Hotel Lautréamont
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In John Ashbery’s haunting 1992 collection, just as in the traveler’s experience of a hotel, we recognize everything, and yet nothing is familiar—not even ourselves
Hotel Lautréamont invites readers to reimagine a book of poems as a collection of hotel rooms: each one empty until we enter it, and yet in truth abundantly furnished with associations, necessities, and echoes of both the known and the alien. The collection’s title poem is itself an evocative echo: Comte de Lautréamont was the pseudonym taken by Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, a radical nineteenth-century French writer about whom little is known except that he produced one remarkable presymbolist epic prose poem called The Songs of Maldoror and died of fever at the age of twenty-four in a hotel in Paris during Napoleon III’s siege of the city in 1870.
Addressed to lonely ghosts, lingering guests, and others, the poems in Hotel Lautréamont present a study of exile, loss, meaning, and the artistic constructions we create to house them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Blandishments, chitchat, jokes, parodies, personae and all kinds of slang circulate freely through Ashbery's ( April Galleons ) latest collection. As always, his work will frustrate readers who must know just what it's about. Curious and spectacular details no sooner come up than they vanish; distractions and even boredom have their places; and Ashbery's central preoccupations--passing time, the ambiguities of identity--are as ordinary as they are enduring. The title of the volume alludes to the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont, a 19th-century French author much admired by the Surrealists. By putting the count's name to a commercial establishment for travelers--or providing him with a family seat--Ashbery leads us to consider his relation, as an American, to the traditions of French poetry. He is a past master at slipping across established boundaries of discourse, and the limit of his work is perhaps that it is so entirely urbane. Tempered by irony, his poems are mitigated by sentiment, as if their author is resigned to the fact that the conventions they send up are about as satisfactory as anything gets. Still, the poems continually surprise us with the question of what to make of them. Are they psychological evocations, linguistic abstractions, a commentary on the way we live now, confused echoes of a redeemed tongue, or simply arbitrary in their inspiration? Ashbery's art allows for all these readings--and then some.
