Hotel Lautreamont

by Ashbery, John

• ISBN13: 9780679415121
• ISBN10: 0679415122
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1992-09-01
• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc

Summary

Readers of John Ashbery's recent book Flow Chart will find the continuation of its spirit, at once tragic and playful, dense and volatile, passionate and impersonal, in this extraordinary new collection of lyric poems.
The title Hotel Lautreamont alludes to the pseudonymous Count de Lautreamont, a nineteenth-century poet remembered for his presurrealist epic prose poem, The Songs of Maldoror. Little is known about him, save that his real name was Isidore Ducasse and that he spent his brief adult life in various hotels in Paris, checking out of his transient existence in 1870 at the age of twenty-four.
Critics and readers have long appreciated Ashbery's uncanny use of the cadences of colloquial speech ("plain American that cats and dogs can read," in Marianne Moore's phrase), but they have perhaps overlooked the equally important influences of such "outsider" French poets as Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, and Ducasse-Lautreamont. These sometimes forgotten presences are wonderfully alive in this superb new collection, which reaffirms Ashbery's unique ability to transform remarkable psychic force into language.

Table of Contents

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