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    Houseboat Days: Poems
    Houseboat Days: Poems
    Houseboat Days: Poems
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Houseboat Days: Poems

    By John Ashbery

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    About this ebook

    Is poetry the act of putting something together, or the art of taking something apart? Houseboat Days, one of John Ashbery’s most celebrated collections, offers its own answer

    Remarkable for its introspection and for the response it elicited when it was first published in 1977, Houseboat Days is Ashbery’s much-discussed follow-up to his 1975 masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and remains one of his most studied books to date.
     
    Houseboat Days begins with the moving, unforgettable poem “Street Musicians,” an allegory of artistic and personal loss that came ten years after the death of Ashbery’s friend and fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara. But while many of the poems in Houseboat Days are strikingly personal, especially when compared to Ashbery’s work from the 1950s and 1960s, the collection is less about the poet than about the act of writing poetry. In such widely anthologized poems as “Wet Casements,” “Syringa,” “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” and “What Is Poetry,” Ashbery embraces the challenge of his own ars poetica, exploring and exploding the trusses, foundations, and underground caverns that underlie the creative act, and specifically, the act of creating a poem. Marjorie Perloff of the Washington Post Book World called Houseboat Days “the most exciting, most original book of poems to have appeared in the 1970s.” 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459151
    Houseboat Days: Poems
    Author

    John Ashbery

    <p><strong>John Ashbery </strong>was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including <em>Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; </em>and <em>Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, </em>which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.</p>

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    • 4/5
      Ashbery’s poetry slips off the page so effortlessly that it seems unnatural at times. His work is at once influenced by almost everyone before and wholly original. Anyone looking to see the direction modern poetry is taking need look no further. The two pieces most worthy of note are “Melodic Trains” and “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.”

    Book preview

    Houseboat Days - John Ashbery

    Street Musicians

    One died, and the soul was wrenched out

    Of the other in life, who, walking the streets

    Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on

    The same corners, volumetrics, shadows

    Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever

    Called, through increasingly suburban airs

    And ways, with autumn falling over everything:

    The plush leaves the chattels in barrels

    Of an obscure family being evicted

    Into the way it was, and is. The other beached

    Glimpses of what the other was up to:

    Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.

    So I cradle this average violin that knows

    Only forgotten showtunes, but argues

    The possibility of free declamation anchored

    To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself

    In November, with the spaces among the days

    More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.

    Our 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.

    The Other Tradition

    They all came, some wore sentiments

    Emblazoned on T-shirts, proclaiming the lateness

    Of the hour, and indeed the sun slanted its rays

    Through branches of Norfolk Island pine as though

    Politely clearing its throat, and all ideas settled

    In a fuzz of dust under trees when it’s drizzling:

    The endless games of Scrabble, the boosters,

    The celebrated omelette au Cantal, and through it

    The roar of time plunging unchecked through the sluices

    Of the days, dragging every sexual moment of it

    Past the lenses: the end of something.

    Only then did you glance up from your book,

    Unable to comprehend what had been taking place, or

    Say what you had been reading. More chairs

    Were brought, and lamps were lit, but it tells

    Nothing of how all this proceeded to materialize

    Before you and the people waiting outside and in the next

    Street, repeating its name over and over, until silence

    Moved halfway up the darkened trunks,

    And the meeting was called to order.

    I still remember

    How they found you, after a dream, in your thimble hat,

    Studious as a butterfly in a parking lot.

    The road home was nicer then. Dispersing, each of the

    Troubadours had something to say about how charity

    Had run its race and won, leaving you the ex-president

    Of the event, and how, though many of those present

    Had wished something to come of it, if only a distant

    Wisp of smoke, yet none was so deceived as to hanker

    After that cool non-being of just a few minutes before,

    Now that the idea of a forest had clamped itself

    Over the minutiae of the scene. You found this

    Charming, but turned your face fully toward night,

    Speaking into it like a megaphone, not hearing

    Or caring, although these still live and are generous

    And all ways contained, allowed to come and go

    Indefinitely in and out of the stockade

    They have so much trouble remembering, when your forgetting

    Rescues them at last, as a star absorbs the night.

    Variant

    Sometimes a word will start it, like

    Hands and feet, sun and gloves. The way

    Is fraught with danger, you say, and I

    Notice the word fraught as you are

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