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John Ashbery Was a Quiz Kid.

Anthony Howell; ‘Ashbery created intense little collages, and he was a collage in himself. Another artist he admired was Trevor Winkfield – also a poet – and British – whose iconic yet enigmatic paintings have disparate emblems in them which never quite collide, though they ought to; something one can understand the quiz kid responding to; the paintings are full of things which might mean, but do they? A feeling one can get when deep in Ashbery’s lines.’

The by-ways of John Ashbery.

Anthony Howell: ‘For the poet, at least, Ashbery is the model of the art-critic. His manner is urbane, and he refers to Satie and to Wallace Stevens more often than to Cezanne. The melange of the arts evoked by his writing suggests a cafe-society sadly missing these days, now that art-mags are no longer modeled on the Paris Review but gleam at us from the racks, like trade-journals for the purveyance of some non-applied craft.’

John Ashbery’s illumination of a mercurial adolescent.

Martin Sorrell: The translations made by an American octogenarian of a mercurial French adolescent bring us as close as we are likely to get in English to the wellspring of his genius. The distance in age and place between poet and translator is a happy irony. Ashbery’s Illuminations are set to become classic.

Alan Jenkins at sea.

Anthony Howell: ‘Jenkins is a poet liberated (or sozzled) enough to allow the poem to follow its own music and conjure together phrases which project their melancholy magic.’

Kent Journal.

Eric Mottram: Between January 3 and April 1 1974 I went to America for the sixth time. On my way to holding classes at Kent State University…’

Models.

Anthony Rudolf: ‘Posing for months on end for one statuette, with great pride and high hopes that it would be completed and cast and displayed in a glass case, Pauline watched the artist desperately try to improve and complete it. No such luck.’

A partial archive of the New Series.

A partial archive of the New Series, 2009-2023.

A Life in Poetry: Peter Robinson.

Peter Robinson:’I’m a northerner, but not a ‘proud’ or ‘professional’ one. Liverpool, where my mother still lives, as do two of my dearest friends, is the only place I can call my hometown.’

Difficult poetry.

Anthony Howell: ‘Difficulty is nothing new. As F.T. Prince explains in his treatise on the Italian influence on English lyrical verse, poetry is not simply adroit use of sprezzatura – a quality cited by Baldassare Castiglione in his Book of the Courtier, where it is defined as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it”.’

More trouble with genre.

Simon Collings: ‘The texts in “Why are you here?” comprise a spectrum of short prose forms, many of them deliberately pushing against accepted rules about genre.’

Plum Pudding Books.

Anthony Howell: ‘…ponder the garden of forking paths that a library may conjure up in the mind of a writer such as Borges.’

Georges Braque: A poetry of things.

Anthony Howell, on Morandi: ‘Ambivalence and ambiguity seem the very subject matter. How can all those objects actually balance on the top of that frail table, a top which seems tilted in our favour?’

The Sequin ‘oh!’

Luke Roberts: ‘Several poems take up from Pindar, swapping out Ergoteles of Himera (et al.) for unlikely characters: the snooker player Alex Higgins gets a whole ode to himself; Manchester United (‘made in the image of god’) brush shoulders with Pelé; and there’s horse- racing, boxing, and plenty of cricket. Besides the classical inheritance, I wonder if Sequin was interested in sport because the rules of play are agreed in advance, and much of it is there on the surface. Her poems, beyond the quintet/quartet/sextet divisions, tend to keep their inner workings secret. But taken as a whole, her art is more like a pitch invasion.’

On ‘Freeing Up’.

Anthony Howell: ‘It is often the case that there is something improvisatory about freeing up, and that is just what jazz seemed to offer poets such as Logue and Shiraishi, just as rap is potent for wordsmiths today. But what I do take issue with is this tendency to separate, or seek to separate, the milieu of poetry into some eternal opposition, pitching tightness of form against freedom of expression.’

A blurring of genres.

Simon Collings: ‘statements by various critics and authors are marshalled in support of the idea that prose poems are characterised by indeterminacy and an avoidance of closure. But the same can be said of much contemporary lyric poetry. In what way is a Rae Armantrout poem more ‘closed’ than a typical prose poem? How are Charles Simic’s prose poems more ‘open’ than his lineated poems?’