…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 MoreCotton 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 MoreThese 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 More“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 MoreReading 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 MoreRecently, 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 MoreIn 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 MoreBowles 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 MoreWhen 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 MoreCataloging 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 MoreThroughout 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 MoreJoan 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 MoreA 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 MoreMichael 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 MoreThis announcement, appearing in Brooklyn Vegan, on a new LP from SQÜRL, features a track with Charlotte Gainsbourg, called “John Ashbery Takes a Walk.” . . .
Read MoreThe 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 MoreThe 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 MoreAshbery 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 MoreIt’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 MoreWithin 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 MoreThe Flow Chart Foundation . 348 Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534
The Flow Chart Foundation logo and related images copyright ©1991, 2004 Trevor Winkfield. All rights reserved. The Flow Chart Foundation's logo and various related images on this website are adapted from Trevor Winkfield's design for the cover of John Ashbery's book-length poem Flow Chart (Knopf, 1991). Used by permission of the artist, courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.
