Other Traditions

First edition. Small 8vo. Pp. [viii], 167, [1]. Quarter-bound black buckram over brown paper-covered boards, lettered in silver to spine; chocolate brown endpapers. Jacket design by Marianne Perlak featuring Linda Dautreuil's artwork, Sequence and Landscape. Preface, Notes, Index.

Signed and dated by the Author to title page in the year of publication. Signed copies are quite scarce.

The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1989–90. Each of the six poets Ashbery discusses – John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, David Schubert – are amongst his favourites, ones he turns to for a ''poetic jump-start'' at times of creative ebb. "[A]n entertaining and shrewd little book [with] the lectures provid[ing] abundant hints about Ashbery's own method. As he readily admits, poets when writing about other poets frequently write about themselves." –Charles Simic, New York Review of Books