Other Traditions
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Harvard University Press
Publishing:26th Sep '25
£19.95
This title is due to be published on 26th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
“An entertaining and shrewd little book … Ashbery is an accomplished raconteur.” —Charles Simic, New York Review of Books
The most influential American poet of his generation appraises the lesser-known writers who shaped his own confounding, infinitely inventive work.
John Ashbery was the quintessential “difficult poet.” When asked to explain his work, he typically responded by insisting that his poetry was its own explanation. Fittingly, then, when he was invited to deliver the Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1989, Ashbery declined to spell out what he put on the page. Instead, he offered rapt audiences a tour of his influences, the authors he turned to as a “jumpstart for times when the batteries have run down.”
The poets in Ashbery’s personal canon—John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert—were all tragic figures in their own way, plagued by mental illness or poverty, ridiculed or barely recognized in their own lives, and in some cases, all but forgotten today. More importantly for Ashbery, each wrote poetry that somehow defies the reader. Clare’s sometimes-monotonous naturalism, Roussel’s exhausting maze of parenthetical clauses, and Wheelwright’s eccentric Anglican mysticism do not invite casual reading. But under Ashbery’s tutelage, we experience the idiosyncratic brilliance of these “other traditions,” discovering how they shaped not only Ashbery’s poetics but also the broader trajectory of twentieth-century literature, from surrealism to New Criticism.
With inimitable charm, wit, and erudition, the lectures collected in Other Traditions elevate the imperfect and peculiar, affirming the literary virtues of Ashbery’s difficult predecessors. The result is a revealing self-portrait of one of the giants of American poetry, if only through a convex mirror.
Other Traditions is an entertaining and shrewd little book. To begin with, the life stories of the six poets he discusses are all amazing. Ashbery is an accomplished raconteur and the lectures are full of delightful anecdotes...The lectures also provide abundant hints about Ashbery's own method. As he readily admits, poets when writing about other poets frequently write about themselves. -- Charles Simic * New York Review of Books *
[Ashbery] at his most accessible. -- Taylor Antrim * New York Times Book Review *
A pure pleasure to read. Ashbery is a keen and knowledgeable commentator, paying graceful homage to these artists' work, to his own history as a poet and reader, and to the rich mysteries of poetry itself...a quiet triumph. -- Lisa Beskin * Boston Review *
[Ashbery] has chosen [the six poets] for the inconsistency in the quality of their work, often due to turbulent lives, and often the cause of their obscurity. But he unearths their shining moments, examples of their best, most lasting poems. He untangles their lives from their work, their obscurity from their talent and their importance to us from their obscurity. -- Susan Salter Reynolds * Los Angeles Times Book Review *
Recklessness (and in some cases, fun) is the salient feature that connects the six little-known and disparate writers that Ashbery chose to discuss in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures...In his analysis of [the poets], Ashbery is particularly alert to what is 'askew' in their work, to the ways they throw the reader 'off balance,' to the 'fertile short-circuiting' of expectations that their best poetry achieves. -- Mark Ford * New Republic *
Ashbery's lectures reveal his extraordinary curiosity and stamina as a reader; he is willing to wade through tedious stretches of verse and revisit a poet's work frequently, with nothing to go on but the memory of having once been stirred. -- John Palattella * London Review of Books *
Ashbery can be a difficult writer to get to grips with. His long unspoolings of memory, bewilderingly jarring fractured narrative, swings and lurches from one register to another, and a vocabulary which can range from the high-flown to the demotic within a single sentence, are both unsettling and invigorating. -- Michael Glover * Financial Times *
Where others have deconstructed and codified, Ashbery is intimate and revealing, be the subject England, Romanticism, Brooklyn, Marxism, Nashville, or Modernism. In each essay, he attempts to grasp and convey the strange originality of each writer's work, providing a 'user-friendly' set of illuminating commentaries about the legacy and dignity of writing and the nature of truth and poetry. -- Scott Hightower * Library Journal *
ISBN: 9780674302440
Dimensions: 210mm x 140mm x 11mm
Weight: 341g
176 pages