Houseboat Days: Poems

By: John Ashbery

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Synopsis: Is poetry the act of putting something together, or the art of taking something apart? Houseboat Days, one of John Ashbery&’s most celebrated collections, offers its own answerRemarkable for its introspection and for the response it elicited when it was first published in 1977, Houseboat Days is Ashbery&’s much-discussed follow-up to his 1975 masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and remains one of his most studied books to date. Houseboat Days begins with the moving, unforgettable poem &“Street Musicians,&” an allegory of artistic and personal loss that came ten years after the death of Ashbery&’s friend and fellow New York poet Frank O&’Hara. But while many of the poems in Houseboat Days are strikingly personal, especially when compared to Ashbery&’s work from the 1950s and 1960s, the collection is less about the poet than about the act of writing poetry. In such widely anthologized poems as &“Wet Casements,&” &“Syringa,&” &“And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,&” and &“What Is Poetry,&” Ashbery embraces the challenge of his own ars poetica, exploring and exploding the trusses, foundations, and underground caverns that underlie the creative act, and specifically, the act of creating a poem. Marjorie Perloff of the Washington Post Book World called Houseboat Days &“the most exciting, most original book of poems to have appeared in the 1970s.&”