COLLECTIVE ASHBERY: A Group Reading-Through/Thinking-Through of FLOW CHART

January 4 - February 10

Join us in a group reading-through, thinking-through of John Ashbery’s book-length poem “Flow Chart.” Emily Skillings, a former assistant of Ashbery and the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, will lead our online discussion, taking place over Twitter. We will read all of Flow Chart as a group over 38 days, from January 4th through February 10th. Each days reading is accompanied by a recording read by a cavalcade of literati, so you can listen along as you read!

Full details about how to take part, as well as a detailed reading schedule and links to each day’s recordings can be found HERE.

There is no need to register to take part in Collective Ashbery. All you need is any copy of the book (either the freestanding publication or the complete text to be found in the Library of America’s second volume of collected Ashbery poetry). We will read one section of Flow Chart every day. The reading schedule includes audio selections corresponding to a group reading of the work organized by Daniel Brian Jones in 2017 for Ashbery’s 90th birthday (all of which can be accessed through PennSound). You can listen along as you read! We’ve provided page numbers for both the Library of America edition (which contains the only complete text) and the freestanding Knopf/FSG/Noonday editions. Emily Skillings will help guide us through our reading on Twitter (through @flowchartfdn using #CollectiveAshbery) every day. We’ll post all of the tweets created below every few days as well. You can actively join the conversation by posting with the hashtag #CollectiveAshbery on Twitter as you like.

Collective Ashbery Concluding Event:

On 38 Days of Slow Reading: A Discussion of John Ashbery’s Flow Chart

#CollectiveAshbery

February 15, 7–8PM (EST) via Zoom

To conclude The Flow Chart Foundation's 38-day Twitter "slow reading" of John Ashbery's book-length poem Flow Chart, we invited all to take part in (or just watch and listen) a group discussion of the experience. Twitter-read leader, poet and editor Emily Skillings, poet and translator Marcella Durand, and scholar Andrew Epstein shared impressions, questions, revelations, and conundrums, with input from participants. Moderated by Flow Chart's Executive Director, Jeffrey Lependorf.

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She teaches creative writing at Yale and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Marcella Durand is the author of To husband is to tender, Black Square Editions, 2021; The Prospect, Delete Press, 2020; Area, Belladonna* Books, 2008; and Traffic & Weather, Futurepoem, 2008. She is the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. Earth's Horizons, her translation of Michèle Métail's book-length poem, Les Horizons du sol, was published by Black Square Editions in 2020.

Andrew Epstein is a Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture, and the Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry Since 1945 (forthcoming). His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Contemporary Literature, American Literary History, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications, and he blogs about the New York School of poets at Locus Solus.