John Ashbery, who died in 2017, published more than thirty poems in the LRB. He won many prizes for his poetry, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. His first collection, Some Trees, appeared in 1956; his last, Commotion of the Birds, in 2016.
Whatever we’re dealing with catches us in mid-reconsideration. It’s beautiful, my lord, just not made to be repeated, that’s all.
Counterterrorists have already invaded parts of England and Spain. Your action dollar at work. Deception figures in quite a few precious things, although, as I say, it’s a small remnant of what others have achieved to...
We’re patching up an agreement today. The insides won’t let us. I sent you copies by return mail any time soon. We came to a long Q and A period, to which dreams are the smutty alternative. Of these by far the most startling (not to be tedious) combat greasiness from Calexico to Texarkana, a splash on everything they do. They can’t fit it in.
I long to talk...
I tell myself I’m a minimalist. Not that it matters to the big guns who train their sights on us, who also know about tomorrow and their brothers, and had a pretty good run. It would be that time in the future, that was predicted. The wearing of boater hats had become fairly commonplace, like going to the park. Children ran errands while adults went to the movies. There were more sights...
Like a wind-up denture in a joke store fate approaches, leans quietly. Let’s see … There was moreover meaning in the last clause, meaning we couldn’t equate from what was happening to us down the block. We approached with some hesitancy: Let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would.’ Wasn’t it April? Weren’t things more likely to last in this or...
A cloud blew up and like that: OK fun’s fun but we’ve got issues, to wait until tomorrow. At least that’s what I heard, a kind of rushing as of water over steep slabs. More ants to fry. I was placed on administrative leave, you had to be there, nevertheless it sucked, went back years. No one could find the original copy, there were bats in the belfry. Finally one comes down...
It’s been two years since the last one, so it must be time for a new book of poems by John Ashbery. Like the old James Bond films, Ashbery’s late instalments arrive punctually, and...
A little over thirty years ago, John Ashbery delivered a lecture at the Yale Art School called ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’, in which he asked whether the distinction between the...
Famous poems, like faces, are a particularly memorable kind of introduction to the person they conceal. Like other kinds of introduction, they are often what we remember a person for, or what we...
I remember the pleasure of my first reading of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems when it came out in 1964 in a City Lights edition uniform (except that it was blue and red, not black and...
For as long as he has been exhibiting Kitaj has been publishing commentary on his pictures. With him the two activities interlock, coming closer to the idea of the calligram that Foucault played...
This is Ciaran Carson’s second collection of poems. His first, The New Estate (1976), revealed an intricate, lyrical poet intensely aware of traditional Irish cultures, and concerned to...
Like Tristram Shandy, Delmore Schwartz so hated his name that he sometimes used to attribute all of his misfortunes to it. It was an obsession he enjoyed feeding: he would invent ridiculous...
Professor Vendler’s soul is in peril. Reviewing Black American broadsides in 1974, she found it ‘sinful that anthologies and Collected Works should betray the poems they print by...
In ‘A Wave’, the title-poem of his new collection, John Ashbery says, among many other things: One idea is enough to organise a life and project it Into unusual but viable forms, but...
The poet’s mind used to make up stories: now it investigates the reasons why it is no longer able to do so. Consciousness picks its way in words through a meagre indeterminate area which it...
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