Well, here’s a curiosity, Christian Bale reading Ashbery’s Breezeway for audible.com. The recording was never released, and it’s the first we know of it even being made (authors aren’t always made aware of audiobook versions of their own books). . .

Gallup attended Tulane University for two years, then transferred to Columbia University's School of General Studies, where he received a BA. By then, his Tulsa friends had moved to New York City, where, living in what came to be known as the East Village, they took on the name jokingly bestowed upon them by the noted poet John Ashbery, the "Tulsa School of Poetry."…

Publishers Weekly has included a new book by John Ashbery—of course being published posthumously—forthcoming this June: Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery (Ecco). It’s described by PW as a “posthumous collection featur(ing) Ashbery’s trademark playfulness with language and range of tones and styles, gathering book-length projects and long poems written between 1993 and 2007.” It features a forward by Ben Lerner, and was edited by Emily Skillings, Ashbery’s final assistant, and a longtime part of The Flow Chart Foundation. The works were discovered after Ashbery’s passing. A mighty huzzah to Emily for all of her work in bringing these remarkable poems to the public…

There is a little anecdote I'd like to tell, just to keep in the back of your mind. I read one time that somebody asked John Ashbery how he writes poetry. He said that he didn't really have any specific methodology, but he gave this example of being in a public place and overhearing a conversation between some strangers, and then really liking a phrase, and taking that exact phrase and using it as the start of his poem. . .

Some design considerations for the project have been established, including the selection of a style of street lighting called Ashbery, which combines advanced technology with a traditional appearance…

I discovered Ashbery at a Media Play. For a brief moment when I was twenty years old, an instant, really—the Salem, Oregon, Media Play existed only for an instant, flashing into existence and almost the same day seeming to recognize the impossibility of its own existence, then melting away like the snowman I built on one of the four, or was it three, occasions it snowed during the seven years I lived in Round Rock, Texas, as a child, me weeping as the snowman melted, irretrievable even in its continued presence—Media Play was a heaven to me, its hintermost wall filled by shelves of poetry books, not the entire width of the wall, but a few yards of wall to the right of the center of the store, the hintermost right of the hintermost center, more poetry books than at any other bookstore in Salem. There, as I scanned the poetry section of what I could only assume, owing to a lack of confirming signage, was the book play part of the Media Play, I spotted, very early in my alphabetical journey, though not before Akhmatova, Ashbery’s And the Stars Were Shining—not his most recent book, that would have been the itself alphabetically organized Can You Hear, Bird?, but the book immediately previous to his most recent book—and, being twenty and a high school dropout, I was blown away by that initial and. What—except, you know, every instant of every life, though I hadn’t yet noticed that fact—begins with and?

It is this ever-present environment of cinema—and its attachment to memory, image, and language—in the poetry and life of John Ashbery that Michael Almereyda brilliantly captures in his 2017 The Lonedale Operator, now playing on the Criterion Channel. Its highly collaged and dazzling annotations of Ashbery’s recollections serve as a bittersweet final portrait of the artist. Almereyda and I shared an exchange over email about the great poet and the making of this short, intimate film…

The latest book by Grzegorz Jankowicz juxtaposes two works with which the author has been fascinated for over a dozen years. Both have the same title: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The first is the mesmerizing painting of Parmigianino, known to all connoisseurs of sophisticated weirdness (let us recall that one of its owners was Rudolf II); the second is John Ashbery's award-winning and critically acclaimed poem, written 450 years later…

“I find the moments of beauty and possibility opening up in John Ashbery’s work inexhaustibly beautiful,” the fiction writer and poet Ben Lerner recently said in an interview.  This is certainly not surprising – Ashbery is a fixture in virtually all of Lerner’s writing and thinking.  After Ashbery passed away in 2017, Lerner wrote a brief, affecting tribute in the New Yorker about the poet and their relationship (“I’m dizzied by my luck at having overlapped with John Ashbery, one of the good things about being born when I was”). . .

On the occasion of John Ashbery’s birthday (July 28th, 2020 — he would have been 93), Pioneer Works featured a selection of collages and texts by John Ashbery and Joe Brainard (curated by The Flow Chart Foundation with the kind assistance of Ron Padgett and Tibor di Nagy Gallery), as well as a transcription of Ben Lerner’s introduction of Ashbery’s reading there in 2015.

Access the online exhibit here.

On September 25, 1965, Andy gave a party for John Ashbery at the 47th Street Factory. The literary and art worlds anticipated it for a week, but I wasn’t invited and I was devastated. Everyone was there and talked about it endlessly afterward. Because I was a poet, it was a double insult…

Another city poet, John Ashbery, keeps the social distance inside in “This Room,” a poem of droll claustrophobia. “Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine,” the poet muses, sounding like someone stuck inside for weeks. “We had macaroni for lunch every day,” he recalls, as if predicting my own lockdown menu…

To his surprise, Thompson discovered that 15 of the Cumming subjects taught, studied, or received honorary degrees at Harvard. Those not yet mentioned are Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, LL.D. ’83, Nobel-winning Peruvian writer and former Harvard visiting professor Mario Vargas Llosa, Litt.D. ’99, former World Bank Group president James Wolfensohn, M.B.A. ’59, and perhaps the most influential late-twentieth-century U.S. poet, John Ashbery ’49, Litt.D. ’01. . .

For all their difficulty, these very difficult times bring home to people what is truly important for us. After our initial shock and fear, we began to appreciate that a full fridge might permit us to survive, but was no guarantee of the fullness of life (see John 10:10). For fullness of life we need more: we need the people that are important to us.

That is what the pandemic has been taking from us, the good and ordinary way of being with each other. But we wait patiently with hope. It is in this spirit that we need to follow public health guidance. While this is painful and difficult, it also necessary. We keep a distance to keep each other safe. But the distance we thus create will keep us safe; it is, like the poem says, “the light from the lighthouse that protects as it pushes away” (John Ashbery)…

Among the ordinary reading rooms that I have not entered now for over two months is my office. Sitting atop a gray metal filing cabinet in that office is a framed broadside of this little poem by John Ashbery…

Not for the first time during the outbreak—and almost certainly not for the last—it seemed like we were living out those John Ashbery lines: “The crisis has just passed. / Uh oh, here it comes again, / looking for someone to blame itself on, you, I . . . ”

The Hudson Window Art project is separate from the windows exhibit already on display at Hudson Hall at 327 Warren, which is showcasing the work of the late American poet and Hudson resident John Ashbery. Running through May 28…

In Richard Eberhart’s The Apparition, couples gather for an evening of amateur theater in a private living room. In John Ashbery’s The Heroes, Greek thinkers congregate at a seaside house for a weekend of homoerotic revelry. Everywhere in Bean’s study, the poets show an interest in how people behave in groups…