Houseboat Days

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Ebook in EPUB format. Available for immediate download after we receive your order

DRM:
Watermark

Publication Year:
2014

ISBN-13: 9781480459151

<DIV><B>Is poetry the act of putting something together, or the art of taking something apart? <I>Houseboat Days</I>, one of John Ashbery&rsquo;s most celebrated collections, offers its own answer</B><BR /><BR />Remarkable for its introspection and for the response it elicited when it was first published in 1977, <I>Houseboat Days</I> is Ashbery&rsquo;s much-discussed follow-up to his 1975 masterpiece <I>Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror</I>, and remains one of his most studied books to date.<BR />&#160;<BR /><I>Houseboat Days</I> begins with the moving, unforgettable poem &ldquo;Street Musicians,&rdquo; an allegory of artistic and personal loss that came ten years after the death of Ashbery&rsquo;s friend and fellow New York poet Frank O&rsquo;Hara. But while many of the poems in <I>Houseboat Days</I> are strikingly personal, especially when compared to Ashbery&rsquo;s work from the 1950s and 1960s, the collection is less about the poet than about the act of writing poetry. In such widely anthologized poems as &ldquo;Wet Casements,&rdquo; &ldquo;Syringa,&rdquo; &ldquo;And <I>Ut Pictura Poesis</I> Is Her Name,&rdquo; and &ldquo;What Is Poetry,&rdquo; Ashbery embraces the challenge of his own ars poetica, exploring and exploding the trusses, foundations, and underground caverns that underlie the creative act, and specifically, the act of creating a poem. Marjorie Perloff of the <I>Washington Post Book World</I> called <I>Houseboat Days</I> &ldquo;the most exciting, most original book of poems to have appeared in the 1970s.&rdquo;&#160;<BR /></DIV>