Your Name Here
Everyone wants to subscribe to a deed of heroism, especially if the risks are largely imaginary. The headline announcing a daring deed; in the tourist shop a poster promising a spectacular, sun-drenched corrida, and there is a space between the legendary bullfighters for one more sequined matador: "(Your Name Here)".
That is how the individual, whom Hardy declared must at heart remain "unread eternally", manages to read out of the isolated 'I' into other selves. It does not appropriate, it does not exercise negative capability, but rather attempts a kind of adventuring in voices, landscapes, loves and lives, and a coming back to – well, not precisely to oneself, because what, precisely, in the end, can one say is oneself? But coming back to a place that seems like home, where "Your name" is naturally "here".
The poems in "Your Name Here" were written before, during and after John Ashbery's rumbustious "child sequence" "Girls on the Run" (1999); they are the innocent productions of the adult imagination following not Darger's weird pictorial narrative but the even weirder narrative of everyday life, everyday dreaming.
About the Author
John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He has published more than twenty collections of poetry, beginning in 1953 with "Turandot and Other Poems". In 1976, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. His art writings are collected in "Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987" (Carcanet, 1990) and his literary essays appear in the "Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Other Traditions" (Harvard University Press, 2000), and in "Selected Prose" (Carcanet, 2004). Widely honoured internationally, he is the recipient of the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry from theBavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Munich), the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome), and the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poesie (Brussels), all given for lifetime achievement. In 2002 he was named Officier of the Legion d'Honneur of the Republic of France. In 2012 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal, presented to him by President Obama at the White House. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
