Poem at the New Year

To mark the coming of the New Year, Rebecca Kosick, Lecturer in Translation Studies, reads a poem by John Ashbery.

Of her choice of poem, Rebecca Kosick said:

I chose ‘Poem at the New Year’ to honor the great American poet John Ashbery, who died in 2017. I admire how this poem draws together the many, at times contrasting, significances of a new year’s arrival—there’s melancholy but also the promise of new chances. There’s the feeling of being outside of time alongside the feeling of time’s passing. There are questions about the everyday and questions about the far away. Though Ashbery’s poetry can be challenging, I appreciate how this poem allows these contrasts to coincide and how it invites the reader to question and wonder along with it.

Dr. Kosick is the new co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute. Her research focuses on 20th century and contemporary poetry and art in hemispheric America, with interests in word and image studies, experimental approaches to the practice and theory of translation, and materialisms old and new. She is currently at work on a book project entitled Word, Image, Object: On the Matter of Poetics in Hemispheric America.

Further information

‘Poem at the New Year’, 1992, in Hotel Lautreamont, copyright © 1992, 2017 by John Ashbery, All rights reserved, Published in the UK by Carcanet, Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt Inc. for the author’s estate.