Gallaher: John Ashbery has meant at least as much to me as any other poet. I see, though, something of a different Ashbery than the way I mostly hear people talk of his work. He said once, back in the ’70s, that his poems mirror thinking, or a kind of thinking, the way the mind works, with a light, surreal touch. Something like that. And I love his work, and I love that idea, though I don’t really see his work proceeding that way, at least his poetry doesn’t match how I think. It’s more, in my reading, a play of wit through dreaming. Topical, lucid dreaming maybe.

That brings up two questions: One, how is his work proceeding then? And two, what might poetry look like that mirrors thinking…

On February 10th, 2020, Jeffrey Lependorf, The Flow Chart Foundation’s Executive Director, gave the following talk on Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror at the Sorbonne (and again the following day at the University of Rennes)…

Sunday, February 9th at 1:30PM (EST), “The Lonedale Operator,” Michael Almereyda’s short biopic on John Ashbery’s relationship to Cinema, will premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It will be part of a program of shorts called “I’m Looking Through You.”

Beck’s music is typically classified as pop—in the past decade, especially, he has drifted more toward the sorts of hulking anthems that are discernible over the din of the beer tent at giant outdoor festivals—but it can just as easily be slotted into the avant-garde canon, alongside work by other artists who stack distinct images in chimerical ways. When I texted him a short poem by John Ashbery, he replied with a picture of a tall pile of Ashbery’s books. The spines were cracked…

Grainy and sun-washed, The Trip has the look and feel of a polaroid found in the back pocket of a pair of Levi’s. Accompanied by Honey, a pitbull mix who acts as a grumbling chorus through subtitles, Myles makes their way down streets that could belong to any other sparsely populated Southwestern city. After some playful teasing, they coaxes out a score of puppets. Myles speaks for all of them save for a crocodile (voiced by John Ashbery), dipping in and out of falsetto. The vocal affectation serves a double purpose: to distinguish their words from Myles’s and to cast them as childlike. (Myles made these very puppets as a kid.) Endearingly crude in appearance, each has its own distinct personality: Montgomery, who is coming to terms with his sexuality as a gay man; Bedilia, a “diva” who longs to sing on the radio; Casper, a ghost who dreams of studying philosophy; Oscar, “the man of the house” who Myles compares to their father; and Crocky the crocodile, who’s either a recovering alcoholic or a suffering one…

It was a special treat, I remember: We would jump in the back seat of a car and hop over to Efrat on Saturday night. I was 17, and living for a year in Gush Etzion, the area just south east of Jerusalem that has been the scene of repeated violence. I remember the quiet at night, and the old hills and new looking houses, the sense of provisional eternity. We thought that there might be girls there, and maybe one would talk to us. I fell in love in the West Bank, and played basketball there, and read John Ashbery at a bus stop waiting to go even deeper into its interior…

The Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y has a seventy-year archive of recordings—it began hosting readings in 1939 and recording them in 1949—and it offers a unique opportunity to study poets’ voices and reading styles. Between 1952 and 2014, John Ashbery made seventeen appearances on the stage of the Poetry Center. He read with other poets—Barbara Guest, Mark Ford, Jack Gilbert, John Hollander, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, and James Schuyler. He read with painters—Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers. And he joined in readings honoring other poets—tributes to Frank O’Hara (1970), Elizabeth Bishop (1979) and Marianne Moore (1987). Ashbery, who made regular Poetry Center appearances from the ages of twenty-four to eighty-seven, is on a short list of poets whose Y readings spanned so many decades (others include W. S. Merwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, and Galway Kinnell)…

In the fall of 2017, the Tibor de Nagy and Pratt Manhattan galleries in New York paid tribute to John Ashbery, a few months after his death, exhibiting his bizarre collages , over one hundred and twenty works made over seventy years. The most influential American poet of his generation was also revealed to the public as a pop artist: since 1948 he had in fact been delighted to paste cuttings of various origins on postcards and boards of board games, recomposed in humorous combinations with an elusive meaning. Characters from the world of comics and advertising are shown in secret conversation with the great masterpieces of art - Giorgione with Crazy Cat, Parmigianino with Buster Brown - often accompanied by faces of enigmatic cats, or set between playing cards and old stamps…

I did not foresee, when Olivier Brossard kindly invited me to speak about John Ashbery’s most celebrated book, that it would prove to be quite so recalcitrant; that speaking into the absence of my great friend would arouse so many disparate impulses; among them, the desire to be cogent and useful to you; the desire to say something fresh about this writer whose work has attracted so much commentary by poets and critics; the desire to register at least some of the ways in which Ashbery the poet and John the friend were guides to me for more than four decades, beginning in 1971, when I was living in London, and working at the Institute of Contemporary Arts…

We welcome short papers addressing any aspect of New York School poetry, art, and writing for the inaugural meeting of the New York School Studies Association (NYSSA). This event builds on the research network scholars and poets began to form during the illuminating New Work on the New York School symposium and poetry evening held at the University of Birmingham in 2018. We hope it will be the second international meeting of many…

Two years after the death of American poet John Ashbery (1927-2017), the Girona publishing house Libros del Siglo publishes, for the first time in Catalan, the bilingual edition of his most valued book, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror , translated by the poet Melcion Mateu ; a poetry collection published in 1975, winner of the Pulitzer, National Book and National Critics prizes, of which the famous poem that gives title to the book is part…

It’s not usual we have an Ashbery Sighting from the Beijing News, but the following appeared recently, on the occasion of Ashbery’s work appearing in a new Chinese edition (Thank you, Google Translate, though with a good bit of light editing necessary still, and yet still much of this remaining as inscrutable as it may be interesting) :

…Of course, meaning is the inherent attribute of language. Poetry with language as its starting point cannot be completely separated from meaning. But in this tradition, poetry no longer pursues a "central meaning,” but rather its focus is on the center. The escape of meaning, the result of the language of the carnival (that is, the so-called language dance of Valery) itself disintegrates the central meaning, with the joy of the flow of the language, the latter is crushed into fragments of meaning that are incoherent…

You wrote the usual bad undergraduate poetry? [Laughs.]

Yeah, and I found that to be a nice kind of escape. I think that I remember the first time that I remember reading John Ashbery in a class too, and that blew my mind.

Do you remember what you read?

It was “Syringa.”

Huh. 

I forget what book collection it’s in. I don’t know how to describe it. I feel like I never fully know how to describe what he does, but it’s amazing…

[translated from Spanish] John Ashbery (Rochester, New York 1927- New York, 2017), is undoubtedly the most important living American poet today. Endowed with a plural capacity of form, Ashbery has been developing a writing increasingly mobile and more accurate, in whose precise mechanisms can be captured all the invisible, including "the smell of light", and the epic of everyday life, conceived as a "going through the same street in different times", knowing that it is never possible to "alter the heart of things", because we are all "between nothingness and paradise", which does not prevent you from discovering "the rainbow of tears" "In the midst of the discomforts of an increasingly complex society…

Every bit as packed with atmospheric wit as one might expect of a book that draws its title from a John Ashbery poem, Shapiro’s story unfolds at an abandoned summer camp along the south shore of Massachusetts, with all that setting’s inherent promise of escape and romance — its ineffable “haze of desire and memory.”