I applaud Solis’ project, and I think we need more poet-inspired fonts. Here are a few ideas:

-Sappho: Every letter is only half drawn, but in a really sexy way.

-Gertrude Stein: Every letter is repeated from two to seven times.

-John Ashbery: All the Bs look like Ds. . . .

“….exquisite mind cartoons that could be heard with eyes closed, the voice perfectly ordinary with the slight edge of extravagant conversational camp, a mind artifice not unnatural to hypnagogic revery, deceptive, till you hear the chasm landscapes and awkward universes created and contradicted in vast gas-deposit shocking trivial universal mind.”
--- Allen Ginsberg – from an introduction to a reading by John Ashbery, at Naropa Institute, 1975.

. . .

Writers interested in new approaches were obliged to seek shelter with small presses, or with subsidised university presses, such as the Yale University Press and the Wesleyan University Press, which were the first to publish John Ashbery, the latter bringing out his book The Tennis Court Oath. . .

HUDSON, N.Y. — Picture a film projected on a silver screen in an elegant hall. The images are clear, even familiar, but something is missing — the original sound is gone. Instead, a performer standing in front of the screen offers a new audio option — perhaps a poem, some music, even dance. . .

But his more serious poetry could be ambitious, as well as dense. Mr. Ashbery once said that it was like the notes of “a mad scientist who has swallowed the wrong potion in his lab and is desperately trying to get his calculations on paper before everything closes in.” . . .

Here in the 21st-century US, we can trace so much of our current popular culture to East Asia. Think about it: What would life in modern America be like without sushi, manga, or karaoke? And now, add to the list the art of neo-benshi, which sees its practitioners replacing the dialogue of scenes from popular films with their own new, original—and often side-splittingly surreal—dialogue for audiences at live screenings. . .

“…She soon learned the answer. Her father, according to Josh Schneiderman, a Frank O’Hara scholar, had alienated Maureen O’Hara, Frank’s youngest sister and the fierce guardian of his estate, by telling her that John Ashbery was the better poet and asking her about her brother’s sex life. (O’Hara was gay, and it was an important part of his identity and his writing.) Soon after, Schjeldahl was exiled from his position as authorized biographer…”

“I was never interested in doing art criticism at all—I’m not sure that I am even now”, the poet John Ashbery told the Paris Review in 1983, 26 years into his career doing art criticism. “As so often when you exhibit reluctance to do something,” Ashbery continued, “people think you must be very good at it. If I had set out to be an art critic, I might never have succeeded”. . . .

The press release for Victoria Gitman’s master class of a retrospective “Everything Is Surface: Twenty Years of Painting” shares that the show owed its title to a line from John Ashbery’s 1974 poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Ashbery’s text is also an homage—the title was borrowed from a sixteenth-century tondo painted by Italian Mannerist Parmigianino, an image the poet first encountered in reproduction. . .

This does of course float perilously close to Tolstoy’s meaninglessness, which is a form of smugness. It is not surprising that Shields emerges as an admirer of that elegant airhead John Ashbery, for whom poetry was phrase-making. Ashbery’s phrases are delicious (thanks to Deerfield and Harvard); but it’s Mallarmé without the mystery, and after a few poems, the effect is gormless. At regular intervals Shields draws his own blood – it saves him from Ashberyism. . .

We are used to hearing of poets so private they speak for all of us. We are not used to hearing that John Ashbery is among them. Anyone who has ever been baffled by Ashbery’s work will understand the temptation to conclude that here is a poet so private he is truly private, so difficult he is truly inaccessible. But to arrive at that dead end is exasperating, if only because the reputation leads you to expect much more. . .

And yet … you’d be hard pressed to find contemporary poems in English that exhibit an affinity with the poems gathered here, the kind of affinity that, without being anything like them, the early poems have with poems by Hardy and Frost, Yeats and Moore. Scads of poems in the 1930s and ’40s were influenced by Auden, some written by his friends, but the most recent readable and widely-available proof of his influence I know of is John Ashbery’s Some Trees, published in 1956, and a poem Philip Larkin added to his 1946 The North Ship when it was reprinted 20 years later, “Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair.” . . .

Way back in 1976, both Ashbery and O’Hara were considered “painterly poets,” whatever that means. One early critic named Fred Moramarco describes “Self-Portrait” like this . . .

IN THE SPRING OF 1912, Marcel Duchamp went to see a very strange play. It had been advertised around Paris with a poster displaying twelve disconcerting scenes: an earthworm playing a zither, a thermomechanical orchestra powered by an imaginary substance named “bexium,” a rolling statue made of whalebone corset stays, and other fanciful technologies, works of art, animals, and often unfortunate human beings (who were apparently needled or electrified during rituals and performances, if the poster were to be believed). . . .

I’m typically not happy with a day of writing unless I’ve had an initial read and feel good with how it sounds. When I’m really going—when I’m in “that paddlewheel of days,” that’s what John Ashbery called it, you know, when one day just turns into the next—what I really like to do is at least have a couple lines into the next scene. . .

Published between 1968 and 1975, Adventures in Poetry was edited by poet Larry Faginand printed and assembled at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Featured in its pages is writing by many poets associated with the first and second generation of the New York School. Surreal and often playful, the work provides a valuable access point into a vibrant and social community of writers who overlapped both in life and on the page. We’ve gathered together a selection of works by some of the era’s most enduring voices. . .

One of the most ambitious sections in the book is the final one, modelled on John Ashbery’s ekphrastic poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Anand’s poem “Slow Dance” contains the same number of lines and stanzas as Ashbery’s – a constraint that, paradoxically, allowed Anand the freedom to let herself go. It also underscored the intersection of her two driving impulses. “When I read [“Self-Portrait”] the first time, I was studying theoretical ecology and complex systems theory. And I found lines in it that were basically describing a complex system,” she says. “That blew me away.” . . .