The Mooring of Starting Out

by John Ashbery

Most critics would agree that John Ashbery is one of 20th-century American poetry's finest voices. Perhaps his most admired book is Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a culmination of themes, styles, and forms with which the poet experimented over the course of two decades. Now, the poet's devoted readers can trace his development through the first five books of his poetry, collected here in one handy volume. The Mooring of Starting Out represents Ashbery's work from 1956 through 1972, comprising Some Trees, his first book; The Tennis Court Oath, written while he was living in Paris; Rivers and Mountains; The Double Dream of Spring; and Three Poems.

Genres: Poetry

389 pages, Paperback

First published June 21, 1997

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

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have an interest in Ashbery, this is the place to start. It's a beautiful collection that makes diving in easy, in part because it forces you to deal with so much. Read through his poems quickly the first time, then revisit the ones that catch your attention anyway. Don't worry much about what the author intended, or worry only a little, because "getting it right" is the wrong idea, at least at first. Maybe a better way to say it is that Ashbery's style, as varied as it is, benefits from creative interpretation. There are books and articles out there that might help you contextualize his work, but you don't need much help to feel what's happening, and that's enough to tackle his writing.

And don't skip "Three Poems." Do whatever you have to in order to make it through all three; they're long and intimidating, so pretend that they're a bunch of short poems pressed together in prose form. They're easier to read than you might think and they might help you read the more condensed, less open poems that come before. In fact, don't be afraid to start there. They left the biggest impression on me in some ways, and they made me want to go back to the rest immediately.

[Kayla E · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is what arguably made me like poetry at all.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ashberry knows how to play with language without making language or the other things of the world mere toys. Unlike Wallace Stevens, to whom he is often compared, Ashberry's poems are made of the world not made outside it in a sad, sneering, wintery suburban yard. I love these early books for their echoes of Auden and their strange aesthetic that's already turned aged, like vintage cabinets or Soviet architecture. Long live John Ashbery.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume contains the first 5 Ashbery volumes, including Some Trees, The Tennis Court Oath, Rivers and Mountains, The Double Dream of Spring, and Three Poems. Highly recommended as the basis of postmodern lyric poetry.

[Caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should tag this one as always reading. My favorite way to read this book is to randomly open a page and start from the first line that catches my eye. That's Ashbury.

[Leah W · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've read "Some Trees" and don't adore it, go ahead & get the hell out of my Goodreads profile RIGHT NOW, PEOPLE.

[Manuel Abreu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I once thought of Ashbery as "red herring as lyric," but having sat with this, I see the work now more as a kind of rococo reconciliation with the postmodern condition. A term D'Aguiar uses to describe the work of Wilson Harris— "ontological promiscuity" — seems to fit as a descriptor of Ashbery, too. We also see clearly that the poet thinks in images, that the condition of the image or picture suffused his poetic inquiry. Learning about his collage practice makes this all the more cogent. Anyway, yes, this is good. Recommended.

[Matteo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Clepsydra" is the poem of a lifetime.

[Adeline Galich · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is absolutely beautiful. Ashbery is for sure my favorite poet of all time

[Crito · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a big ol poetry philistine, but my tongue is telling me this is what American poetry should sound like. We dropped the midatlantic lilt and gained the world.

[Ian Carpenter]

DNF Just did not grab me.

[Stop]

Read the STOP SMILING interview with poet John Ashbery

I GUESS IT'S ROMANTIC, IF YOU'RE A DOG
By Greg Purcell + Fred Sasaki

(This interview originally appeared in the STOP SMILING Hollywood Lost & Found Issue)

The famed New York School of poetry was a network in the Fifties composed of friends, as they called one another, who didn’t know they were a part of any “school” at all. Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery — poets themselves — simply met new poets, as they were inclined to do, and introduced them around; thus the movement was born. It included dozens of practitioners. Each possessed different interests and strategies, but if any one thing defined them, it was a fondness for the playful forms of European modernism, along with an openness to American culture as it was experienced on the ground. Ashbery and O’Hara, in particular, were avid moviegoers, and the great sensory shift that comes from abandoning yourself to the darkness of a movie theater seems ingrained in the New York School aesthetic — it loses none of its joy in the translation from one medium to the other.

John Ashbery, perhaps the most revered American poet living today, has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in poetry, and has collected numerous other laurels. We asked him to talk a little about the movies he loves and has written about — both as a poet, less frequently as an essayist — over the years. He protests, “It’s odd that I’m suddenly being sought out as an authority on Hollywood, which I’m not, though of course I have been going to movies for many decades.”

Read the complete interview...

[T. · Rating 3 out of 5]

What to find in the rubble of things left behind while people are too busy moving rooms? Books, and lots of books. Dust, old journals, a very worn pillow. Remembered conversations, perhaps nostalgia. And L.'s book, discovered while friends and I were digging through piles of stuff we can save. I'm not even sure if I ever asked for his permission, but surely a compilation of Ashbery's poems, forgotten for years and years - I couldn't leave it there, could I.

Here, one of my favourite Ashbery poems:

Some Trees
John Ashbery

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

[Kassandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars rather than five only because the five early collections included in this volume are not uniformly at the same height of excellence. "Some Trees" and "The Double Dream of Spring" are two of the best volumes of poetry published in English in the 20th Century.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's Ashbery for chrissakes...

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This includes The Tennis Court Oath, which has some nice bits.

[KW · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best collections of poetry I've ever read/studied. Complex yet simple. Beautiful words turned poems turned spirituality. John Ashbery may be the greatest poet alive today.