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“... Chronic Symbiosis These things can be arranged, he said. Besides, glitter has become reasonable again. Hadn’t you heard? For one irrational second I thought today’s subject was plagiarism, as symbolised by that desk. But no, it’s joy in never knowing, in having once known, and in its still not being too late to know. Yes, but I know now that I knew long ago when children around me grew ...”

“... Promenade 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 one’s long life, only coming at the end to a ‘foolish consistency’, by which time one has passed all the reasonable objections, is on one’s own ...”

“... word here, meaning the poetry’s effort to achieve the effect of being clear on the page. In Ashbery’s case the wordage trembles with a perpetual delicacy that suggests meaning without doing anything so banal as to seem to attempt it. Poetic syntax is constructed to express with a certain intensity a notion of the meaningful that does not convey ...”

“... 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 avant-garde and the mainstream has become obsolete. ‘Looking back only as far as the beginning of this century,’ he remarked, ‘we see that the period of neglect for an avant-garde artist has shrunk for each generation ...”

“... 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 you buy your ticket knowing what to expect: a suave cartoon with ridiculous gadgets, clever one-liners and last-minute escapes ...”

“... forty-eight, we argued all         night about whether a poem was good enough for us. John Ashbery sat in a corner shelling pistachio nuts;         Robert E. Bly wore a three- piece suit and a striped tie; Kenneth         Koch was always sarcastic. Once as we pasted an issue         together we discovered a blank page ...”

“... went down in the shiny lift and sank in an armchair by the crystal ashtray.     Was I a Mr John Ashbery, someone asked me.     No, I replied, not Mr Ashbery – but pausing mysteriously mid-sentence as I felt     he deserved a couple more guesses for being     somehow on the right track, if not ...”

“... Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg were making Action Painting famous; and he and John Ashbery, his friend and contemporary, must have felt their poetry belonged in tandem with that school. O’Hara’s ‘Why I am not a painter’ doesn’t tell us why he is not a painter, but shows how the process of making a painting and making a poem ...”

“... publishers in the 1960s. The one anomaly in Harwood’s bibliography is his inclusion, along with John Ashbery and Tom Raworth, in Volume 19 of the Penguin Modern Poets series, published in 1971. The groupings that Penguin came up with in this admirable series tended to be hit or miss. But the combination of ...”

“... are              more or less a severe critic said              of John Ashbery.How to shape an hour, chart a flow.Corbin v. corvid: whose              etymologies win today,              whose orthographies are rising.Let’s follow a kingfisher down the long shoreextravagant with brush and ...”

“... 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 many ideas merely Lead one thither into a morass of their own good intentions. The reference to ‘one idea’ recalls the passage in ‘Esthétique du Mal’ where Wallace Stevens dismisses                                      the lunatic of one idea         In a world of ideas, who would have all the people Live, work, suffer and die in that idea In a world of ideas ...”

“... Karin Roffman​ ’s superb biography of John Ashbery’s early life concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship ...”

“... equipped.                   I may be needing a new cover, signals Cupcake, John Hollander’s secret agent in his marvellous book-length poem Reflections on Espionage:                                      I worry Mostly, though, how having been made another Person might have enabled me to do the ...”

“... it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the unprivate walls?’ His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived ...”

“... attempt to cover it. I want merely to offer some comment on three poets – Eliot, Larkin and Ashbery – who may all be said to throw different kinds of light on the phenomenon of Anglo-American culture. First, some definitions: what, for instance, does it mean to be ‘American’ in this sense? Over the last century, American writers have returned to ...”