I’m fascinated by the ways that people use language when language is not regarded as precious, and that informs my practice as a writer. You know, the poet John Ashbery never edited any of his writing. He just wrote it and left it, taking the approach where he just went into his subconscious, pulled things up, and worked with what was there. There’s something to that. . . .
Read MoreTHE CANONIZATION OF LOU REED (The New Republic)
/
Ashbery “was so overloaded by the sensory barrage he burst into tears, exclaiming, ‘I don’t understand this at all!” . . .
Read MoreJON FOSSE ON CRITICISM, DARIO FO AND BOB DYLAN: “AWARDING THEM WAS A MISTAKE” (Breaking Latest News)→
/
If there was one American to whom he should be given it was John Ashbery. But he died shortly after Dylan received the award . . .
Read MoreMY INSPIRATION: DAVID SPITTLE (Narc)→
/
My first full collection of poetry was inspired by the osmosis of the PhD, my meandering dealings with depression (to put it mildly), the atmospheres of Polish writer Bruno Schulz, the films of Guy Maddin and Andrew Kötting, and the syncretic sense of connectivity that contains within itself a reversal…an unresolved duality…the particle and wave of light; quantum states of being that dovetail conveniently into an appreciation for ambiguity. . . .
Over and through all of this was the guiding influence of John Ashbery’s poetry and the desire to write out from all that it gave to me, whilst not being hitched to versions of imitation. The conundrum of influence (or Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’)…the formative psychology of its impact as the inspiration you are then driven to escape . . .
Read MoreTHE ART OF HUMBLEBRAG (Tablet)→
/
This is Lerner’s version of “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” which was Wordsworth’s way of trying to remember what it felt like to struggle against empire. It’s also a little roadside wave at John Ashbery, about whom Lerner has written on many occasions and credits as a foundational precursor. Here’s one of Ashbery’s attempts at that disjunction, and, in the way of influence, you can now hear Lerner struggling to be born from it . . .
Read MoreSQÜRL’s ECSTATIC AMBITIONS (Fader)→
/
[Carter and I] created this instrumental track together, and I called it “John Ashbery Takes a Walk” because it was kind of meandering. It seemed like someone taking a walk to me, and I love John Ashbery. After we recorded it, I thought, “Wow, what if we got Charlotte to recite one or two of these very early poems from Ashbery’s first book, Some Trees?” These are two of my favorite poems ever of his, although I have many.…
Read MoreONE OF THE CITY'S BEST PIZZERIAS RETURNS AS AN UNAPOLOGETIC NEIGHBORHOOD RESTAURANT (Eater)→
/
…in terms of his overall aesthetic and feel for the space, comes from a John Ashbery poem, the Ecclesiast: “You see how honey crumbles your universe/Which seems like an institution — how many walls?” The poem now hangs on the restaurant’s door, a sign for his neighbors, a signal for what’s ahead.
“I wanted the idea of honey — it’s slow, it’s sticky, it’s sweet,” Melillo says. “There’s like an organic nature to the way things happen; things have to kind of unfold.”…
Read MoreJOHN ASHBERY BY JESS COTTON (Tears in the Fence)→
/
Cotton cites a moment of personal revelation for Ashbery, from his editor’s introduction to The Best American Poetry 1988, where he notes how he ‘was struck, perhaps for the first time, by the exciting diversity, the tremendous power it [poetry] could have for enriching our lives.’ What Cotton calls ‘Ashbery’s idiosyncratic talents’ are part of that enrichment, poems which ‘make the moment of communication a live act’. Anne Lauterbach notes that ‘when you read his work you are reading being alive.’…
Read MorePOET, EDITOR, PUBLISHER, ANTHOLOGIST: JOHN TRANTER'S INFLUENTIAL LIFE IN LITERATURE (The Conversation)→
/
These poems show Tranter experimenting with text-to-speech software and returning to the sonnet form. Also prominent among his late work is the “terminal”, a form Tranter may have invented, in which the poet borrows the end-words of a previous poem to write a wholly new text.
Among these, the most memorable is The Anaglyph, a long discursive poem of cumulative power, which uses the opening and closing words of each line of John Ashbery’s Clepsydra. …
Read MoreNOTICE ALL THAT DISAPPEARS (The Atlantic)→
/
“I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way,” writes John Ashbery, also a poet who follows the unpredictable play of the mind. “And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.” Graham is a poet who, for much of her career, has tried out various ways of putting it all down, and of reflecting on the mind’s and body’s leaps and limits in that quest. In her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), the fraught enmeshment of the human in the natural world had already oriented her eye and ear: “When a forest / burns, the mind / feels compelled to say / I did it, I must have / done it,” she wrote in “Mimicry.” . . .
Read MoreALLITERATION (PART III) - (The Poetry Foundation)→
/
Reading a cryptic Ashbery poem is like laboring to recover the hidden or bypassed proof of a division problem. Resounding with echoes from Whitman (“Missing me one place search another”) and from the poetry of unrequited love, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” adapts Whitman’s ideal of poetic accessibility for a more skeptical age: “You have it but you don’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.” All that missing here is kissing in a way that the word kissing itself is not: sounding out these lines, the reader’s lips close three times on the bilabial m, physically kissing each iteration of “miss” (and each iteration of “poem”?) into existence. “The poem,” Ashbery concludes, “is you.”…
Read MoreJOHN ASHBERY IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD (Full Stop)→
/
Recently, over the course of two visits, I went to Hudson, NY, some 120 miles north of New York City, to visit The Flow Chart Foundation, an organization that houses the Ashbery Resource Center archive and research facility and hosts events aimed at “explor[ing] poetry and the interrelationships of various art forms as guided by the legacy of American poet John Ashbery.” . . .
Read More7 BOOKS WE CAN'T STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS MONTH (Vanity Fair)→
/
In this volume a reader will find: Marianne Moore on first reading Ezra Pound; Roth on “premature feminist rage” (worth noting: of the sixteen writers in this collection, a scant three are women); Jack Kerouac’s wife, Stella, trying to throw the interviewer out of her house, and also Kerouac utilizing the magnificent expression “Up your ass with Mobil gas!”; John Ashbery talking about what Auden thought of him…
Read MoreGRAND NORMAL GIRL (London Review of Books)
/
Bowles was unable to read the clippings. A stroke had damaged her eyesight so she struggled to read anything but children’s books with large print. She asked her friend to read the reviews aloud. ‘It is to be hoped that she will be recognised for what she is,’ John Ashbery wrote in the New York Times, ‘one of the finest modern writers of fiction, in any language.’ He went on to describe her prose as ‘a constant miracle’ in which ‘it is impossible to deduce the end of a sentence from its beginning, or a paragraph from one that preceded it ... and yet the whole flows marvellously and inexorably to its cruel, lucid end.’ . . .
Read MoreA REFLECTION THROUGH LITERARY ANALYSIS: ‘THE TENNIS COURT OATH’ BY JOHN ASHBERY (Deep Dark Woods)→
/
When considering the artistic context of his life at this time, Ashbery ostensibly uses the page as his canvas and words as his objects to create a poetic collage of multiple voices, aligning himself with the permissively ambiguous Surrealist notion of art as the world rather than merely being a reflection of it…
Read MoreASHBERY-ESQUE: ADVENTURES IN CATALOGING THE JOHN ASHBERY READING LIBRARY (Stylus)→
/
Cataloging John Ashbery’s book collection has been a massive undertaking. At least it has been for me, the English Department grad student who, book by book, leaves through the foxed pages that frame the background of Ashbery’s rich literary life. After processing over 2,500 books from his library in a mere nine months—roughly half of the collection, which was generously donated to the Poetry Room by David Kermani—Ashbery’s archived books have revealed some fascinating things about him, his peers, and maybe even about myself. . . .
Read MoreTHE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD: POEMS BY APRIL BERNARD (City Lights)→
/
Throughout her sixth collection, Bernard searches for “the world behind the world,” a spiritual realm of justice and peace, music and grace. The host of saints present in this parallel world includes poets–John Ashbery, Thomas Wyatt, Gerard Manley Hopkins–as well as folklore spirits, animals wild and domestic, and personal ghosts. . .
Read MoreINDUSTRIAL ARTS: ETHER GAME PLAYLIST (Indiana Public Media)
/
Joan Tower (b.1938) No Longer Very Clear: II. Or Like a....an Engine Joan Tower is widely regarded as one of the most important American living composers today. Although she has written music in most classical genres, she returns to her roots as a pianist for her suite of four solo piano pieces titled No Longer Very Clear. Each movement of the piece is named for a line from a poem by John Ashbery…
Read MoreTEN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO READ AGAIN AND AGAIN (The Atlantic)→
/
A Blessing in Disguise,” to my mind his single greatest poem, concludes its ecstatic post-meet-cute delirium with the only thing left to say: “And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.”
Read More6 NEW BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ THIS MARCH (Vulture)→
/
Michael Silverblatt, the longtime on-air book critic for KCRW in Los Angeles, is widely read and deeply thoughtful, and as a result his program, Bookworm, is satisfying to both cultish and well-known tastes alike. Grace Paley, Octavia Butler, and David Foster Wallace are joined by the likes of John Ashbery, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag. . .
Read More