Your Name Here

by John Ashbery

Our Review
The juxtaposition of seemingly random, even bizarre elements is what renders the poetry of John Ashbery so difficult for some readers. He collects ordinary oddities and links them together in a conversational stream of consciousness, thus disguising profundity in the everyday (or finding it there?) and only occasionally relying on the sort of portentous phrases to which so much poetry is indebted. Yet there is shape to this apparent arbitrariness, and in reading Ashbery's newest collection, Your Name Here, distinct themes do begin to coalesce and assert themselves.

Many of the poems share, for instance, an unmistakably elegiac tone. In a poem like "Strange Occupations," the word "remember" appears four times in the first eight lines. The book is very much the searching-backward gaze of an older man -- Ashbery is in his 70s -- who clings to memories of people and places but is haunted by missed opportunities and unforeseen consequences. Ashbery sifts through the attic of his life, but he intertwines its contents with the colorful stuff of dreams and fictions, and he directs his remembrances to others; the book is full of constant references to "you," invocations of friends, addresses to the absent.

One of the book's recurring images is that of a spool -- conjuring up the skein of days, the thread of a life unwinding in memories. Writing becomes a transcript of the aging process, a literal book of days; it preserves a sense of self before time's lens, defying the idea of "life as a sandbar...that the tide is frantically trying to erase." But the danger lies in representation replacing action: "My life at my back now, my discourse/like weeds far out on a lake" wrings its hands at the passive nostalgia of later years. In "telling my adventures to anyone who will listen" (from a poem called "Cinema V�rit�"), the poet's life is reduced to art, not transformed by it.
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Looking back at his mistakes, the poet wants to know, "In what way do things get to be wrong?" and he thinks "how heavenly it would have been/if it had all happened later or differently." But an awareness of the gulf between freedom and necessity, expectation and reality, also deepens with age, Ashbery seems to say. One never forgets death, the ultimate end, but getting there can take so many routes, and therein lies the urgency of living: "One can wait on the curb for the rest/of one's life, for all anyone cares, or one can cross/when the light changes to green..." "Escape is never possible" if life is reduced to a labyrinth -- but "there is still time for surprises," for the shock of novelty, adventure, chance. "We know, they say, and keep going," one of the book's final poems declares, supplying the only possible answer for the future to iYour Name Here/i's wistful questioning of the past.
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--iJonathan Cook/i

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Formal 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.

Reviews

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

STANZAS BEFORE TIME

Quietly as if it could be
otherwise, the ocean turns
and slinks back into her panties.

Reefs must know something of this,
and all the incurious red fish
that float ditsily in schools,

wondering which school is best.
I'd take you for a drive
in my flivver, Miss Ocean, honest, if I could.

[Scott Ballard · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I remember the world of cherry blossoms looking up at the sun and wondering, what have I done to deserve this or anything else?” from Vendanges.

I found this collection difficult to penetrate, over the month of reading these poems, I tried several angles to infiltrate the flow, I feel I failed. Perhaps another year!

[John Pappas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Confounding, amusing and arch, these poems wrap their long lines around your brain and don't let go. Dream-like and surreal, Ashbery's poems have at their heart a core of wonderment in the world and a desire for powerful experience and connection, a desire to abate loneliness by engaging in the world or in one's projections of the world. You never know, when you start reading a poem by Ashbery, quite where you'll end up.

[Andrew LaBelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely gorgeous. Contains plenty of unforgettable vocabulary and images, and very approachable despite quite opaque structures and the frequent absence of ostensible meanings. The tone of the poems is often playful. Many of them juggle syntaxes as easily as they pivot between their subject matter. While this collection potentially offers many instances of profound, yet sober happiness, it encapsulates and bursts at the edges with a sad weariness and forlorn touch of estrangement.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

a re-reader fasho, five stario

[Charles · Rating 1 out of 5]

So, clearly, John Ashberry was/is widely recognized as a poet of distinction and has been the recipient of many awards. The poetry in this collection certainly showed a strong sense of language and some fine imagery. I just didn't like it. To me, the poetry reads like word salads, with sentences and fragments strewn together to avoid meaning. For example: "That watery light, so undervalued except when evaluated, which never happens much, perhaps even not at all--I intend to conserve it."

I might have still enjoyed this poetry if it had had a sense of music to it, but I personally find the phrasing mostly pedestrian and not very rhythmical. Here's another example: "But how can I be in this bar and also be a recluse? The colony of ants was marching toward me, stretching far into the distance, where they were as small as ants. Their leader held up a twig as big as a poplar. It was obviously supposed to be for me. But he couldn't say it, with a poplar in his mandibles. Well, let's forget that scene and turn to one in Paris."

Perhaps Ashberry was trying to say something about language in general, because after reading a dozen or so his poems back to back, I turned to a regular prose story and found, for a moment, that I couldn't quite understand the flow of the words. I suppose that is an accomplishment, to impose his rhythm, or anti-rhythm on me for even a few seconds. It might have been accomplished at shorter length though; this is a long collection.

Please don't take my opinion here as any form of objective evaluation. This is how I felt about the poetry but many others seem to like his work and he has a much, much more extensive list of accomplishments than I do. Find out for yourself.

[leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't my most favorite poetry read ever but there were a few good lines here and there. Overall, I didn't have any poems that I loved enough to make a note of. It was a birthday gift to me by someone I care about so I wanted to at least try to read it through.

[A L]

Even more moving and oneiric than usual; loved "Life is a Dream" and "Slumberer."

[Kasandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Ashbery, to me, is like getting on a ride that makes you feel a little sick and disoriented when you stumble off it, yet is so fun you can't wait to get in line to ride it again as soon as you're done. He shakes up the brain quite nicely. These do have a sad/elegiac tone to them. My favorite poem here is "Merrily We Live", which ends:

"Today a stoat came to tea
and that was so nice it almost made me cry --
look, the tears in the mirror are still streaming down my face
as if there were no tomorrow. But there is one, I fear,
a nice big one. Well, so long,
and don't touch any breasts, at least until I get there."

[Di · Rating 3 out of 5]

The very first time I am putting down a book of poetry half read. Cant get into this one. But there were a few I liked from what I did manage to cover, one if which contains these lines:

"I know I'll have a chance to learn more
Later on. Waiting is what's called for, meanwhile.
It's true that life can be anything, but certain things definitely aren't it. This gloved hand,
For instance, that glides
So securely into mine, as though it intends to stay."

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed it slightly more than the two previous collections of poetry from Ashbery. But not enough to want to read the whole body of his work. A few poems here were good. Perhaps at another time in my life I will have a different reaction.

Book rating: 3.5 stars

Post Note: found it odd two lines repeated in different poems...
Oh, I love you so much in such a little time.
It seems a shame we have to go on living.


--The File on Thelma Jordan
--De Senectute

[Mikael · Rating 4 out of 5]

my name there yr name where

[Katharine Holden · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not drawn into any of the poems.