Chinese Whispers: Poems - Hardcover

Ashbery, John

3.72

173 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374122571 ISBN 13: 9780374122577

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

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Chinese Whispers is the British name of a game called Telephone in America. According to a certain "Professor Hoffmann" in his book Drawing Room Amusements (1879), "the participants are arranged in a circle, and the first player whispers a story or message to the next player, and so on round the circle. The original story is then compared with the final version, which has often changed beyond recognition."

"Chinese Whispers" is also the superb title poem in this new collection of sixty-three poems by John Ashbery. In these works, as perhaps in much poetry, the verbal nucleus that is the original incitement toward a poem undergoes twists and modulations before arriving at its final form. The changes are caused not by careless listening to the speech of others, but by endlessly proliferating trains of ideas that a single word or phrase ignites in the poet's mind. These alter the face of the poem even as they contribute to it and become part of its fabric. As in a sea change the poem has been transformed, often into "something rich and strange," but the strangeness is that of thought being opened up, like a geode, to reveal unexpected facets of meaning.

John Ashbery has been called "America's greatest living poet" by Harold Bloom. Now in his seventy-fifth year, he continues to write poetry that is dazzlingly inventive and original.

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From the Inside Flap:

"Since the death of Wallace Stevens in 1955, we have been in the Age of Ashbery. It delights me that Chinese Whispers is John Ashbery at his most poignant, lucid, and perceptive."
—Harold Bloom

"‘We can only go on extracting fishhooks/ from meanings that were intended to be casual.’ John Ashbery has been extracting those ‘fishhooks’ for many years now, but perhaps none of his collections have been as inspiring and ethically rigorous as is Chinese Whispers—a book that, for all its humor, parodic narrative, and droll ‘telephone’ playing, is passionately concerned with Wallace Stevens’ question ‘How to live. What to do.’ Here is Ashbery at his most relaxed and yet most intense—letting no one off the hook, least of all himself. No other poet writing today has Ashbery’s ability to surprise us at every turn—to force us to rethink what we thought we understood. It is a dazzling performance!"
—Marjorie Perloff

"Ashbery is astonishingly original, and though his mannerisms have been widely imitated, he himself has imitated no one."
—Edmund White

"Anything new by Ashbery has become for poetry the natural noise of now."
—John Bayley

"No book by John Ashbery is ever quite like the one that came before it. If he sometimes seems to be a figure out of the recent future, that is because Ashbery has the true innovator’s desire not to repeat himself."
—J. D. McClatchy, Poetry

"I find him prepossessing."
—Marianne Moore

"[Ashbery is] a national treasure . . . his poems perfect in their pitch, astonishing for their sheer good nature."
—Linda Gregerson

"The sheer range of Ashbery’s style is unparalleled among contemporary writers."
—Fred Moramarco

"Ashbery’s poems have become an integral part of the lives of those who read poetry. He is one of the few authors whose every new book we await hungrily, with the feeling that our souls are leaning forward into something significant, refreshing and transformative."
—Forrest Gander, The Providence Sunday Journal

About the Author:

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and educated at Harvard and Columbia. He is Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Language and Literature at Bard College and lives in New York City and Hudson, New York.

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