John Ashbery (1927- )

A selective list of open access articles on the American poet John Ashbery, favoring signed scholarly articles and books, peer-reviewed sources, sources supervised by editors, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Web Sites.

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Literary criticism

Agata, John. A review of Girls on the Run, Boston Review, Feb/March 2000.

Bercovitch, Sacvan and Cyrus R. K. Patell. On the American Avant Gardes, the difficulty of Ashbery, and his connection with painters. In The Cambridge History of American Literature: Poetry and Criticism, 1940-1995 (Cambridge UP 1994). Preview at Google Books.

Conte, Joseph. "The Smooth and the Striated: Compositional Texture in the Modern Long Poem." Conte remarks in this classic essay that 'The "smooth texts" among twentieth-century long poems might include.... John Ashbery's Flow Chart (1991).' Modern Language Studies 27 (Spring 1997).

Devaney, Tom. Reviews Chinese Whispers Jacket 21 (Feb. 2003).

DuBois, Andrew. A short review of Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander (Ecco Press, 2005), Harvard Review, Dec. 2005.

Gander, Forrest. Reviews John Ashbery's Girls on the Run. Jacket 8 (July 1999).

Gilson, Annette. "Disseminating 'circumference': the diachronic presence of Dickinson in John Ashbery's 'Clepsydra.'" [Emily Dickinson] Twentieth Century Literature, Winter 1998.

Gray, Jeffrey. "The Great Escape: John Ashbery's Travel Agency." Discusses "The Instruction Manual" and many other poems. In Mastery's End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry (U of Georgia P 2005). Preview at Google Books.

Herd, David. David Herd's John Ashbery and American Poetry is an attempt to demystify the "obscure" poet, says reviewer Robert Potts, in The Guardian.

Imbriglio, Catherine. "'Our days put on such reticence': The rhetoric of the closet in John Ashbery's Some Trees." Nuanced discussion of Ashbery's reticence about homosexuality. Contemporary Literature 36 (Summer 1995) [subscription only].

Jackson, Richard. "Many Happy Returns: The Poetry of John Ashbery." Ashbery's technique is one in which the figures of speech qualify and redefine their own meanings, continuously returning with additional variations. Ploughshares, Fall 1986.

Kane, Daniel. A substantial introduction to John Ashbery from the Literary Encyclopedia, 24 June 2003.

Lehman, David. An excerpt from Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998) summarizes the 1950's cultural context for "the last authentic avant-garde movement that we have had in American poetry."

Lehman, David. The introduction to Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde (1998) is reprinted here. Jacket 5 (Oct. 1998)

Lehman, David. A review of Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, in Salon.com, 19 Oct. 1998 Another review, by Paul Hoover. Jacket 6.

Leddy, Michael. "Lives and Art: John Ashbery and Henry Darger." Jacket 17 (June 2002).

Lepkowski, Frank J. "John Ashbery's revision of the post-romantic quest: meaning, evasion, and allusion in 'Grand Galop.'" Twentieth Century Literature, Fall 1993.

Lorborer, Eric. A review of Girls on the Run, City Pages, 2 June 1999.

Moramarco, Fred. "Across the Millennium: The Persistence of John Ashbery," suggests ways of enjoying Ashbery's language (with reference to Raymond Roussel). What is 'arctic honey' a student asked Ashbery about his line 'The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness.' "It's probably something cold and sweet" he replied. American Poetry Review, March/April 2004.

Moramarco, Fred. Lengthy essay from Containing Multitudes, which has sections on John Ashbery and other mid-century poets who "move beyond the impersonal, objectivist confines of modernism and toward a poetry centered in the physical self of the poet who produced it. They participated collectively in the mid-century poetic climate that revolutionized poetry and greatly broadened its possibilities."

Newman, R. Andrew. "A poet in winter: a fine-tuned hand sketches the contours of memory," on Ashbery's poetry of old age. The Weekly Standard, 2 May 2005 (removed).

Norton, Jody. "'Whispers Out of Time': The syntax of being in the poetry of John Ashbery." "Because of the formal, theoretical, and thematic centrality of language in his poetry, Ashbery's work cannot be understood outside the context of contemporary philosophy of language, and especially the work of Heidegger, Derrida, and Wittgenstein." In Twentieth Century Literature, Fall 1995.

Perloff, Marjorie. "Normalizing John Ashbery." Critical interpretations that see Ashbery as continuing the tradition of modernism contrasted to interpretations that contend Ashbery's work represents a breakthrough to postmodernism. From Perloff's web site at SUNY Buffalo.

Perloff, Marjorie. "Still Time for Surprises" A review of John Ashbery's Your Name Here and David Herd's John Ashbery and American Poetry. Thumbscrew, 18 (Spring 2001).

Phillips, Rodney On the New York School poets from the Literary Encyclopedia, 20 December 2004.

Qureshi, Ramez. Review of John Ashbery's Your Name Here and poetry by Michael Palmer. Jacket, 18 (Aug. 2002).

Rehak, Melanie. Review of Your Name Here in Salon.com, 24 Oct. 2000.

Rubinstein, Raphael. A review of John Ashbery's Girls on the Run, Art in America, Feb. 2000.

Rubinstein, Raphael. "A muse in the room, or poets are poor," proceedings of two panels on relationship between poets and painters. Art Journal, Winter 1993. Notes from two panels at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA, New York, on collaborations between poets and painters. 3 December 1990. Panel: John Ashbery, the painter Jane Freilicher, Kenneth Koch, and the painter Larry Rivers. Moderator: Ron Padgett.

Sawyer, Larry. A review of The Vermont Notebook by John Ashbery and Joe Brainard (Granary Books/ Z Press). Jacket 28 (Oct. 2005).

Shepherd, Reginald. "Only in the Light of Lost Words Can We Imagine Our Rewards." On Some Trees, and Ashbery's likeness to Wallace Stevens in "The Painter," "Le livre est sur la table," and "The Instruction Manual." Conjunctions 49 (Fall 2007).

Shultz, Susan M. Full-text of Shultz's introduction to The Tribe of John Ashbery.

Stein, Judith E. "The word made image - collaboration of John Ashbery and the painter Jane Hammond." On a list of evocative titles for paintings Ashbery supplied to the painter Jane Hammond, Art in America, May 1995.

Suarez-Toste, Ernesto. "'The tension is in the concept': John Ashbery's surrealism." Style, Spring 2004.

Sweet, David. "'And Ut Pictura Poesis is her name': John Ashbery, the plastic arts, and the avant-garde," Comparative Literature, Fall 1998.

Tranter, John. "Three John Ashberys," an introduction to Ashbery's themes, Jacket 2 (Jan. 1998). This issue of the outstanding web publication Jacket is devoted to John Ashbery.

Tranter, John. In a 1985 interview Ashbery discusses his later thoughts about "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and The Tennis Court Oath.

Tranter, John. A 1988 interview with John Ashbery for the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Vendler, Helen Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton UP 2005). Publisher's blurb. Vendler's introductory chapter.

Vincent, John. "Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars: John Ashbery's queer politics." "In this essay, I will show how, in three poems that span Ashbery's oeuvre, a semiotics and thematics of homosexuality jimmies open address and reference, as well as logical, figural, and poetic closure." Twentieth Century Literature, 1998.

Vincent, John. "Escaping the future." Vincent notes that "John Ashbery’s Girls on the run... is less difficult than his recent short lyrics because it is less violent in its syntactic, pronominal and address shifts. This is not to say that it is an easy read. However, the book is literally and figuratively clothed in the lush fabric of the 'children’s adventure story.'" Jacket 32 (Oct. 2007).

Zinnes, Harriet. Review of Ashbery's Chinese Whispers. Jacket 21 (Feb. 2003).

Biographical & introduction

The Modern American Poetry web site on John Ashbery includes critical commentary: On "'They Only Dream of America'"; On "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape"; On "Syringa"; On "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" with a Note on "Hop o' My Thumb"; On "Paradoxes and Oxymorons." From U of Illinois.

An extended article on John Ashbery at the Poetry Foundation. Also includes list of works, some poems, and a secondary reading list.

Recording of John Ashbery reading "The Tennis Court Oath" in 1969, courtesy The Dial-A-Poem Poets.

An account of a reading by John Ashbery at the New School, 7 Feb. 2004, from the blog of journalist Sasha Frere-Jones.

A brief biography of John Ashbery from the Academy of American Poets.

A short introduction to John Ashbery from the New York State Writers Institute, SUNY.

Brief discussion of Ashbery as a gay writer considers whether to read him as a gay writer or as a writer who is gay. By Terrence Johnson at the Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture.

An intro to John Ashbery's work from publisher Random House.

On collecting books by the New York school of poets, from AB Bookman's Weekly, 25 Jan. 1999 (removed).

Web sites & bibliographies

An annotated bibliography of criticism from 1972 through 2000 on Ashbery's "Three Poems," by Adam Talmage Monroe.

Professor Joseph Conte's syllabus for English 633: Poetic Texture: The Smooth and the Striated. Postmodern Poetry, Fall 2001.

Web site for The Ashbery Resource Center, an archival and research project which collects and preserves materials relating to Ashbery, with a particular focus on Ashbery's work as it relates to the visual arts, cinema, music, architecture, the decorative arts.

Discussion questions for teaching John Ashbery from educational publisher Heath.

The John Ashbery page at the Electronic Poetry Center, SUNY Buffalo includes some poems, a few links, and a detailed list of Ashbery's works.

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