“The passage opens both outward and inward, into what Hejinian admirer John Ashbery, in his own great not-not-a-memoir poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” calls “a magma of interiors.” The “pattern of small roses”. . .

“The most influential American poet of our age, John Ashbery (1927-2017), lived his last years in Hudson, where the Flow Chart Foundation was established to preserve and promote his work. "John Ashbery and his husband David Kermani first came to Hudson in the '70s, following some friends who had already bought places here, like [artist] Elsworth Kelly," says the foundation's executive director, Jeffrey Lependorf”. . .

“After explaining ways Ashbery’s poem enlivens our understanding of the cultural and psychological sources of this mess, I opened the lecture to discussion. After a pause, a student who obviously wasn’t feeling it asked, sincerely and more or less respectfully, ‘is Ashbery just saying Fuck You to the reader?’” . . .

“In this sense, we are all fatalists,” Mr. Ashbery wrote, “since ‘whatever’ has happened to us all, and we all recognize it when we see it. Yet it has seldom been more sumptuously tallied, tabulated and illuminated.” . . .

“To refresh my memory I look up a couple of examples, “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” by John Ashbery” . . .

“The two senses of ‘fine’ express a close affinity between the ornate and the mediocre, which meet in many of our aesthetic categories (kitsch, camp, gaudy, etc.). Ashbery’s ‘fine’ does not quite fit into these categories, instead holding excellence and mediocrity in inassimilable suspension. Just as Christ is fully man and fully God, Ashbery’s ‘fine’ is great and trifling. Writers who were ‘fine / for their time’ are (as the trite near-rhyme suggests) being dismissed from a modern-day perspective, clouded by a layer of condescension. But ‘fine for their time’ could also mean ‘fine, as the word meant in their time’, therefore (as the OED has it) ‘perfect, pure, genuine’.” . . .

“‘Among the echoes of poets, one certainly hears Ashbery, especially his tonal range: “Scientists put jellyfish genes in a rabbit / The g-forces were delectable in my pelvis.’” . . .

Before his reading, Ashbery sat down for an interview on the WNYC Round and About the Guggenheim radio program with museum staffer Mimi Poser and David Kalstone, an English professor at Rutgers. The interview has been digitized and made available as part of the Guggenheim Museum Archives’ Reel to Reel collection. In the interview, Ashbery, Poser, and Kalstone, discuss how poetry relates to art, how Ashbery got his start as an art critic, and how he goes about writing a poem . . .

"The gallery is now - how could it be otherwise with Krüger - as a book on the table. And to Ohlbaum's always fantastic photographs, Krüger contributed a few lines, miniatures, short portraits that are sometimes hilarious to read, enlightening, pointed. For example about John Ashbery:

“When you had dinner with this friendly poet in New York, he liked to order a large portion, but he would only eat half of it; the other half had to be packed away for the dog. He once explained to me that he wrote in a cubist style; I've been chewing on this for a long time”. . .

“Ashbery said that poetry has no content, that it is its own content. Poets don't write about anything other than poetry. If defining the nature of poetry may be the highest degree to which a poet can aspire, the articles included in this book are surely among the best attempts that have been made in this regard, at least during the 20th century” . . .

“Dara Barrois/Dixon: Nothing startling, plenty arresting, plenty satisfying, renewing attachments to poems, finding new favorites, remaining impressed most of all with Jim’s dedication to imagination. Good to see and follow the poems changing over the years, while they never stop paying close attention to who people are and how we live. John Ashbery once called Jim’s poems “dazzling,” and that feels about right to me” . . .

“The title of the Jeu de Paume retrospective draws on Rivers’s long-standing relationship with literary forms, which both inspire and appear within his work: in Rivers’s film Trees Down Here (2018), we hear John Ashbery read his poem ‘Some Trees’over a blurred background of drawings and the sound of pages turning (Art Review)” . . .

The artist Fairfield Porter, who portrayed the poet John Ashbery in 1952, was a determined counterpoint to Abstract Expressionism, focusing on landscape and figure. “I want to do everything the avant-garde theorists say you can't do,” he said. . .

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. . . .

If there was one American to whom he should be given it was John Ashbery. But he died shortly after Dylan received the award . . .

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 . . .

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 . . .