Hotel Lautréamont

by John Ashbery

• ISBN13: 9780374527556
• ISBN10: 0374527555
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2000-10-30
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Critics, scholars, students, and other readers of contemporary poetry have long appreciated Ashbery's uncanny mastery of the cadence and lyricism of colloquial speech, but they have been less sensitive to the equally important influences in his work of such "outsider" French poets as Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, and Isidore Ducasse (a/k/a Count de Lautreacute;amont). These sometimes overlooked presences are wonderfully alive in this collection of lyric poems, which first appeared in 1992. Now back in print,Hotel Lautreacute;amontunderscores Ashbery's ability to be both tragic and playful, dense and volatile, passionate and impersonal. As David Herd observed inNew Statesman and Society, this is "a poetry fully and startlingly engaged with the way things happen."

Table of Contents

Light Turnouts	3	(1)
And Forgetting	4	(2)
The Large Studio	6	(2)
The Garden of False Civility	8	(2)
Autumn Telegram	10	(1)
Notes film the Air	11	(2)
Still Life with Stranger	13	(1)
Hotel Lautreamont	14	(3)
On the Empress's Mind	17	(1)
The Phantom Agents	18	(1)
From Estuaries, from Casinos	19	(3)
Cop and Sweater	22	(2)
Musica Reservata	24	(2)
Susan	26	(1)
The King	27	(2)
The Whole Is Admirably Composed	29	(2)
By Forced Marches	31	(2)
Autumn on the Thruway	33	(5)
The Little Black Dress	38	(1)
Part of the Superstition	39	(3)
The Art of Speeding	42	(2)
American Bar	44	(2)
From Palookaville	46	(3)
Another Example	49	(1)
Avant de Quitter Ces Lieux	50	(2)
The White Shirr	52	(1)
Baked Alaska	53	(5)
Private Syntax	58	(1)
Not Now but in Forty-five Minutes	59	(2)
In Another Time	61	(1)
Withered Compliments	62	(1)
The Wind Talking	63	(3)
Joy	66	(1)
Irresolution on a Theme of La Rochefoucauld	67	(2)
A Call for Papers	69	(2)
Love's Old Sweet Song	71	(2)
Wild Boys of the Road	73	(2)
Le Mensonge de Nina Petrovna	75	(2)
Of Linnets and Dull Time	77	(1)
Korean Soap Opera	78	(3)
A Driftwood Altar	81	(2)
Poem at the New Year	83	(1)
Central Air	84	(3)
The Youth's Magic Horn	87	(2)
Brute Image	89	(1)
Of Dreams and Dreaming	90	(3)
Seasonal	93	(1)
Kamarinskaya	94	(2)
Elephant Visitors	96	(1)
The Great Bridge Game of Life	97	(2)
The Departed Lustre	99	(2)
Villanelle	101	(2)
A Sedentary Existence	103	(1)
Erebus	104	(3)
The Old Complex	107	(1)
Where We Went for Lunch	108	(3)
As Oft It Chanceth	111	(1)
Retablo	112	(2)
A Mourning Forbidding Valediction	114	(2)
I Found Their Advice	116	(1)
French Opera	117	(2)
A Stifled Notation	119	(1)
Haunted Stanzas	120	(2)
Livelong Days	122	(2)
Quartet	124	(3)
[untitled]	127	(1)
Oeuvres Completes	128	(2)
Just Wednesday	130	(2)
In My Way / On My Way	132	(3)
No Good at Names	135	(2)
Film Noir	137	(2)
In Vain, Therefore	139	(1)
The Beer Drinkers	140	(2)
That You Tell	142	(2)
A Hole in Your Sock	144	(1)
And Socializing	145	(1)
Revisionist Horn Concerto	146	(2)
The Woman the Lion Was Supposed to Defend	148	(2)
Harbor Activities	150	(1)
It Must Be Sophisticated	151	(4)
Alborada	155	(1)
How to Continue	156