Chinese Whispers

John Ashbery’s restless, witty meditation on aging and the music of change: A must-read collection from America’s greatest modern poet

The child’s game Chinese Whispers, known in America as Telephone, is an exercise in transforming the recognizable into something beautifully strange. John Ashbery’s twenty-fourth collection of poems, Chinese Whispers, re-creates in every line the accidentally transformative logic of the language game for which the book is named. In sixty-three charged and often very funny poems, Ashbery confronts the relentlessness of age and time while demonstrating, in his unmistakable, self-reflexive style, the process by which a single thought unravels, multiplies, distends, travels, and finally arrives, changed and unfamiliar.
 
First published in 2002, shortly after Ashbery’s seventy-fifth birthday, Chinese Whispers is a collection in which fairy tales, mysteries, and magic dollhouses interleave effortlessly with the everyday of pancakes and popular culture. Ashbery’s language is absolutely recognizable from modern life as it is experienced, but at the same time is as dreamlike and disquieting as intercepted transmissions from another world.

“Chinese Whispers is John Ashbery at his most poignant, lucid, and perceptive.” —Harold Bloom
 
“Chinese Whispers is absolutely unruly and utterly enjoyable. A mix of mercurial prose poems, disembodied lyrics, and wayward narratives, it demonstrates once again Ashbery’s singular range.” —Tom Devaney, The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Chinese Whispers collects the variegated forms of American English, ranging from folksy expressions and outlandish phraseology to disposable, pedestrian speech. It’s a vast compendium, a monument of sorts, not least because Ashbery is able to transform the most transient of expressions into something like a durable object, to be contemplated, amused by, stared at in bewilderment.” —James Gibbons, Bookforum
 
“Perhaps none of Ashbery’s collections have been as inspiring and ethically rigorous as is Chinese Whispers. No other poet writing today has his ability to surprise us at every turn—to force us to rethink what we thought we understood. It is a dazzling performance.” —Marjorie Perloff
 
“A master at applying conversational tone and humor to the weightiest ideas, Ashbery is also a modest philosopher and expert jester. His command of language, carefully aimed ambiguity and brilliantly masked metaphors make Chinese Whispers another success for Ashbery, who, once again, takes poetry to the next level while keeping it intensely and mysteriously personal.” —Norene Cashen, Detroit Metro Times
 
“John Ashbery is not a poet of our time. He is the poet. If the early twentieth century had Eliot, we have Ashbery to show us the broken thoughts, wayward romantic rambles, and swarms of media messages that invade our brains all at once—and the constant struggle to find some (god, any!) secure meaning in it all. Chinese Whispers offers just what you expect from the poet, which is everything.” —Christopher Bollen

John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He has authored more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, his work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he has won numerous American literary awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a National Humanities Medal. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. For many years, Ashbery taught graduate and undergraduate poetry courses at Brooklyn College and Bard College, and his most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012. He lives in New York.