In "Quick Question" John Ashbery extends an invitation to readers to accompany him into the extraordinary worlds of the everyday, experienced through the box of tricks that is language. He revels in twist and transformation, the constant mutability of words and things: "Whatever stops playing is the enemy of the incomplete". He can stop us in our tracks with the accuracy of his perception: "Somewhere in America someone is trying to figure out / how to pay for this". Aware of the paradoxes of his own writing, he teases us with questions: "Is it all doggerel and folderol?" "Would I lie to you?" Either way, his invitation is irresistible: come in, see what happens.
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.
Reviews
"'Quick Question', with the hushed intensity of its music and great lyric beauty, could only be Ashbery" – Ian Thomson, Financial Times
