{"product_id":"9781480459052","title":"As We Know","description":"\u003cb\u003eDating from one of the most studied creative periods of John Ashbery’s career, a groundbreaking collection showcasing his signature polyphonic poem “Litany” \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst published in 1979, four years after Ashbery’s masterpiece \u003ci\u003eSelf-Portrait in a Convex Mirror\u003c\/i\u003e, the poems in \u003ci\u003eAs We Know\u003c\/i\u003e represent the great American poet writing at the peak of his experimental powers. The book’s flagship poem, the seventy-page “Litany,” remains one of the most exciting and challenging of Ashbery’s career. Presented in two facing columns, the poem asks to be read as independent but countervailing monologues, creating a dialogue of the private and the public, the human and the divine, the real and the unreal—a wild and beautiful conversation that contains multitudes.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAs We Know\u003c\/i\u003e also collects some of Ashbery’s most witty, self-reflexive interrogations of poetry itself, including “Late Echo” and “Five Pedantic Pieces” (“An idea I had and talked about \/ Became the things I do”), as well as a wry, laugh-out-loud call-and-response sequence of one-line poems on Ashbery’s defining subject: the writing of poetry (“I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well \/ But I was mistaken”). Perhaps the most admired poem in this much-discussed volume is “Tapestry,” a measured exploration of the inevitable distance that arises between art, audience, and artist, which the critic Harold Bloom called “an ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ for our time.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBuilt of doubles, of echoes, of dualities and combinations, \u003ci\u003eAs We Know\u003c\/i\u003e is the breathtaking expression of a singular American voice.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Open Road Media","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47165348839664,"sku":"9781480459052","price":17.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781480459052_p0.jpg?v=1763619504","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781480459052","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}