This announcement, appearing in Brooklyn Vegan, on a new LP from SQÜRL, features a track with Charlotte Gainsbourg, called “John Ashbery Takes a Walk.” . . .
Read MoreEPHEMERA (Poetry)→
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The bookshelf I face in my study. Often I turn books out, and I like thinking about them in conversation with each other. At right is the famous image of Mina Loy on the cover of her novel, Insel. I wrote an essay on her artworks recently, so she has been present. The essay, titled “Mina Loy: Art of the Unbeautiful True,” will soon be published in Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable (Princeton University Press, 2023). . . .
Read MoreHOW NILANJAN MUKARJEE STRADDLES THE WORLDS OF MESH ENGINEERING AND AVANT-GARDE POETRY (My Kolkata)→
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The cosmopolitan network is not limited to his scientific career. As a poet, he has hobnobbed with creative minds from different continents and cultures, taking an active interest in translating several poets from English to Bengali, including Peter Gizzi and John Ashbery. . .
Read MoreTHEATER OF THE SPIRITS: JOSEPH CORNELL AND SILENCE (MIT Press Reader)→
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Ashbery felt Cornell’s work recovered from childhood “the dazzling, single knowledge we get from the first things we see in life, things we look at daily and come to know through long, silent experience.” . . .
Read MoreMY TRAVELS IN THE LAND OF WINKFIELD (Hyperallergic)
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It’s easy to see why Winkfield was a favorite artist of John Ashbery, whose sestina, “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” was populated by the comic-strip characters Popeye, Olive, Wimpy, Swee’Pea, and the Sea Hag. One could, in fact, liken Winkfield’s paintings to a sestina — which is a complex, 39-line poem featuring an intricate, pre-established repetition of end words in six stanzas — except that there is no reiteration in his work. . .
Read MoreTHEY CAME FROM AMERICA—JOHN ASHBERY, ANNE SEXTON and BILLY COLLINS (Magyar Kurïr)→
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Within a relatively short period of time, three significant figures of (post)modern American poetry were able to present themselves to the Hungarian audience in an independent volume. Each publication is one of the most beautiful achievements of the domestic literary translation culture operating under bleak conditions. . . .
Read MoreON FRANK O’HARA AND JOHN ASHBERY (London Review of BOOKS)→
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford (one of the editors of the second volume of Library of America’s John Ashbery edition, Collected Poems 1991–2000) discuss the lives and works of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, close friends and leading lights of the New York School, who sought to create an anti-academic, hedonistic poetry, freeing themselves from the puritan American tradition.
Read MoreBERNADETTE MAYER, POET WHO CELEBRATED THE ORDINARY, DIES AT 77 (The New York Times)→
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John Ashbery is invoked in the obituary of poet Bernadette Mayer.
Read MoreCULTURE THAT MADE ME: CONOR O'BRIEN OF VILLAGERS REVEALS HIS TOUCHSTONES (Irish Examiner)→
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“With John Ashbery’s poetry, it’s exploring how to express the inexpressible, which is basically what art is for me. When you have a thought or a feeling and you know that words will never do it justice, you'll never be able to express that to anyone else. That's when you write the song, and that's what John Ashbery was trying to get at, in an interesting way.”
Read MoreSITHENS IN A NET (The New York Review)→
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“At a reading, John Ashbery was asked,
’But what was that about?’ and he said,
’I guess I’m just sad about time,…’”
AUTUMN IN NEW YORK: ON THE FINGER LAKE TRAILS→
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“The great John Ashbery, raised on a farm eighty miles north of here on the shores of Lake Ontario, walks with me for a while…”
Read MoreMILKWEED SMITHEREENS (4Columns)→
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“In its lowercase, italicized flux, the diary is a reminder of John Ashbery’s well-known assertion that poetry is a constant babbling stream into which you simply dip a cup or ladle now and then.”
Read More'RIVERS AND MOUNTAINS' OPENS AT SOLANA BEACH'S OOLONG GALLERY ON NOV.5 (Del Mar Times)→
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“Solana Beach’s Oolong Gallery will present its latest show ‘Rivers & Mountains’, opening Saturday, Nov. 5 and running through Dec. 23. The show borrows its theme from the historic 1962 poetry book by John Ashbery, not only for its cover art by Michael Peters but also for the emphasis on poetic boldness, nature and lines running through the works selected for display.”
Read MoreJILL KREMENTZ PHOTO JOURNAL: "ALEX KATZ: GATHERING" AT THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM (New York Social Diary)→
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“This painting depicts John Ashbery — one of the most influential poets of the postwar United States— and his partner (later husband) David Kermani. Katz and Ashbery created two collaborative publications, in 1969 and 2005, in which poems by Ashbery were paired with images by Katz.”
REVIEW - SOMETHING CLOSE TO MUSIC: LATE ART WRITINGS, POEMS, AND PLAYLISTS BY JOHN ASHBERY (Litter Magazine)→
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“It’s easy to pluck quotations from these essays and have them reflect back on to the poems. Jeffrey Lependorf highlights a few sentences about Frank Faulkner: ‘The outlines are clear, in general, but there are stray paths and counter-proposals that throw us off-balance, even though on closer inspection they, too, seem to be traces of a schema so large that we see only fragments of it . . . . Meanwhile what counts for us is the gorgeous and seemingly arbitrary fluctuations of a visible dream whose roots are nonetheless deeply anchored in reason.’ Lependorf adds: ‘Ashbery’s poetry provides similar pleasures.’”
Read MoreHOW POETRY AND PORTRAITURE TAKE ROOT IN JOAN MITCHELL'S LATE WORK, UNTITLED (1992) (Christie's)→
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“Mitchell’s friend, the poet John Ashbery, noticed early on in her career that her landscapes contained a hidden emotional reference to the wide world outside her sealed studio. ‘You have a feeling that her paintings show a location,’ he said, ‘though you don’t know where it is.’”
Read MoreTHIS FORSYTHIA BUSH (The Brooklyn Rail)→
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“That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,
but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction…”
JOHN ASHBERY’S SOMETHING CLOSE TO MUSIC: LATE ART WRITINGS, POEMS, AND PLAYLISTS (Brooklyn Rail)→
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“It’s impossible to pin down exactly all the shapes and contours of Something Close to Music, since there are many overlapping and meandering paths to pursue—but perhaps that’s the point—the narrative logic doesn’t need to be more exact than a life gorgeously assembled and described through fragments of experience and writing.”
Read MoreTOUCH, LOVE, THEN EXPLAIN: A DISCUSSION OF “SOME TREES” BY JOHN ASHBERY (ModPo)
/Al Filreis of ModPo shares a terrific podcast episode of PoemTalk where he chats with Abdulhamit Arvas, Dagmawi Woubshet & Carlos Decena about “Some Trees” by John Ashbery.
Here are links to the episode:
Here is a recording, from PennSound, of Ashbery performing the poem in 1988.
ON THE INCONVENIENCE OF OTHER PEOPLE (4Cloumns)→
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“In the American dream we see neighbors when we want to, when we’re puttering outside or perhaps in a restaurant, and in any case the pleasure they provide is in their relative distance, their being parallel to, without being inside of, the narrator’s “municipally” zoned property, where he hoards and enjoys his leisured pleasure, as though in a vineyard in the country, and where intrusions by the nosy neighbor, or superego, would interrupt his projections of happiness from the empire of the backyard.
The context is their analysis of a John Ashbery poem, but it’s a general idea. Neighbors are annoying, an intrusion into the perfection of bourgeois leisure, one which Berlant compares to a hypercritical superego.”
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