The following, with multiple useful links, appeared on the Best American Poetry log, on the five year anniversary of the passing of John Ashbery.
September 03, 2022
Five Years On: The Day JA Died
Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and John Ashbery – (Photographer Unknown, circa 1965)
“….exquisite mind cartoons that could be heard with eyes closed, the voice perfectly ordinary with the slight edge of extravagant conversational camp, a mind artifice not unnatural to hypnagogic revery, deceptive, till you hear the chasm landscapes and awkward universes created and contradicted in vast gas-deposit shocking trivial universal mind.”
--- Allen Ginsberg – from an introduction to a reading by John Ashbery, at Naropa Institute, 1975.
Hear Ashbery’s reading (along with W.S.Merwin) on that occasion here
John Ashbery’s passing last weekend continues to send shockwaves.
A selection of sites – From the writers at The New Yorker – Larissa MacFarquhar‘s aptly-titled, “The Gentleness of John Ashbery“, Alex Ross “Driving Country Roads With John Ashbery“, Paul Muldoon, “John Ashbery Changed The Rules of American Poetry, Ben Lerner‘s “John Ashbery’s Whisper Out of Time”, and Dan Chiasson, “Postscript”
Rae Armantrout, and David Orr, in The New York Times, Tania Ketenjian in The Guardian, (see also Mark Ford in The Guardian), Matthew Zapruder in the San Francisco Chronicle
David Lehman at Best American Poetry has made available a space for an on-going series of remembrances – see also the recollections there of Archie Rand, John Emil Vincent, Terence Winch, and (on his own blog) Michael Lally
Andrew Epstein and his Locus Solus – The New York School of Poets, specializing in this field, is a must-go-to resource