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.
Mysterious barricades, a headrest (of sorts), boarded the train at Shinjuku junction to the palpable consternation of certain other rubberneckers already installed in the observation car of their dreams. ‘It’s so peaceful on my pallet. I could just live here.’ In a second the deadbeat returned with lunch tokens. It had been meant to be sublime, but hell was what...
My mind occupied by something, I notice shoals of dry leaves rattled by the wind, upsurging like a dog that’s starting to lie down, and a voice like that of my mother says, ‘Then you’ll just have to learn to do without it. The leaves are shells.’
Another time the voice brings me back from not too far away. I was imagining sisters, how a door holds sway over...
The passionate are immobilised. The case-hardened undulate over walls of the library, in more or less expressive poses. The equinox again, not knowing whether to put the car in reverse or slam on the brakes at the entrance to the little alley. Seasons belong to others than us. Our work keeps us up late nights; there is no more joy or sorrow than in what work gives. A little boy...
We used to call it the boob tube, but I guess they don’t use tubes anymore. Whatever, it serves a small purpose after waking and before falling asleep. Today’s news – but is there such a thing as news, or even history? Yes, when you want to go back after a while and appraise the accumulation of leaves, say, in the sandbox. The rest is rented depression, available...
We could see it coming from forever, then it was simply here, parallel to that day’s walking. By then it was we who had disappeared, into the tunnel of a book.
Rising late at night, we join the current of tomorrow’s news. Why not? Unlike some others, we haven’t anything to ask for or borrow. We’re just pieces of solid geometry:
cylinders or rhomboids....
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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