating on a quasi-Socratic structure. As Ashbery converses with established tropes, he is also in dialogue with the reader. Which is his ultimate appeal for me: he'll play the wise man then step back and shrug with us.
Spiraling like fish,
Toward a distant, unperceived surface, was all
The reflection there was. Somewhere had its opaque
Momentary existence.
The vague, pretty figure shows one of Ashbery's best poetic registers, the casual meditation on time. Nature imagery, as here, often accompanies these meditations. Elsewhere he mixes mathematics with meteorology, household patter with professional jargon. I especially like it when he caricatures classical poetic figures. He uses puns, aural tricks, and Romantic apostrophe in unexpected places. Drawing on formal traditions gives his poems a sense of varied eloquence.
Due to the nature of his style and the magnitude of his talent, it's hard to pick favorites from this collection. "Wet Casements" and "Saying It to Keep It from Happening" have so far held up best to rereading. The closing poem, while hard to do in one sitting, makes for a really profound linguistic experience. It looks like a wild riff on the dialogue format and spills into prose at the end, as if the speakers ("He" and "She" – really a formal device) only find more to express as their conversation goes on. More than a dialogue between speakers, the piece explores poetic forms by elaborating on a quasi-Socratic structure. As Ashbery converses with established tropes, he is also in dialogue with the reader. Which is his ultimate appeal for me: he'll play the wise man then step back and shrug with us.
Read
August 8, 2022Ashbery as Ashbery skewing Houseboat you re-approachable beauty I love John. This collection comes straight after Self-Portrait and that crackling vein is still here the mixed lucidity. Famous long poem Fantasia on “Nut-Brown Maid is some of his finest a dialogue based on the old anonymous ballad and I think it’s worth framing John as a crucial figure in the long poem’s history where do we think his pulitzer came from
The Ut Pictura Poesis poem I had known before. I race towards more from the big guy love love
The Ut Pictura Poesis poem I had known before. I race towards more from the big guy love love
March 31, 2025
Väldigt lite matnyttigt, "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid'" undantagen. Jag förstår intellektuellt varför Ashbery är välsedd - hans språk tvingar in en i ett närmast meditativt tillstånd, även om den gör det med stilbilder och exempel som är betydelselösa för mig, även om jag känner igen tillräckliga exempel för att förstå att de nog varit betydelsebärande för min föräldrageneration. Det är lite som att se en spegelbild av en tid som var, fast en grumlad av bucklor och fett - visst finns det aningar man får med sig, men det blir inte något... handfast. Nej, jag betvivlar att jag kommer att återvända till Ashbery.
November 26, 2021
The ol' American trickster up to his olde moves.
November 18, 2023
"Can one advance one step further without sinking equally far back into the past?" The audacity! Don't ask me such things!
July 18, 2023
It was difficult for me to understand what was going on in his poetry. There were some beautiful lines throughout his disjointed style. Probably I should consider reading the collection again and analyzing it more.
January 23, 2017
And Others, Vaguer Presences
Are built out of the meshing of life and space
At the point where we are wholly revealed
In the lozenge-shaped openings. Because
It is argued that these structures address themselves
To exclusively aesthetic concerns, like windmills
On a vast plain. To which it is answered
That there are no other questions than these,
Half squashed in mud, emerging out of the moment
We all live, learning to like it. No sonnet
On this furthest strip of land, no pebbles,
No plants. To extend one’s life
All day on the dirty stone of some plaza,
Unaware among the pretty lunging of the wind,
Light and shade, is like coming out of
A coma that is a white, interesting country,
Prepared to lose the main memory in a meeting
By a torchlight under the twisted end of the stairs.
(John Ashbery is on Goodreads? What?)
Are built out of the meshing of life and space
At the point where we are wholly revealed
In the lozenge-shaped openings. Because
It is argued that these structures address themselves
To exclusively aesthetic concerns, like windmills
On a vast plain. To which it is answered
That there are no other questions than these,
Half squashed in mud, emerging out of the moment
We all live, learning to like it. No sonnet
On this furthest strip of land, no pebbles,
No plants. To extend one’s life
All day on the dirty stone of some plaza,
Unaware among the pretty lunging of the wind,
Light and shade, is like coming out of
A coma that is a white, interesting country,
Prepared to lose the main memory in a meeting
By a torchlight under the twisted end of the stairs.
(John Ashbery is on Goodreads? What?)
October 28, 2008
I don't "get" Ashbery. I have no doubt this is a five star collection for many, and there were many lines that left me both baffled and amazed ("The idea of great distance / Is permitted, even implicit in the slow dripping / Of a lute."), but looking back, I cannot connect lines I liked with specific poems. It's all one strange flow of image and word, with poem titles only serving as pauses. There is a vague, dreamlike sense of mood. But after a while, I found myself craving something more concrete, like a parts manual or a telephone book.
June 21, 2019
I first read John Ashbery in October 2017 and haven't recovered since. I hear his lines in my head every day and just can't help poorly imitating him in my own poetry. With Three Poems and the Double Dream of Spring, this is probably Ashbery's best book.
"To shine light into the house within,
its many memories and associations,
upon its inscribed and picture walls,
argues enough that life is various, life is beautiful.
He who reads that as in the window
of some distant, speeding train
knows what he wants, and what will befall."
"To shine light into the house within,
its many memories and associations,
upon its inscribed and picture walls,
argues enough that life is various, life is beautiful.
He who reads that as in the window
of some distant, speeding train
knows what he wants, and what will befall."
March 23, 2026
I do not understand and I feel weak
April 18, 2022
"You sigh. Your sighs will admit of no impatience,
Only a vast crater lake, vast as the sea,
In which the sky, smaller than that, is reflected."
~
"Your argument's
Neatly beyond any paths I'm likely to take,
Here, or when I eventually leave here."
~
This is my second complete collection of Ashbery's poetry I've read, the first being Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. I loved that one supremely, and this one is pretty good but didn't move me quite as much. Nevertheless, it does have some very excellent things about it. I have a biography of Ashbery that I'm going to read some day, but until then I won't go on about his personal details.
So what were my impressions? Well, Ashbery is as skilled a poet as he ever is in this collection. I think I picked it out because this one in particular was numbered in his best, by no less than Bloom. To give the most general comment possible, I think I put it best in one of my comments when I said that he paints impressionistic strokes of the mundane. This collection in particular seems to center on the mundane. At one point, when I was sharing a poem-"The Other Tradition"- with a friend and they expressed some difficulty with the meaning of the poem but had found the language beautiful, I remarked something like-I used to think that Ashbery's opacity was always making some obscure striving beyond the esoteric, but reading these poems made me reconsider how his opaque style conveys the topic of his poem. Opaque may be a reduction of Ashbery's techniques or the ny school; alas, I am no scholar of modern poetry. Humorously enough, I tried sending another poem in the collection-"Pyrography"-that I thought was particularly straightforward as it was commissioned for the bicentennial, and my friend didn't like it at all lol.
At any rate, what I like about Ashbery is his diction, which does seem esoteric but very much isn't at the same time, and his metaphors, which are so fluid that they can sometimes be hard to keep up with. He often has a human target for his nature metaphors or personifies nature with a transferred epithet-like grace. There is both distance and proximity in his poetry and I find myself reflecting on the beauty of something close at hand, being far removed. Perhaps in some way Ashbery provides that opportunity for his reader to choose whether to be close or remote. And yet it all seems so very personal at the same time.
So we get the titles of poems that are so very clearly mundane: "Wet Casements", "Melodic Trains", or "Crazy Weather". And we get ones that seem rather to speak to us on expansive topics like "The Other Tradition", "The Explanation", or "Saying It to Keep It from Happening."
There is still something about Ashbery that is inaccessible to me. I tired to take my time with these poems and ponder each one before moving on. While I don't think I exhaustively understood every one, I enjoyed the reading.
Only a vast crater lake, vast as the sea,
In which the sky, smaller than that, is reflected."
~
"Your argument's
Neatly beyond any paths I'm likely to take,
Here, or when I eventually leave here."
~
This is my second complete collection of Ashbery's poetry I've read, the first being Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. I loved that one supremely, and this one is pretty good but didn't move me quite as much. Nevertheless, it does have some very excellent things about it. I have a biography of Ashbery that I'm going to read some day, but until then I won't go on about his personal details.
So what were my impressions? Well, Ashbery is as skilled a poet as he ever is in this collection. I think I picked it out because this one in particular was numbered in his best, by no less than Bloom. To give the most general comment possible, I think I put it best in one of my comments when I said that he paints impressionistic strokes of the mundane. This collection in particular seems to center on the mundane. At one point, when I was sharing a poem-"The Other Tradition"- with a friend and they expressed some difficulty with the meaning of the poem but had found the language beautiful, I remarked something like-I used to think that Ashbery's opacity was always making some obscure striving beyond the esoteric, but reading these poems made me reconsider how his opaque style conveys the topic of his poem. Opaque may be a reduction of Ashbery's techniques or the ny school; alas, I am no scholar of modern poetry. Humorously enough, I tried sending another poem in the collection-"Pyrography"-that I thought was particularly straightforward as it was commissioned for the bicentennial, and my friend didn't like it at all lol.
At any rate, what I like about Ashbery is his diction, which does seem esoteric but very much isn't at the same time, and his metaphors, which are so fluid that they can sometimes be hard to keep up with. He often has a human target for his nature metaphors or personifies nature with a transferred epithet-like grace. There is both distance and proximity in his poetry and I find myself reflecting on the beauty of something close at hand, being far removed. Perhaps in some way Ashbery provides that opportunity for his reader to choose whether to be close or remote. And yet it all seems so very personal at the same time.
So we get the titles of poems that are so very clearly mundane: "Wet Casements", "Melodic Trains", or "Crazy Weather". And we get ones that seem rather to speak to us on expansive topics like "The Other Tradition", "The Explanation", or "Saying It to Keep It from Happening."
There is still something about Ashbery that is inaccessible to me. I tired to take my time with these poems and ponder each one before moving on. While I don't think I exhaustively understood every one, I enjoyed the reading.
December 2, 2025
Ok, I know I said this about Double Dream of Spring, but *this* might be the best Ashbery collection. Pyrography may be the single best poem he wrote; Syringa, Saying It To Keep It From Happening, and Houseboat Days are all excellent. I could list half the collection as poems that I marked for being strong. I'm not sure if Daffy Duck in Hollywood is good, but it's certainly funny and new. And though I'm wary of Ashbery's long poems, I really liked Fantasia on the Nut Brown Maid. As with Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the inspiration source clearly benefits as a kind of thematic organizing principle, albeit even more loosely here than in that prior poem. For a follow-up to be this good is a remarkable accomplishment.
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January 3, 2020Reviewing a book by John Ashbery is like reviewing a book by a moray eel. Did you write these poems INTENTIONALLY, or did they just sort of collect on his typewriter? Or did he write them backwards, last line first?
Don’t get me wrong; this book is very good. Ashbery’s poetry improved after his death – at least for me. (Though when he read out loud, he was super funny.)
Opening at random:
… Because
It is argued that these structures address themselves
To exclusively aesthetic concerns, like windmills
on a vast plain. To which it is answered
That there are no other questions than these.
December 1, 2022
Found this version of Ashbery way more approachable than Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Still the same circularity and flowery abstraction but I thought he pulled it off a lot more successfully here- the big difference for me was that the more abstract musings felt more recognizable and he found ways to tether them to concrete details that were so hyper-specific that I could follow along. At a certain point he gets so dense you stop interpreting/decoding and start daydreaming to his music, which I recommend readers start doing as soon as they possibly can. Will probably be my last Ashbery attempt for quite a while but definitely instructive.
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August 28, 2024“…Each of us circles
Around some simple but vital missing piece of information,
And, at the end, as now, finding no substitute,
Writes his own mark grotesquely with a stick in snow,
The signature of many connected seconds of indecision.
What I am writing to say is, the timing, not
The contents, is what matters. All this could have happened
Long ago, or at least on some other day,
And not meant much except insofar as the eye
Extracts a progress from almost anything. But then
It wouldn’t have become a toy.
And all the myths,
Legends and misinterpretations, would have scattered
At a single pistol shot. And it would no longer know what I know.”
Around some simple but vital missing piece of information,
And, at the end, as now, finding no substitute,
Writes his own mark grotesquely with a stick in snow,
The signature of many connected seconds of indecision.
What I am writing to say is, the timing, not
The contents, is what matters. All this could have happened
Long ago, or at least on some other day,
And not meant much except insofar as the eye
Extracts a progress from almost anything. But then
It wouldn’t have become a toy.
And all the myths,
Legends and misinterpretations, would have scattered
At a single pistol shot. And it would no longer know what I know.”
November 10, 2024
A few quotes
ON THE TOWPATH
“The question has been asked
As though an immense natural bridge had been
Strung across the landscape to any point you wanted.”
FANTASIA ON "THE NUT-BROWN MAID"
"Pursuing time this way, as a dog nudges a bone,
You find it has doubled back, the flanges
Of night having now replaced the big daffy gray clouds."
“You are like someone whose face was photographed in a crowd scene once and then gradually retreated from people’s memories, and from life as well.”
ON THE TOWPATH
“The question has been asked
As though an immense natural bridge had been
Strung across the landscape to any point you wanted.”
FANTASIA ON "THE NUT-BROWN MAID"
"Pursuing time this way, as a dog nudges a bone,
You find it has doubled back, the flanges
Of night having now replaced the big daffy gray clouds."
“You are like someone whose face was photographed in a crowd scene once and then gradually retreated from people’s memories, and from life as well.”
May 22, 2022
I found it more difficult to connect with this book in comparison with Some Trees and Self-Portrait. Until the art-poetry poems, I didn't enjoyed the book at all. The second half of the book is where I could find what makes Ashbery who he is.
May 19, 2023
Harold Bloom said _Houseboat Days_ (1977) was “[John] Ashbery’s very best book, with many astonishing poems in it, some transcending even his most beautiful earlier work.” I’ve not read much Ashbery, but reading _Houseboat Days_ I hear this as a backhanded compliment.
Read
October 19, 2024Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.
March 16, 2026
“The problem isn’t how to proceed
But is one of being: whether this ever was, and whose
It shall be. To be starting out, just one step
Off the sidewalk, and as such pulled back into the glittering
Snowstorm of stinging tentacles of how that would be worked out
If we ever work it out”
But is one of being: whether this ever was, and whose
It shall be. To be starting out, just one step
Off the sidewalk, and as such pulled back into the glittering
Snowstorm of stinging tentacles of how that would be worked out
If we ever work it out”
July 2, 2020
"crazy weather" was five-stars, at least
January 17, 2025
“I have chosen this environment and it is handsome”
Thank you Ashbery
Thank you Ashbery
March 24, 2026
Challenging, brilliant and beautiful. Some poems may at times fall through cracks of ambiguity, but most work in this collection is worth the effort. Ashbery is one of a kind.
May 1, 2025
Lyrical, but I had trouble following meaning (a me problem not a poet problem, of course).
March 22, 2025
There is a where to America. A location that’s abstract, like the definition of the word “dwelling.” Where you ask, “Where is the America you dwell in?” Because where introduce a question, and it can entertain a concept. An abstraction. And this mental space always feels like the ambition to Ashbery’s books. Or it’s what I read for in his books. What abstraction will Ashbery be feeling out in this book? Is it the temporality of a day, like I read in The Double Dream of Spring? Is it the wash of time, the cresting of some times that ultimately settle into the no-time that is always what time feels like, like I read in A Wave In one sense, Ashbery’s poems, no matter the book, always feel so comforted by abstraction. But each book also feels like a new angle for thinking, or a new way to situate an abstraction that was always familiar to him?
And in this case, I find Ashbery concerned with the abstraction of where. How time can make where more where-worthy. And people where you expect people to be complicating where you are at the moment. The poem, “Melodic Trains,” where the poem wonders whether there’s a set time for a train to be stopped at each station, and everyone’s behaviors in the stations, children, people who know they’re going to need to find a taxi, people waiting for the next train. This weaving of concerns that are just observed concerns. That’s the where as it’s existing in each of these people. Pastel tints of reality and affect, but not full-on pathos depicted in the reality. Maybe this is a stretch. But I’m often thinking about CA Conrad’s somatic rituals in Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness. The poems in that book introduced first with a prose explanation or prompting. Followed immediately by the poem which appears like a shard of language. I’ve always been struck by the clear pathos in Conrad’s prose introductions compared to the poetic shard that appears after. Ashbery’s poems fit somewhere between those two registers. Almost like they would like to pretend the composure of poetic explanation (like Conrad’s shard in those poems). But then Ashbery’s so prose-y, or so invested in the long sentence, and so I’m lulled into a reading that borders on pathos, or I find I’m confused what I should be feeling about Ashbery’s interplay of lite cynicism and lite wonder.
It makes Ashbery’s poems feel like a garden of creeping ivy. And maybe this is the America he wants me to see. The where in America that can be assumed to be what America had become in the 1970s. Like the time then felt like the time it does now, but it was then. The where in America constantly fading. Because there is something about this book, published in the 1970s that feels more mindful of the 1950s. An America that would have been substantially was then, if you think about it. Or the 1970s would have been struggling with what was was in the 1950s, and how that was kept appearing in the landscape. Like a suburban landscape that had started growing into those saplings they planted along the neighborhood streets. And for some people, those saplings will always be the saplings they remember, a saplings that was exactly what they remembered of that neighborhood, but there are other people who will just see them as trees. This neighborhood is full of trees. And that tilt of one generation’s view versus another is kind of what Ashbery seems to address in the book.
And in this case, I find Ashbery concerned with the abstraction of where. How time can make where more where-worthy. And people where you expect people to be complicating where you are at the moment. The poem, “Melodic Trains,” where the poem wonders whether there’s a set time for a train to be stopped at each station, and everyone’s behaviors in the stations, children, people who know they’re going to need to find a taxi, people waiting for the next train. This weaving of concerns that are just observed concerns. That’s the where as it’s existing in each of these people. Pastel tints of reality and affect, but not full-on pathos depicted in the reality. Maybe this is a stretch. But I’m often thinking about CA Conrad’s somatic rituals in Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness. The poems in that book introduced first with a prose explanation or prompting. Followed immediately by the poem which appears like a shard of language. I’ve always been struck by the clear pathos in Conrad’s prose introductions compared to the poetic shard that appears after. Ashbery’s poems fit somewhere between those two registers. Almost like they would like to pretend the composure of poetic explanation (like Conrad’s shard in those poems). But then Ashbery’s so prose-y, or so invested in the long sentence, and so I’m lulled into a reading that borders on pathos, or I find I’m confused what I should be feeling about Ashbery’s interplay of lite cynicism and lite wonder.
It makes Ashbery’s poems feel like a garden of creeping ivy. And maybe this is the America he wants me to see. The where in America that can be assumed to be what America had become in the 1970s. Like the time then felt like the time it does now, but it was then. The where in America constantly fading. Because there is something about this book, published in the 1970s that feels more mindful of the 1950s. An America that would have been substantially was then, if you think about it. Or the 1970s would have been struggling with what was was in the 1950s, and how that was kept appearing in the landscape. Like a suburban landscape that had started growing into those saplings they planted along the neighborhood streets. And for some people, those saplings will always be the saplings they remember, a saplings that was exactly what they remembered of that neighborhood, but there are other people who will just see them as trees. This neighborhood is full of trees. And that tilt of one generation’s view versus another is kind of what Ashbery seems to address in the book.
June 16, 2011
Lots of gems in here. Love the circularity--"They have so much trouble remembering, when your forgetting/ rescues them at last, as a star absorbs the night" ("The Other Tradition"). And beautiful, dense imagery, coupled with audacious syntax: "'Into the eternal wimpling of the sky: luster / On luster, transparency floated onto the top most layer / Until the whosel thing overflows like a silver / Wedding cake or Christmas tree, in a cascade of tears'" ("Variant"). "Pyrography" is a poem for the American Bicentennial--probably the only commemorative piece worth saving out of that commercialized year of cheese. "What Is Poetry" is a remarkably transparent definition by a notoriously abstract poet. If "The Thief of Poetry" is perhaps a tribute to the enjambment of William Carlos Williams' lines, then "The Ice Cream Wars" may be a nod to Wallace Stevens. It feels like here, the first book after the peak of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, that Ashbery is starting the long, slow slide of imitating himself, exaggerating his tics. But why shouldn't he? Virtually every other poet at the end of the twentieth century imitated him too.
October 8, 2012
Well, this is my second attempt with Ashbery. I tried The Tennis Court Oath earlier this year and got about ten pages into it before giving up, so finishing Houseboat Days feels like more of an accomplishment than any 88-page book should. But I suppose I just don't get Ashbery. I found almost every last one of these poems inscrutable, which is a shame since there were interesting lines and images throughout. I just couldn't figure out what they add up to.
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