Chinese Whispers
By John Ashbery
2002
First Published
3.74
Average Rating
112
Number of Pages
According to a Victorian volume called Drawing Room Amusements (1879), in the game of Chinese Whispers "participants are arranged in a circle, and the first player whispers a story or message to the next player, and so on round the circle. The original story is then compared with the final version, which has often changed beyond recognition." In John Ashbery's latest collection, the verbal nucleus that is the incitement toward a poem undergoes changes caused not by careless listening but by endlessly proliferating trains of ideas that a word or phrase sets into motion. The poem has been transformed, often into "something rich and strange," but the strangeness is that of thought being opened up, like a geode, to reveal unexpected facets of meaning.
Avg Rating
3.74
Number of Ratings
176
5 STARS
29%
4 STARS
30%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
9%
1 STARS
2%
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Author
John Ashbery
Author · 43 books
John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and he traveled as a Fulbright Scholar to France in 1955. Best known as a poet, he has published more than twenty collections, most recently A Worldly Country (Ecco, 2007). His Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975) won the three major American prizes: the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an early book, Some Trees, was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has served as executive editor of Art News and as the art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1985 to 1990. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in New York, and since 1990 he has been the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard.
