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John Ashbery (1927 - )

poet

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Criticism about John Ashbery

Introduction to The Tribe of John Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry

http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/schultz/tribe/intro.html

"AMONG CONTEMPORARY POETS, John Ashbery is at once the most consistent and the most various. It is a mark of Ashbery's pervasive presence that so many of the poets he included in The Best American Poetry, i988, which reprinted the hundred poems of the year that Ashbery most liked, sound like him, orthat is-like one of him. There is a meditative Ashbery, a formalist Ashbery, a comic Ashbery, a late-Romantic Ashbery, a Language poet Ashbery, and so on-even, as Charles Altieri shows us here, a love poet. No poet since Whitman has tapped into so many distinctly American voices and, at the same time, so preserved his utterance against the jangle of influences. Of course, as in an intricate Venn diagram, these Ashberys overlap; form inspires comedy and meditation (as in "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape")."

Contains: Commentary, Criticism, Pictures

Author: Susan M. Schultz

From: Electronic Poetry Center http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/

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Normalizing John Ashbery

http://jacketmagazine.com/02/perloff02.html

"Has success spoiled John Ashbery? By no means, as I shall suggest below, if we are talking about such recent volumes as Can You Hear, Bird (1995). But the current discourse on Ashbery's work is something else again. Now that academic critics, who, not so long ago, dismissed Ashbery's poems as so much obscurantist doubletalk, have been forced to concede that the Ashberyan mode doesn't seem to be going away, that, on the contrary, its particular modulation of voices and performative registers speaks to poetry audiences from Austria to Australia, a new explanatory narrative is in the making. According to this account, there's nothing so unusual about Ashbery, who, so it now seems, has all along written under the sign of Eliot or Stevens, leaving Modernism firmly intact as the movement or epoch of choice, the movement from which no later twentieth-century poet (not even Ashbery) can actually deviate."

Contains: Criticism

Author: Marjorie Perloff

From: Jacket #2; January 1998

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Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars: John Ashbery's queer politics

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_2_44/ai_532601...

"Since reading 'homosexuality' in Ashbery's poetry allows a point of penetration through grammatical, referential, or epistemic murk, its value as a critical tool seems inestimable At the same time, the difficulty of Ashbery's poetry allows critics to disregard homosexual thematics when they are not useful to their other projects."

Contains: Criticism

Author: John Vincent

From: Twentieth Century Literature Summer 1998

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Three John Ashberys

http://jacketmagazine.com/02/3jas.html

"This is a basic introduction to some themes in John Ashbery's poetry. John Tranter came across Ashbery's writing in the 1960s. Here he reflects on the schizophrenia of fame."

Contains: Criticism, Pictures

Author: John Tranter

From: Jacket #2; January 1998

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Biographical sites about John Ashbery

John Ashberry

http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=16

A short biographical sketch of the author, and the text of several reviews of his works and interviews with the author.

Contains: Interview, Sketch

From: Carcanet

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John Ashbery

http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/238

Brief biography and bibliography.

Contains: Sketch, Pictures, Webliography

From: The Academy of American Poets http://www.poets.org/

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Other sites about John Ashbery

John Ashbery

http://jacketmagazine.com/02/jaiv1985.html

"Interviewed by John Tranter, New York City, 20 April 1985."

Contains: Interview, Pictures

Author: John Tranter

From: Jacket #2; January 1998

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John Ashbery

http://jacketmagazine.com/02/jaiv1988.html

"Interviewed by John Tranter, New York City, May 1988."

Contains: Interview, Pictures

Author: John Tranter

From: Jacket #2; January 1998

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