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    Rivers and Mountains: Poems
    Rivers and Mountains: Poems
    Rivers and Mountains: Poems
    Ebook90 pages59 minutes

    Rivers and Mountains: Poems

    By John Ashbery

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    From one of our most important modern poets comes an essential early collection, including the famous long poems “The Skaters” and “Clepsydra”

    When Rivers and Mountains was published in 1966, American poetry was in a state of radical redefinition, with John Ashbery recognized as one of the leading voices in the New York School of poets. Ashbery himself had just returned to America from ten years abroad working as an art critic in France, and Rivers and Mountains, his third published collection of poems, is now considered by many critics to represent a pivotal transition point in his artistic career. The poet who would gain widespread acclaim with his multiple-award-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) is, in this collection, still very much engaged in the intimate, personal project of taking his poetry apart and putting it back together again, interrogating not just the act of writing but poetry itself—its purpose, its composition, its fundamental parts.
     
    Nominated for a National Book Award by a panel of judges that included W. H. Auden and James Dickey, Rivers and Mountains includes two of Ashbery’s most studied and admired works. “Clepsydra,” which takes its name from an ancient device for measuring the passage of time, echoes both the physical form and the philosophical weight of a water clock in its contemplation of the experience of time as it passes. “The Skaters,” the long poem that closes the collection, was immediately praised as a masterpiece of modern American poetry, and is the work that perhaps most clearly introduces the voice for which Ashbery is now well known and loved: generous, restless, wide-ranging, and human. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459199
    Rivers and Mountains: 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
      This early collection is my first exposure to John Ashbery, and after researching the mixed critical acceptance of his work throughout his career, I feel a little less overwhelmed by my initial reaction to some of the poems within. Ashbery is well known for his surrealist style, and this definitely comes across in poems such as The Recent Past, and A Blessing in Disguise. Most reviews of this collection heap a lot of praise on the long-form poem that takes up nearly half of this volume, The Skaters, but I personally found a resonance within the shorter pieces, two in particular. Into the Dusk-Charged Air, a playful list poem, barrels through a variety of different descriptions of rivers in what feels almost like a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the language. Then there is The Ecclesiast, a poem about embracing the impermanence and inconsequentiality of life, and which read as a direct response (or rebuttal) to Kind David from Ecclesiastes 1, who proclaimed “Utterly meaningless!/Everything is meaningless.” A great collection from the early part of a long and celebrated career, Rivers and Mountains has me looking forward to delving into more of Ashbery's work.

    Book preview

    Rivers and Mountains - John Ashbery

    These Lacustrine Cities

    These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing

    Into something forgetful, although angry with history.

    They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,

    Though this is only one example.

    They emerged until a tower

    Controlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back

    Into the past for swans and tapering branches,

    Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love.

    Then you are left with an idea of yourself

    And the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon

    Which must be charged to the embarrassment of others

    Who fly by you like beacons.

    The night is a sentinel.

    Much of your time has been occupied by creative games

    Until now, but we have all-inclusive plans for you.

    We had thought, for instance, of sending you to the middle of the desert,

    To a violent sea, or of having the closeness of the others be air

    To you, pressing you back into a startled dream

    As sea-breezes greet a child’s face.

    But the past is already here, and you are nursing some private project.

    The worst is not over, yet I know

    You will be happy here. Because of the logic

    Of your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart.

    Tender and insouciant by turns, you see

    You have built a mountain of something,

    Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,

    Whose wind is desire starching a petal,

    Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.

    Rivers and Mountains

    On the secret map the assassins

    Cloistered, the Moon River was marked

    Near the eighteen peaks and the city

    Of humiliation and defeat—wan ending

    Of the trail among dry, papery leaves,

    Gray-brown quills like thoughts

    In the melodious but vast mass of today’s

    Writing through fields and swamps

    Marked, on the map, with little bunches of weeds.

    Certainly squirrels lived in the woods

    But devastation and dull sleep still

    Hung over the land, quelled

    The rioters turned out of sleep in the peace of prisons

    Singing on marble factory walls

    Deaf consolation of minor tunes that pack

    The air with heavy invisible rods

    Pent in some sand valley from

    Which only quiet walking ever instructs.

    The bird flew over and

    Sat—there was nothing else to do.

    Do not mistake its silence for pride or strength

    Or the waterfall for a harbor

    Full of light boats that is there

    Performing for thousands of people

    In clothes some with places to

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