The Best American Poetry 1988 by John Ashbery

The Best American Poetry 1988 by John Ashbery

A celebration of the first edition of Best American Poetry and a tribute to the late John Ashbery—the guest editor and one of the best American poets of all time—this thirtieth anniversary edition is a look back at the beginning of a renowned anthology series and an outstanding collection of poems. In 1988, series editor David Lehman began an institution with the inaugural installment of Best American Poetry. Thirty years later, this anniversary edition celebrates its guest editor, the brilliant John Ashbery. Ashbery was a vastly-admired, highly decorated, and generative artist; The New Yorker noted that, however one interprets Ashbery, “An alternative view says that every Ashbery poem is about poetry.” How fitting that he worked with Lehman on the first Best American Poetry, which would go on to become nearly as admired and generative as Ashbery himself—and always a book of poetry about poetry. The Best American Poetry 1988 includes poems by Derek Walcott, Amy Gerstler, Donald Hall, Robert Pinsky, Ruth Stone, Ann Lauterbach, Seamus Heaney, and many more. With a Foreword by Lehman, in which he calls Ashbery “a poet’s poet’s poet,” and an Introduction by Ashbery, where he reflects that “life is what present American poetry gets to seem more like, and the more angles we choose to view it from, the more its amazing accidental abundance imposes itself,” this edition, with a new Preface from Lehman about how Best American Poetry has developed over the years, is a rewarding look back at the beginnings of the series.

JOHN ASHBERY, a native of Rochester, New York, has lived since 1958 in Paris, where he is art critic for the New York herald tribune European edition and for Art International of Zurich. He spent two earlier years in France as a Fulbright fellow, in Montpellier and Paris; he has also been connected with Art News in New York and with two American publishing houses, Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill. He is a graduate of Harvard and has done advanced work at Columbia and N.Y.U., specializing in French literature. His poems have appeared in various magazines and in privately printed collections. The present book is his second. Its predecessor was Some Trees (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1956)- the most beautiful first book to appear in America, said Poetry Magazine, since [Wallace Stevens'] Harmonium.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781501196331
ISBN 10	1501196332
Title	The Best American Poetry 1988
Author	John Ashbery
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Year published	2018-09-11
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.