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.
As handwriting sprawls a page, revealing much about the writer’s psyche, so too these lemons, dividends of peace, in our time, my friend.
Don’t stagger the bejesus out of the old harness, play with the dog, who yaps afresh at any pretext of the blond air, or stifle the air’s partisans, the moments.
Hard to pin down when the...
Sometimes, on Sundays, they walk a little ways into the oval spell others are soft on. She, a maid, unknown to terror, rising out of the ridge, its spreading cedars bemused and endearing. The ancestors have never been influenced by any kind of logic, not even a shrike’s, and now I can’t even say what a hornet’s-eye view of this catastrophe might englobe, if...
It wasn’t meant to stand for what it stood for. Only a puptent could do that. Besides, we were in a state called New York, where only bees made sense.
Those who were with us were not with us and deserved a spanking. Others, looking out over the bay’s mild waters could barely distinguish a message made of logs: ‘Return to the frontier or all is lost, though in time some may...
Too bad I have this idea of him based on someone else, named Matt (another uncluttered name), whom I disliked for no reason other than having once thought he misprised me, which I didn’t really believe. (Whew!) This is getting complicated, like always.
Let’s leave Steve at the wellhead of a dream, where he belongs, and belongs also to others who will make fun of him...
They all kissed the bride. They all laughed. They came from beyond space. They came by night.
They came to a city. They came to blow up America. They came to rob Las Vegas. They dare not love.
They died with their boots on. They shoot horses, don’t they? They go boom. They got me covered.
They flew alone. They gave him a gun. They just had to get married. They...
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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