Chinese Whispers - Softcover

Ashbery, John

3.72

173 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857546180 ISBN 13: 9781857546187

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd, 2002

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You turn to your neighbour and cup your hand and say into his ear what you've heard. He does the same to a girl on his right. With each repetition the message gets a little further from the original intention. But as the intention recedes, the whispered phrases approach what they intend themselves. A poem, for instance, may start as a poet's statement. But a poem is less and more than an initial statement. It may start from a poet, but it doesn't finally belong to the poet. John Ashbery's new collection includes sixty-five poems. In each, a verbal nucleus, the original incitement to commit poetry, undergoes twists and modulations and arrives at a final, altered, form. The changes come about because the train of ideas proliferate, departing from the platform of a word or phrase. Each poem is a veritable Gard du Nord.

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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 1927 in Rochester, New York. He grew up in Rochester and spent most of his time living with his grandparents. Ashbery had to leave the city and move to the country at the age of seven when his grandfather retired from his post as professor at the university. He went to Deerfield Academy at 16 and felt out of place in this '...sort of jock, upper-class WASP school.' (John Ashbery, 'How far to go too far,' The Guardian, G2, 24 July, 1997, 12.) He continued his education at Harvard where he met Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara and, along with James Schuyler and Barbara Guest, they became known as the 'New York School of Poets.' This was not an official 'school,' but a group of like minded poets seeking to undermine the serious and academic poetry written after the war in America. In 1955 Ashbery was awarded the Fulbright scholarship enabling him to go to Paris and he also had his first book of poetry accepted by W H Auden who, at the time, was the editor of the Yale Younger Poets Series. The collection of poems produced during Ashbery's time in Paris, The Tennis Court Oath, were extremely experimental and were not well received by critics. When his scholarship money ran out, Ashbery became an art critic and translator. Ashbery finally returned to New York after the death of his father in the mid-sixties and has remained in the city since then.

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