John Ashbery & Frank O’Hara on Erje Ayden, the Pulp Writer for the New York School May 20, 2013: A truly great feature and the Friday pick at BODY magazine: John Ashbery introduces us to the Turkish writer Erje Ayden, who some of you might know better as the pulp fiction writer behind the New York School. Ayden started out as a spy in Europe in the 1950s and then moved into the downtown New York arts scene, befriending Frank O'Hara and [...] by Harriet Staff

Code Unknown: 23 Things About W. H. Auden April 25, 2013: [caption id="attachment_65785" align="alignright" width="500"] W. H. Auden[/caption] One day, while he and Stephen Spender were students at Oxford, Spender told him that he was thinking of stopping writing poetry. Auden stopped in his tracks, took firm hold of Spender’s arm and said, “You must keep writing poetry, Stephen—we need [...] by Bill Berkson

Why Write Sestinas? April 16, 2013: Oh yes, why write sestinas? I like the difficulty of the form: six stanzas with six end-words that have to repeat in a particular rotating pattern (twice in the three-line envoi at the end) like playing ping-pong with six balls and six other players. Sestinas are tricky.  The repetition of the end-words gives you a chance to mull over [...] by Camille Guthrie

Writing Poetry about Art April 12, 2013: I’m a member of the tribe who likes to write poetry about art. The first moment of ekphrastic poetry we have comes from Homer when he halts the battle action in The Illiad to describe the stunning Shield of Achilles. The most well-known ekphrastic poem is of course Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which he uses the fabulously-named term, [...] by Camille Guthrie

Code Unknown: John Ashbery April 3, 2013: In his workshop at the New School for Social Research, when I took it, in 1959, Kenneth Koch read and talked about John Ashbery’s work with his, Kenneth’s, customary sense of modern poetry as made from a play of associations. The surface of a poem was analogous to the expanse of a sensibility’s intensities and diffusions in the course of [...] by Bill Berkson

Bothered by Beauty April 1, 2013: One of the poems I like to return to is John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” from Houseboat Days (one of my favorite book titles). He begins: You can’t say it that way any more. Bothered about beauty you have to Come out into the open, into a clearing, And rest. Often bothered by beauty, I was recently rereading [...] by Camille Guthrie

Flaunt Magazine: ‘All Poetry Is Poems’ March 14, 2013: The folks at fashioncentric Flaunt magazine have devoted a recent Au Contraire section to poetry. 18 pages of John Ashbery, Fiona Banner, Caroline Bergvall, Derek Beaulieu, Erica Baum, Kenneth Goldsmith, Christian Bök, and Alexander Grant, to be exact. Who knew Flaunt was interested in poetry, let alone innovative and emerging conceptual [...] by Harriet Staff

All Ashbery, All the Time February 20, 2013: If you haven't made your way over to PennSound today, you ought to. They've posted some fresh audio and video of John Ashbery from his recent visit to the Kelly Writers House. Also added is a November 2, 2011 reading at Smith College. More about that: In his intro to that event, Michael Thurston offers a brief history of critics' [...] by Harriet Staff

Sampling Silence in Ashbery February 12, 2013: We love it when poetry opens out into other disciplines and art forms. Last spring, the New School hosted a festival called How to Continue: Ashbery Across the Arts. Participants from a variety of disciplines engaged with John Ashbery's work, and all sorts of crazy and exciting things happened. Christian Hawkey chose to examine the collection [...] by Harriet Staff

From the Archives of Frieze: Ashbery Interview February 8, 2013: This week, we're all about archives--see our recent post on a Bob Perelman feature from the archives of Jacket. We've only just begun to peruse the archives of Frieze, and already we've come upon a new-to-us 2004 interview with John Ashbery. Craig Burnett, the interviewer, introduces the exchange by describing his first encounter with [...] by Harriet Staff