Your Name Here: Poems [Paperback]

John Ashbery (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2001

I got kind of frenzied after the waiting
had stopped, but now am cool as a suburban garden
in some lost city. When it came time for my speech
I could think of nothing, of course.
I gave a little talk about the onion - how its flavor
inspires us, its shape informs our architecture.
There were so many other things I wanted to say, too,
but, dandified, I couldn't strut,
couldn't sit down for all the spit and polish.
Now it's your turn to say something about the wall
in the garden. It can be anything.
- from "Terminal"

In his twentieth collection, John Ashbery continues to examine the themes that have preoccupied him of late: age and its inevitable losses, memories of childhood, the transforming magic of dreams in daily living. Your Name Here offers souvenirs to readers, inviting them to "personalize" the poems with their own associations and memories. Ashbery's masterful voice is heard with renewed vigor and poigancy in these beautiful poems.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ashbery may be America's most influential living poet, and its most widely admired. Traditional critics like Harold Bloom admire his lyrical flourishes of prophecy and regret; experimentalists, quite as justly, praise his verbal outlandishness and tonal intricacy, his comic moments and slippery transitions. Both will find much to like in this 20th collection, which (like much of his '90s poetry) combines flamboyant, temporary poses with serious explorations of mortality and nostalgia: "If only I could get the tears out of my eyes it would be raining now," one page concludes: "I must try the new, fluid approach." Typically, a new Ashbery poem will zip and twist from context to context, person to person, from silly to sad to hopeful and back again. More than ever, Ashbery plays games with his readersAthough the games frequently get called off midplay: "Not You Again" begins "Thought I'd write you this poem. Yes,/ I know you don't need it.... Just want to kind of get it off my chest/ and drop it in the peanut dust." Readers bowled over by some parts of this volume may find Ashbery's lesser poems too much alike, their whimsical stanzas not quite adding up. But the best poems here are one of a kind: the hilarious (and atypically coherent) "Memories of Imperialism," for example, which imagines that Admiral Dewey (of Philippines fame) invented the Dewey decimal system. Among the jokes, mix-ups and quick costume changes, two constants are campy slang and a deep sense of loss: "If all you want is kittens, come back later... 'What if I said I want no kittens,/ just a big fat you?'" Some will see, in the book's many versions of "you," Ashbery's longtime partner Pierre Martory, who died in 1998, and to whom he dedicates the volume. A line of serious elegies and laments, emerging gradually and understatedly, leads at last to the astonishing, brief "Strange Cinema," also dedicated to Martory. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Ashbery is and has long been an astonishing poet. Several of his poems, most notably "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and "The Double Dream of Spring," are touchstones of modern poetry; what astonishes now, as much as anything, is his great fertility as well as high quality. He has always been strongly influenced Wallace StevensDhis model for freedom from explicit meaningDand here Ashbery submits to Stevens's law that poetry "must give delight." This is one of his most pleasing collections in many years. Ashbery has mastered a tone at once melancholic and comedic, as in "What Is Written": "Dark spool,/ moving oceanward nowDwhat other fate could have been yours?/ You could have lived in a drawer/ for many years, imprisoned, a ward of the state. Now you are free/ to call the shots pretty much as they come./ Poor, bald thing." Not every reader grasps Ashbery's mixture of banal tone and language with surreal images and juxtapositions, but Ashbery is a great poet, and there are many delights in this new collection. Highly recommended.DGraham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374527830
• ISBN-13: 978-0374527839
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,652,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Redeemed Area, October 8, 2002

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Your Name Here: Poems (Paperback)

Ashbery's writing with the crackle of someone just starting out. It's like now that he knows he's in the canon (thanks, Bloom), he can really go looby and make English swing. The autumn leaves fall a little lighter in these poems; reverie (always present) takes a back seat to inspired goofiness. I've admired other Ashbery books--this one I loved. It's made my own elite canon of bathroom reading and not a poem's let me down. I hope I grow old just like this.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Negative Capability, March 24, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Your Name Here (Hardcover)

Aw nerts this guy is too much for me. I feel like one of the girls with names like Linda, Ruth, and Pat from the 1940s who stand next to an airplane when this poet comes along from the next century. "Your Name Here", the very title, suggests his "negative capability" is acting up again, with results typically mind-blowing, keeping everyone guessing. I rank this almost on the level of the great "Can You Hear, Bird."

2.0 out of 5 stars Effete of clay, April 5, 2011

By 

Simon G. Barrett (london, england) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Your Name Here: Poems (Paperback)

'Candace, was it you?' (p91, UK ed)

Ashbery ain't telling - but the joke's gone on for far too long. Reading him is like looking at a succession of brightly coloured plastic bathtoys - all different, but all the same. Sterile simulacra. Poetry lives by its inevitability - le mot juste. Ashbery only does arbitrary - poetry by numbers.

The old New York Schoolers were actually funny. And vital, passionate, hungry. Sexist too, maybe, but at least sexy. Ashbery never seemed quite of their number; aloof, urbane, etiolated - what the French call an intello (egghead), his shtick is deadpan, arid, precious - there's something unnervingly buttoned-up about him. Alicia Ostriker, in Stealing the Language, refers to his coyness; I prefer to think of it as flirtation - po-faced, eyelid-fluttering come-hitherness -- and how the egghead critics love a tease! But the secret is there's no secret. The triumphant Zippy of Poetland, Ashbery's not exactly naked but does flash way too much suspender, so beyond absurd that he appears the only sane one in the room.

By the way, the British edition has indubitably the better cover. I think. (Is that a coffin or a conjurer in the US edition? Either would be apt..) And Ashbery surely knows (he does, of course he does) that Rimbaud's poem (p66 in my edition) is called simply Voyelles - while the fact that he allows French syntax to bleed into English on p117 betokens laziness bordering on contempt.