Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists

Name: Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists
Price: 15.0 USD
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ISBN: 9781644230701

by John Ashbery

$15.00

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An intimate and unique collection of the work of John Ashbery--a prolific poet and art critic--pairing poetry and art writings with playlists of music from his personal library.

This book places poetry by Ashbery (1927-2017), gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing. In addition, as Ashbery loved music and listened to it while writing, the "playlists" here present samplings of music from these same years, culled from his own library of recordings.

Ashbery's poetry is frequently described as ekphrastic, though, rather than writing a poem "based on" or "inspired" by the content of an artwork or piece of music, he engages with how the experience of seeing it and the artistic strategies employed offer ways of thinking about it and through it. Many observations from Ashbery's art writing also provide keys to how we might read his poetry. Many recordings he listened to feature contemporary classical works that emphasize complex textures, disparate sounds, and disjunct phrases. Ashbery's poetry similarly plays with a diversity of poetic textures and sudden turns such that a reader might construct multiple narratives or pathways of meaning. He rarely offers linear stories or focuses on evocative descriptions of a scene or object.

In exploring this ekphrastic book project, the reader is invited to discover how, for Ashbery, these three forms might illuminate and inform one another. In Mónica de la Torre's introduction, she explores the connection between the three muses of music, art, and poetry, and the ekphrastic experience of reading Ashbery.

Publisher:: David Zwirner Books
ISBN:: 9781644230701
Binding:: Paperback
Pages:: 96
Authors:: John Ashbery
Published Date:: 2022-06-07
Language:: English

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About John Ashbery

Among the central figures of the New York School, John Ashbery (1927–2017) was born in Rochester, New York. His collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975), prompted by the Parmigianino painting, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in a single year, the only book to take all three. He won the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize for Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems. The Poetry Society of America awarded him the Robert Frost Medal in 1995. He published more than twenty volumes of poetry across six decades and worked for years as an art critic in Paris and New York.

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