“….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, Terry 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
More On The Road commentaries (it was On The Road‘s 60th this week) – Allen, the teacher – to John Krull – (“Ginsberg urged me, gently, to read the book again without preconceived notions”). David Barnett in The Independent (“All I really knew was that On The Road absorbed me completely. It was nothing like I’d read before”), Stuart Mitchner – the view from Princeton – (“Kerouac) is very much here”)
Nathan Gelgud, cartoonist (we’ve featured him before), over at Signature, takes a look at it too