John Ashbery

Poem of the Week: Paul Legault

by Zachary Pace December 16, 2011 Poems of the Week

[River 2]

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A Language Poet You’ll Enjoy Reading

by Brooks Lampe January 7, 2011 Language

Add Clark Coolidge to the list of great American poets that nobody is talking about.

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Department of Records

by Alfred Corn October 11, 2010 Poetry and Poetics

When the young woman of twenty-five notices faint lines around the mouth or tiny crowsfeet at the corner of her eyes, something even more intimate than vanity makes her stop to reflect. The script for her very own mortality play, written on the finest parchment, has begun to develop, nor does she need any special clairvoyance to divine the final act from the first.

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“The Invisible Avant-Garde”

by Adam Fitzgerald May 28, 2010 Aesthetics

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Terrible Eyes: On a Newly Discovered Photograph of Arthur Rimbaud

by Adam Fitzgerald April 18, 2010 The Other

I followed deadpan Rivers down and down,
And knew my haulers had let go the ropes.
Whooping redskins took my men as targets
And nailed them nude to technicolour posts.

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Some David Schubert Poems You May Not Know

by Allison Power April 2, 2010 Poetry and Poetics

I reached a point where there was no
Use going on: my companion said, “Do not waken
The watchman, do not shout, he will die
Of shock if you make the slightest
Sound.” I stood in the utter darkness,
Cold. Without evidence of myself.

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Paparazzi

by Adam Fitzgerald March 20, 2010 The Other

“When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.”

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The Flaming Poodle of the Mind: Poetry Readings, Vaudeville & Louise Gluck’s Legs

by Joe Weil March 16, 2010 Aesthetics

If I am anything at all, I am a vaudevillian. Considering that vaudville has been stone dead the last 80 years, that’s a hard thing to be, but wouldn’t you want to attend a reading where, first, someone read Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” beautifully, followed by a white poodle jumping through a fiery hula hoop, then a great tap dancer, and then a good torch singer doing “Strange Fruit,” topped off by a rousing version of Etheridge Knight’s “All Fucked Up”?

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To Make Bach the Grund of Grundrisse and the Chaconne of a Shocked Shack

by David Shapiro March 15, 2010 Aesthetics

Today I thought I should add my secret voice to your evaluations.
Your intelligence may be genius, but remember as my mother saids also always to be nice.
A seventh grade teacher consoled me when I was teased:
You can always tell the genius by the enemies who surround him.

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Seventeen Years Ago Last March: Elizabeth Bishop’s Grand Finale

by Adam Fitzgerald March 6, 2010 Art

‘Crusoe in England’ was first published in The New Yorker in 1971, then later collected in ‘Geography III,’ perhaps Bishop’s finest single volume of poems. (Only recently I discovered the title of which was suggested to her by John Ashbery. He had found a little geography textbook of the eponymous name, and sent it to her, thinking she’d rather enjoy it. Turns out, she did.)

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Blogging through Grossman, Part 3: Poetic Promiscuity.

by Micah Towery March 2, 2010 Art

We recent poets have two great tools at our disposal: freedom of poetic license, and freedom of publishing. Generally, we can say whatever we want, and get a significant number of people to hear what we have to say. The question is whether this freedom has led to better poetry or degeneration. Perhaps that’s not the best way to put it. The question should be, even if somebody is doing something amazing and new in poetry, would we even see it? Will we travel all this way to find that we really did need the gatekeepers of poetry??

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