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    Some Trees: Poems
    Some Trees: Poems
    Some Trees: Poems
    Ebook75 pages42 minutes

    Some Trees: Poems

    By John Ashbery

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    About this ebook

    John Ashbery’s first published book of poems, handpicked from the slush pile by none other than W. H. Auden

    Ashbery’s Some Trees narrowly beat out a manuscript by fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara to win the renowned Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—after the book had been rejected in an early screening round. Competition judge W. H. Auden was perhaps the first to note, in his original preface to Some Trees, the meditative polyphony that decades of readers have come to identify as Ashbery’s unique style: “If he is to be true to nature in this world, he must accept strange juxtapositions of imagery, singular associations of ideas.”
     
    But not all is strange and associative here: Some Trees includes “The Instruction Manual,” one of Ashbery’s most conversational and perhaps most quoted poems, as well as a number of poems that display his casually masterful handling of such traditional forms as the sonnet, the pantoum, the Italian canzone, and even, with “The Painter,” the odd tricky sestina. Some Trees, an essential collection for Ashbery scholars and newbies alike, introduced one of postwar America’s most enduring and provocative poetic voices, by turns conversational, discordant, haunting, and wise. 

    Editor's Note

    Witty, evocative & thoughtful...

    Picked by W.H. Auden to receive the Yale Younger Poets prize, this early collection by one of America's most distinguished poets is rich with wit, imagery & Ashbery's inimitable thoughtfulness.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459168
    Some Trees: Poems
    Author

    John Ashbery

    <p><strong>John Ashbery </strong>was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including <em>Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; </em>and <em>Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, </em>which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.</p>

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    Reviews for Some Trees

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      This was a decent collection of poetry from John Ashbery's youthful days. Some poems are a near miss, but others hold the presence of his form and skill by taking you along and guiding you in your perceptions, thoughts, and insinuations. A malleable sense of discovery exists with this book and it holds some of its own power from it.3.5 stars.
    • 1/5

      Thats incredible
    • 5/5
      Its tremendous :)
    • 4/5
      Tremendous...!!
    • 4/5
      Excellent Book....I love the animal..This book is very interesting.If you also have a fond of animal's life go through this book.
    • 5/5
      SOME TREES OUT OF A HUGE FORESTUsed Poem: "Some Trees" by John AshberyThe "Mesostomatic" Poem I got using the program: Each neighBor by spEech were Arranging yoU and I in whaT performance not merelY chance means sOmething Filled with Canvas puzzling ligHt And being there and moviNg our days suCh reticence these sEem defense.I chose option A in this assignment because the idea of being able to create as many "automatic poems" as you would like to with the aid of a computer program piqued my curiosity. I have to admit that I had to try several times to obtain a poem without errors from the selected text, but my pleasure with the final result made up for all the effort. I had great fun too!I finally selected the poem "Some Trees" by Ashbery, firstly because I was deeply impressed by its close reading and then because I thought that it was an appropriate poem to give further meaning to the concept of chance. Because in this aleatory process creating the Mesostic poem, chance has a great deal of importance, but at the same time, adding the wing words and writing the spine, you can somehow unconsciously interfere with the result.As the branches of the trees in Ashbery's poem, which arrange by chance to meet and dance together, or the lovely accidental side of any relationship, in this new reduced poem, I find a freshly and even liberating sense in the words. They become the highest reality.Trying to do a close reading of the poem, I'd say that for me it talks about meetings. Meetings in the general sense, two lovers, an artist and a new idea, a reader and a poem, a subtle and elegant courtship, any kind of meeting, of getting to know something or someone who didn't exist before. Meetings which may seem to be casual or even meaningless, but at the same time, they have a reason to be, they are performed, they exist so we (the readers, the lovers, or both!) can move forward, overcoming any formal and conventional obstacle which might be found on their way and becoming something completely different in the process.And out of all the huge forest of words, the program and I chose only some of them, so chance creates a new quality, a new interpretation for these words, there is an accidental intention which somehow gives homage to Ashbery's poem, and why not, it creates new and unadulterated beauty out of it.

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    Some Trees - John Ashbery

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