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Some Trees

First edition
Author	John Ashbery
Language	English
Series	Yale Series of Younger Poets
Release number	Volume 52
Publisher	Yale University Press
Publication date	March 28, 1956 (1956-03-28)
Publication place	United States
Pages	87
OCLC	771087663

Some Trees is the debut poetry collection by the American writer John Ashbery, published on March 28, 1956 by Yale University Press.

Background

Ashbery, 1945

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O'Hara, 1950

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Ashbery and O'Hara met while attending Harvard as undergraduates. Many of the poems collected in Some Trees were written during the same period.

Ashbery – Harvard – O'Hara – Auden

• "Ashbery was still an undergraduate when he wrote what is perhaps his most popular poem, 'Some Trees,' about a nascent love affair and the efforts of two people to define themselves within it. ... Typically perverse, Ashbery dismisses the poem today. 'A conventional modern poem of that period, my farewell to poetry as we know it—it had a paraphrasable meaning. I don't see my poetry as others see it ... It's a problem of mine.'

Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition

In 1955, Younger Poets judge W. H. Auden (pictured in 1956) was dissatisfied with every submission and almost declared no winner. At the last minute, he was given submissions by Ashbery and O'Hara—both of whom had already been eliminated—and ultimately named Ashbery the winner, despite serious reservations.

Contents

Some Trees: table of contents

Order	Title	Previous publication
		Date	Journal
1	"Two Scenes"	—
2	"Popular Songs"	—
3	"Eclogue"	—
4	"The Instruction Manual"	—
5	"The Grapevine"	—
6	"A Boy"	—
7	"Glazunoviana"	—
8	"The Hero"	—
9	"Poem"	—
10	"Album Leaf"	—
11	"The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers"	—
12	"Pantoum"	—
13	"Grand Abacus"	—
14	"The Mythological Poet"	—
15	"Sonnet"	—
16	"Chaos"	—
17	"The Orioles"	—
18	"The Young Son"	—
19	"The Thinnest Shadow"	—
20	"Canzone"	—
21	"Errors"	—
22	"Illustration"	—
23	"Some Trees"	—
24	"Hotel Dauphin"	—
25	"The Painter"	—
26	"And You Know"	—
27	"He"	—
28	"Meditations of a Parrot"	—
29	"Sonnet"	—
30	"A Long Novel"	—
31	"The Way They Took"	—
32	"The Pied Piper"	—
33	"Answering a Question in the Mountains"	—
34	"A Pastoral"	—
35	"Le livre est sur la table"	—

Publication

Some Trees was published on March 28, 1956, with a list price of $2.50 (equivalent to about $22 in 2023, adjusted for inflation). Yale University Press printed 817 copies of the first edition. Even given its limited quantity, the book sold poorly; in the words of Dinitia Smith, it "dropped into a bottomless pit." Four years after its publication, only 456 copies had been sold. It took ten years to sell the entire original run.

Corinth Books in New York issued a reprint in December 1970—absent Auden's foreword—with 1,000 hardcover and 2,000 paperback copies. Joe Brainard painted a new cover for this edition. It was reprinted again, in 1978, by Ecco Press. The book has been included in its entirety in Ashbery's compilations The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry (1998) and Collected Poems 1956–1987 (2008).

• "Although O'Hara had lost the competition, he wrote a rave review of Ashbery's book for Poetry, the only good review Ashbery got. Otherwise, Some Trees dropped into a bottomless pit. Eight hundred copies were printed, and it took ten years to sell them all."

• In France, "Ashbery waited for news about Some Trees. None came. He would never have a career as a poet, he decided. From now on, he would write only for himself."

Critical reception

• Harold Bloom's first exposure to Ashbery: "Mr. Bloom discovered Mr. Ashbery by accident when he was 26, in his second year of teaching at Yale, when he stumbled upon Some Trees in the university bookstore and read it straight through standing up in the aisle."

Sources

Anon. (October 2008). "Book Review: Collected Poems 1956–1987". Publishers Weekly. Archived from the original on October 23, 2019.

Bradley, George, ed. (1998). The Yale Younger Poets Anthology. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07472-7 – via the Internet Archive (registration required).

Jenkins, Nicholas (January 4, 1998). "A Life of Beginnings". The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 2, 2019.

Kermani, David K. (1976). John Ashbery: A Comprehensive Bibliography, Including His Art Criticism, and with Selected Notes from Unpublished Materials. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities. Vol. Vol. 14. Garland Publishing. ISBN 0-8240-9997-4 – via the Internet Archive (registration required). {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help)

Lewallen, Constance M. (2001). Joe Brainard: A Retrospective. With essays by John Ashbery and Carter Ratcliff. The Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley and Granary Books. ISBN 1-887123-44-X – via the Internet Archive (registration required).

Miller, Michael H. (January 1, 2013). "The Meaning of All This: Talking to John Ashbery About His Past, Present and Future". The New York Observer. p. 4. Archived from the original on May 3, 2019.

New York Times Book Review staff (December 2, 1956). "A Selected List of 250 Outstanding Books of the Year". The New York Times – via the TimesMachine (subscription required).{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

O'Hara, Frank (February 1957). "Rare Modern". Poetry. 89 (5): 307–316. JSTOR 20586436.

Roffman, Karin (2017). The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-29384-0 – via Google Books.

Smith, Dinitia (May 20, 1991). "Poem Alone". New York. pp. 46–52. Retrieved July 10, 2019 – via Google Books.{{cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

Stitt, Peter (Winter 1978). "Reviewed Works: Some Trees by John Ashbery; Houseboat Days by John Ashbery; The Snow Poems by A. R. Ammons; The Selected Poems 1951–1977 by A. R. Ammons; Selected Poems by Lucien Stryk". The Georgia Review. 32 (4): 940–948. JSTOR 41397855.

Category:1956 books Category:1956 poems Category:American poetry collections Category:English-language books Category:Poems in English Category:Poetry by John Ashbery Category:Yale University Press books