Three Poems

A provocative, challenging masterpiece by John Ashbery that set a new standard for the modern prose poem

"The pathos and liveliness of ordinary human communication is poetry to me," John Ashbery has said of this controversial work, a collection of three long prose poems originally published in 1972, adding, "Three Poems tries to stay close to the way we talk and think without expecting what we say to be recorded or remembered."

The effect of these prose poems is at once deeply familia...