Whenever John Ashbery deals out his royal flush of persnickety syntax, tailspun twaddle, and eel-slippery lyric convolution, the mind is where it ought to be. Whipping up spun dimensions in a burning flux of calculated demonry, gossamer insights snookered away in back-closets of the soul, an encroaching blur of poetic hunger just beyond our knowing.

We can *feel* the poet stenciling out his stanzas, sifting every event for its fine-grained visceral crunch, its lyrical *there-ness*, a mind designed to sound deep water with the halcyon light of Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, the great unassailable precursors of American verse (so difficult to rediscover and appreciate in the morass of "poetry-slams" and "performance-art" that currently glut our poetry venues).

Imagine the type of mind that could respond to Crane and Stevens without flinching, over forty years and eighteen volumes of verse. Imagine the solitaire.

Ashbery staggered me in my late teens with *Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror*(1975), lighting up my sinuses in a cocaine wash of zippety rhythms and studied inflection, peopling my sleep with deep Figurae and a lush library of maps, persuading the fool's heart in me to break from my covert and run wild with the night mind of the race, the structures and possibilities of my life overloaded by his cognitive dazzle. "The geek shall inherit the earth," this poet seemed to be telling me, and I, hamstrung by gynephobia and a crippling social-anxiety, took the old codger at his word.

Ashbery taught me how to keep pace with the world, to saturate the atoms of life with an inward stare, yoking myself nakedly to the ebon flight of his lush written world. With Ashbery's deep intellect and dickety-slippity wit, his pretzelly stanzas and mind-torquing conceptual corkscrewing, I could go on forever relighting my own image, against steady palls of black pain. (But don't all great poets teach us precisely this?)

Witness Ashbery at his most serpentine: "To create a work of art that the critic cannot even talk about ought to be the artist's chief concern." Ouch. Where does that leave the rest of us? Fumbling for categorical handholds on the cliff-face of so-called "language-poetry"? Shrugging off the old man's labyrinthian navel-picking as wastefully avant-garde academic verbiage? Most of these poems seem to erupt in an obfuscatory strain of muddled, stickjaw phonetics, then nip and flounder and twiddle and skip-rope through some half-fledged convolution of thought, reproducing the vagaries and blindsights of poetic composition itself, biting its tail in an Ouroboros vertigo of self-reference and studied awkwardness, an infinite regress short-circuiting each new wired fragment of stunted dramatic logic, of discontinued narrative transit, flip-flopped to articulate its crackerjacked, contradictory character, an uber-villain's squadron of twittering machines set a-flutter to tweak the night with the familiar Stevensian tragedies arising from epistemology.and solipsism.

Yes, we can analyze it now (or else pretend our way to some jerry-rigged solution). All the whistles and clicks of inbound meaning. The poetic tracery of nightvision cunning, unfastening the set of our bones, gorging our deep human need for prosody and inflection, all taken to grief in the massing forms of some depth-stirring new solip:system. (Sometimes a great poem is all it takes.) Ashbery's rippling, obfuscatory surface-tension hides and betokens a mind-pretzelling world of ninny-ish cognitive delight, of a "peculiar slant of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model...filtered and influenced by it, until no part remains that is surely you."

Give this book a chance.... Recommended points of entry: "Soonest Mended"(87), "As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat"(163), "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"(188), "Wet Casements"(225), "Houseboat Days"(231), "Tapestry" (269), "A Wave"(322).

John Ashbery once again takes me on a fantastic ride with his four dimentional poetry. Highly recommended for the poet with writer's block because Ashbery teaches us that bounderies are only limited in the mind. I call him tangential because his imagry shoots one into as many directions as one has.

I don't like to misquote other writers and artists...so, it was, naturally, Bernardo Bertolucci who said about himself that he has "a nostalgia for the present". Ophuls certainly had a nostalgia for the past. My admiration and appreciation for Ashbery's work grows stronger all of the time!

For some reason, Fantomas never figures in the genealogy of the detective story, where Borges, with his 1942 story 'Death and the compass'is credited with completely reversing the traditional elements of detective fiction (crime,investigation,solution, resolution), to create a new post-modern genre, 'anti-detective fiction', followed by Nabakov, Pynchon etc,which is characterised by a lack of or a compromised resolution, an unknowable world (Holmes, Poirot etc. always knew the world they operated in), and a hugely fallible detective who is unable to control the plot, and is usually destroyed by his own detection. Fantomas does all this 30 years earlier. In the first book, we don't even know who Fantomas is - there is enough textual evidence to suggest that he is not Etienne Rambert-Gurn, that we can never know who he is. We have only Juve's word for it, and he is constantly admitting that this may be a figment of his imagination. The form itself is also revolutionary - instead of following a single narrative to its resolution, the narrative is continually splintering, with different stories on the go at once. Juve manages to connect them all to Fantomas, but to accept this is to ignore the special contrapuntal magic of the text, which through repitition, doubling, mirroring, achieves a terrifying loss of control on the part of the reader, who is frequently in the dark as to which character is which. Even if Gurn is Fantomas, the ending is hardly the cosy resolution of Agatha Christie, say. An innocent man is executed, and a homicidal lunatic is on the loose. The predominant motif of the novel is of the theatre, acting, inventing a role - the result being a comprehensive deconstruction of any simplistic, holistic notions of identity, and therefore, perhaps, offering a more liberating way of looking at the world, one which does not depend on repressive dichotomies, such as good and evil. This novel, despite being indifferently written, is a masterpiece, which proves the superior power of the unconscious over the conscious artist.

Who is Fantomas? The Lord of Terror, Emperor of Crime, Genius of Evil. That is to say, a middle-aged businessman, a masked black-tie and tuxedo burglar, an English footsoldier from the Boer wars. In this, the first of 32 sensational crime novels, Fantomas decapitates a marquise, stuffs the corpse of an English lord into a trunk and has an affair with his wife, fleeces a Russian princess, drowns all the passengers on an oceanliner to get rid of an alias, and throws the butler from a speeding train. And he gets away with it all, despite relentless pursuit by the righteous, obsessive, and paranoid Inspector Juve. Unfortunately for you, late 20th-century English reader, Morrow/Ballantine only reissued two novels, both out of print. Curses! I tell you, Fantomas is alive! "His boundless shadow extends / Over Paris and all coasts / What then is this gray-eyed ghost / Whose silence surges within? / Might it be you, Fantomas / Lurking upon the rooftops?" --Robert Desnos, "La Complainte de Fantomas"

The English have their Master Detectives. But the French have Fantomas - Master Criminal! Nowhere in English or American crime novels is there a villain as scary, or as omnipotent as Fantomas. If you're ready for crime novels where the bad guy always wins -- get Fantomas!

The adventures of Fantomas and his 'squeeze', Lady Beltham, were a sensation in France during the first part of the 20th Century. Even though they were just dime novels, great poets like Appollinaire (founder of the "Friends of Fantomas Society"),and artists like Magritte and Juan Gris worshipped this Genius of Crime. These novels, (especially the first one), are intoxicating, gruesome, and permeated with the atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Paris.

Readers of English mysteries might find the plots a bit airy at times, but there are moments of sublime surreal transcendance in each one, that simply cannot be found anywhere else.

One episode finds detective Juve, (Fantomas' nemesis), spying through a looking glass into an apartment he suspects has been visited by Fantomas. (This was Forty years before "Rear Window").

Through his looking glass, he is baffled to observe the lady who lives there, apparently recoiling in horror at her middle-class living room furniture, and leaping to her death onto a Parisian boulevard.(Juve through his telescope, could not see the Boa Constrictor which Fantomas had placed in the room.)

Bad guys dressed as gendarmes, good guys posing as criminals. With each new character, one wonders, "Is this Fantomas, or is it Juve"? And "Where is Lady Beltham"? Everyone is a master of disguise. Nothing is certain -- except that the genius of crime, with his sweet, beautiful English Aristocratic Lady will ultimately triumph in the end.

Those who've sampled the often arrogant and self-glorifying work of Breton and other surrealists will find Hebdomeros to be unique. De Chirico's novel is poignantly shameful and delicately heart-wrenching. It isn't easily forgotton.

HEBDOMEROS is quite unearthly and would be a disappointment to anyone looking for a conventional novel. But you are likely here for something else. It moves with the logic of a dream, passing from one scene to the next with the same warp of tension a plotted novel might have, yet HEBDOMEROS has no plot, it is errant, distracted. "It's strange," Hebdomeros was thinking, "as for me, the idea that something had escaped my understanding would keep me awake at nights, whereas people in general are not in the least perturbed when they see or read or things that they find completely obscure." This from the opening page, a comment on its own strangeness, instructing the reader a little in what is to come. And what follows is completely beautiful. Here is something to finish on: "Hebdomeros turned his steps again toward the rivers with the concrete banks, toward the decaying palaces whose domes and weather vanes rose up under the ever-fleeing clouds. This forbidding place whose solemn door was closed at the moment ought to have saddened him, but the recollection of what he had seen there during moments spent in the midst of a scattered and indifferent public was quite enough to console him. He saw, moving up slowly out of the chiaroscuro of his memory and little by little defining themselves in his mind, the shapes of those temples and sanctuaries built in plaster that stand at the foot of sheltering mountains and rocks through which ran narrow passes that made one strangely aware not only of the unknown worlds nearby, but also of those distant horizons heavy with adventure that ever since his unhappy childhood Hebdomeros had always loved."

I agree w/ the sentiments of the other reviewer: this is rich, dazzling, moving, melancholy, euphoric, musical verse. A great introduction to Ashbery, I believe. Proof of genius.

One of the great works of art of this century. Although less well-known than "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror", this, along with "The Double Dream of Spring" is Ashbery's best book.

All I have to say is that ... this was the greatest thing I've ever read!

Wow I was amazed at the writing of this book. It was so organzied and flowing. Anyone who wants to read about the weather and learn new information, this is your book.

I'm just beginning my wrestle with this beautiful, maddening book and can already see it's going to be a long and fruitful one. Little here sounds early--the unsettling dreaminess, walking a thin line between philosophy and nonsense, is there from the first and only deepens. The voice is one you're bound to recognize, a blend of uncertainty and love for the surface beauty of things; a world constantly appearing, but never there long enough to leave more than a skater's trace. And tres American. It's hard to imagine (here in the first flush) how any other way of writing could speak so prettily and still keep a straight face in this doubting age of ours that offers so much to see and love.

A poet in the line of Whitman, Stevens, and Crane, Ashbery began his career as an art critic -- his early work reflects this aesthetic. A beautiful book, The Mooring of Starting Out includes the book Rivers and Mountains, often considered Ashbery's greatest foray into the imaginative verse of Poundian writers. It includes his first long poem, The Skaters, which is wonderful. This book is a treat if you like to think.

Here you will find the body and mind of the post-modern world
unfolding before your eyes, with all its pleasures, its anxieties, its lost dreams, its hopes. It is the world we know, because it is already in us, part of us--it is always arriving, always arrived. But, there is more. Ashbery, through unique images and juxtapositions, brings into the open a world not quite satisfied with itself, sometimes too satisfied--in a state of suspended satisfaction, sometimes leading to nausea. It is a world looking for experiences under every log and at every corner, only to find the rates of exchange rising and the necessity for experiences increasing. It is a world placed smack dap in the impossibility of its own being. What we have in "Wakefulness" is the journey of many selves through many worlds, many doors, all leading back to a haunting singularity of space and time. One gets the uncanning feeling in each poem that one has been there before, or even that one, if only momentarily, exists only in and through the words that appear on the page. This is what poetry should be. There are echoes of all the greats here, from the English romantics, to Dickinson and Stevens and beyond. But, Ashbery knows how to tame these echoes, how to humour them, disinheret them, and reclaim them for his own purposes, making these poems fully his own. I highly recommend this book and any other Ashbery books.

A marvelous collection. The quote on the inner cover (by Harold Bloom) says it all "The book is a profound pleasure, the gift of a master."

A wonderful collection of poems that rest in the small spaces in the corner of your field of vision. Some of the best of them are only 10 or so words long. Accessible, yet moving; it is hard to read more than three in one sitting.

Pick it up!

Typical late Ashbery: a lot of wonderful poems and a lot of filler. Certainly worth reading for pieces like "Getting back In" and "Tuesday Evening," where the pyrotechnics are spectacular. A very funny collection, among other things.

Here are six essays by John Ashbery about six of his favourite minor poets, ranging from John Clare, born in 1790s England, to David Schubert, born 1913 in New York. John Brooks Wheelwright and Laura Riding are included, from the early 20th century, as is Raymond Roussel (a French precursor to anti-novelists, a specialist in parenthetical labyrinths, and endlessly detailed descriptions of bottle-labels). We have, too, the doomed author of "Death's Jest Book," the 19th-century poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

These essays are engaging and readable, informed and informative without being pedantic. There are anecdotes, too (about Riding, most notably, who is aptly diagnosed by Ashbery as "a control freak"). We notice that half of the authors are homosexual or possibly so, most either committed suicide or had a parent who did so, three were affected by mental problems, and the majority were ardent leftists (Riding being an exception).

To this reader, the two Johns, Clare and Wheelwright, are the most immediately endearing, and David Schubert's disjunctive colloquial tone does fascinate. Some of the comments about the gang of six do shed some light into Ashbery's curious methods: Clare's mucky down-to-earthiness and Beddoes' elegant, enamelled "fleurs-du-mal" idiom both being "necessary" components of poetry, in Ashbery's view. Some of Wheelwright's elastic sonnets have a Saturday Evening Post-type folksiness that is often found in Ashbery's own poetic inventions; Schubert's poems (in Rachel Hadas's words) "seem(ing) to consist of slivers gracefully or haphazardly fitted together." An aside: Look at the first two lines of Schubert's "Happy Traveller." Couldn't that be John Ashbery? About Raymond Roussel, whose detractors accuse him of saying nothing, Ashbery mounts an impatient defence that reads like a self-defence: "If 'nothing' means a labyrinth of brilliant stories told only for themselves, then perhaps Roussel has nothing to say. Does he say it badly? Well, he writes like a mathematician."

We learn that Ashbery is not fond of E E Cummings, and he is unconvincingly semi-penitent of this "blind spot": Cummings, with his Herrick-like lucidity, his straightforward heterosexuality, and his resolute nonleftism, would not appear to fit nicely into Ashbery's pantheon. Ashbery even takes a few mischievous swipes at John Keats -- rather, he quotes George Moore doing so. Ashbery will doubtless forgive his readers if our enthusiasm for the poetry of Keats and Cummings remains undiminished.

There is much in the poetry explored by "Other Traditions" that is dark and bothersome; but there are felicities. These lectures form a fascinating kind of ars-poetica-in-prose by one of America's cleverest and most vexing of poets.

Every once in a while, I come across a book that opens up new doors for me. They introduce to me to areas of life that I otherwise might never have encountered. Other Traditions by John Ashbery is just such a book.

I have always had a love for, but limited knowledge of, Poetry. It was Edward Hirsch's great book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry that first introduced me to Ashbery's work. He is, in my opinion, one of the greatest living poets. Therefore, I jumped at the opportunity to read Other Traditions.

Other Traditions is the book form of a series of lectures given by Ashbery on other poets. Ashbery writes about six of the lesser-known artists who have had an impact on his own life and work. All of them are fascinating. They are:

-John Clare, a master at describing nature who spent the last 27 years of his life in an Asylum.

-Thomas Lovell Beddoes, a rather death obsessed author (he ended up taking his own life) whose greatest poetry consists of fragments that must often be culled from the pages of his lengthy dramas.

-Raymond Roussel, a French author whose magnum opus is actually a book-length sentence.

-John Wheelwright, a politically engaged genius whose ultra-dense poetry even Ashbery has a hard time describing or comprehending.

-Laura Riding, a poet of great talent and intellect who chose to forsake poetry (check out the copyright page).

-David Schubert, an obscure poet who Ashbery feels is one of the greatest of the Twentieth Century.

The two that I was most pleasantly surprised by are Clare and Riding.

Clare has become (since I picked up a couple of his books) one of my favorite poets. He is a master at describing rural life. I know of no one quite like him. Ashbery's true greatness as a critic comes out when he depicts Clare as "making his rounds."

Riding, on the other hand, represents the extreme version of every author's desire for the public to read their work in a precise way--the way the author intends it to be read. Her intense combativeness and sensitivity to criticism is as endearing as it is humorous.

Other Traditions has given me a key to a whole new world of books. For that I am most grateful.

I give this book my full recommendation.

This book is much smaller than I thought it would be, but this only enhances its gem-like charm; from its rich cover to its finely homespun interior. I thought at first I had heard it all before from Ashbery, in his short Schubert and Roussel essays, and in comments dropped in Reported Sightings; but even when covering the same ground he subtly brings forth new worlds. It's refreshing to hear him talk of these beloved poets, like a tour through the comfortable rooms of his mind, which of course also offers countless insights into Ashbery's own career of poetic journeys. I recommend this book to both literary scavengers of the past and arcane poets of the future, but especially to the intriguing combination of both living a dream right now.