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    Chinese Whispers: Poems
    Chinese Whispers: Poems
    Chinese Whispers: Poems
    Ebook136 pages1 hour

    Chinese Whispers: Poems

    By John Ashbery

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    John Ashbery’s restless, witty meditation on aging and the music of change: A must-read collection from America’s greatest modern poet

    The child’s game Chinese Whispers, known in America as Telephone, is an exercise in transforming the recognizable into something beautifully strange. John Ashbery’s twenty-fourth collection of poems, Chinese Whispers, re-creates in every line the accidentally transformative logic of the language game for which the book is named. In sixty-three charged and often very funny poems, Ashbery confronts the relentlessness of age and time while demonstrating, in his unmistakable, self-reflexive style, the process by which a single thought unravels, multiplies, distends, travels, and finally arrives, changed and unfamiliar.
     
    First published in 2002, shortly after Ashbery’s seventy-fifth birthday, Chinese Whispers is a collection in which fairy tales, mysteries, and magic dollhouses interleave effortlessly with the everyday of pancakes and popular culture. Ashbery’s language is absolutely recognizable from modern life as it is experienced, but at the same time is as dreamlike and disquieting as intercepted transmissions from another world. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459014
    Chinese Whispers: 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
      Another decent collection of poetry by John Ashbery. I found this, especially some of the more prosaic pieces, to be effectual and open-ended- ripe for devouring literary flavour. Overall, a good book of poetry.3 stars.

    Book preview

    Chinese Whispers - John Ashbery

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    Chinese Whispers

    Poems

    John Ashbery

    This book is dedicated to

    Ed Barrett, Olivier Brossard, Mark Ford,

    Kenneth Koch, Ann Lauterbach, John Yau

    and to my editor of thirty years, Elisabeth Sifton

    Contents

    Publisher’s Note

    A Nice Presentation

    The Variorum Edition

    The Sleeping Animals

    Disclaimer

    Disagreeable Glimpses

    Theme Park Days

    In Whatever Mode

    From the Diary of a Mole

    Too Much Sleep Is Bad

    The Big Idea

    Why Not Sneeze?

    A Sweet Place

    View of Delft

    Postilion of Autumn

    This Deuced Cleverness

    Unpolished Segment

    Mordred

    The Lightning Conductor

    I Asked Mr. Dithers Whether It Was Time Yet He Said No to Wait

    Haven’t Heard Anything

    Chinese Whispers

    In the Time of Pussy Willows

    The American

    The Seventies

    All That Now

    Truth Gleams

    Little Sick Poem

    A Man Clamored

    Local Legend

    Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland

    Ornery Fish

    Portrait with a Goat

    The Decals in the Hallway

    Echolalia Rag

    The Evening of Greuze

    As Umbrellas Follow Rain

    Under Cellophane

    Reminiscences of Norma

    Obsidian House

    Oh Evenings

    Intricate Fasting

    Alone, I

    Winter Daydreams

    Runway

    Random Jottings of an Old Man

    Her Cardboard Lover

    Moon, Moon

    Syllabus

    On His Reluctance to Take Down the Christmas Ornaments

    The Business of Falling Asleep

    Hints and Fragments

    If You Ask Me

    The Haves

    Like Air, Almost

    The Blessed Way Out

    Sight to Behold

    Prisoner’s Base

    The Business of Falling Asleep (2)

    Real Time

    Heavenly Days

    Sir Gammer Vans

    About the Author

    Publisher’s Note

    Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

    But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page. Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

    In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

    But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

    Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s Disclaimer as it appears in two different type sizes.

         

    Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of Disclaimer, you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading Disclaimer on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead is a complete line, while the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn is not.

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