- 88 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
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."
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."
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Yes, you can access Houseboat Days by John Ashbery in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & American Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Contents
- Publisher’s Note
- Street Musicians
- The Other Tradition
- Variant
- Collective Dawns
- Wooden Buildings
- Pyrography
- The Gazing Grain
- Unctuous Platitudes
- The Couple in the Next Room
- The Explanation
- Loving Mad Tom
- Business Personals
- Crazy Weather
- On the Towpath
- Melodic Trains
- Bird's-Eye View of the Tool and Die Co.
- Wet Casements
- Saying It to Keep It from Happening
- Daffy Duck in Hollywood
- All Kinds of Caresses
- Lost and Found and Lost Again
- Two Deaths
- Houseboat Days
- Whether It Exists
- The Lament upon the Waters
- Drame Bourgeois
- And Ut Pictum Poesis Is Her Name
- What Is Poetry
- And Others, Vaguer Presences
- The Wrong Kind of Insurance
- The Serious Doll
- Friends
- The Thief of Poetry
- The Ice-Cream Wars
- Valentine
- Blue Sonata
- Spring Light
- Syringa
- Fantasia on "The Nut-Brown Maid"
- About the Author
- Copyright