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    Wakefulness: Poems
    Wakefulness: Poems
    Wakefulness: Poems
    Ebook106 pages49 minutes

    Wakefulness: Poems

    By John Ashbery

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    About this ebook

    A collection of poems that recall, in their powerful transformations of language, the moment of clarity that arrives upon waking from a dream

    One of John Ashbery’s most critically acclaimed collections since his iconic works of the mid-1970s, Wakefulness was praised in 1999 for its beauty and alertness. In these pages, the great poet is at once luring the reader into a vivid dream and waking us up with a jolt of recognition. In poems such as “The Village of Sleep,” “Shadows in the Street,” and “Wakefulness,” dreams, sleeplessness, and other transformational and liminal states are revealed to be part of a ceaseless continuity of accelerating changes. Even the most seemingly familiar phrases (“stop me if you’ve heard this one”) are ever in the process of changing their meanings, especially in Ashbery’s hands. And distinctive new realities are created constantly by the power of words, in strange and beautiful combinations. With every word and every line, Ashbery questions the real and summons a new reality.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459120
    Wakefulness: 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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    • 3/5
      I have a lot of good poetry books and I know the reputation and standing of John Ashbery. Donald Hall talks about him favorably in his memoir. However, I can just not get into these poems. Many of these poems to me are just a jumble of words. If there is a meaning it's so deep you could never find it. I honestly believe I could write a jumble of random thoughts and have a poem just as good as any in this book. Sorry but I don't get it.

    Book preview

    Wakefulness - John Ashbery

    WAKEFULNESS

    An immodest little white wine, some scattered seraphs,

    recollections of the Fall—tell me,

    has anyone made a spongier representation, chased

    fewer demons out of the parking lot

    where we all held hands?

    Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me.

    I was touched by your care,

    reduced to fawning excuses.

    Everything was spotless in the little house of our desire,

    the clock ticked on and on, happy about

    being apprenticed to eternity. A gavotte of dust-motes

    came to replace my seeing. Everything was as though

    it had happened long ago

    in ancient peach-colored funny papers

    wherein the law of true opposites was ordained

    casually. Then the book opened by itself

    and read to us: "You pack of liars,

    of course tempted by the crossroads, but I like each

    and every one of you with a peculiar sapphire intensity.

    Look, here is where I failed at first.

    The client leaves. History goes on and on,

    rolling distractedly on these shores. Each day, dawn

    condenses like a very large star, bakes no bread,

    shoes the faithless. How convenient if it’s a dream."

    In the next sleeping car was madness.

    An urgent languor installed itself

    as far as the cabbage-hemmed horizons. And if I put a little

    bit of myself in this time, stoppered the liquor that is our selves’

    truant exchanges, brandished my

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