Tag: John Ashbery

Poets in Cars, An Interview with Nicholas Powell

by Luke Beesley …turn on that dishwasher John Ashbery, ‘Wooden Buildings’ My old mate, poet Nick Powell, visited Melbourne last week with his family – it was his first trip back to Australia in 4 years. Nick’s partner, Laura, is Finnish and he has lived in Helsinki (with short stays in Australia) since 2008. We both spent a large part of our childhoods in Beaudesert, a country town south-west of Brisbane but we first met in Toowong (hilly and green inner-west Brisbane) about 15 years ago – Nick moved into the same apartment building, which became the headquarters of Men’s…

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Ardent Dentists and Artists’ Cupboards: Raymond Roussel and Gerald Murnane in Days of Heaven

by Luke Beesley John Ashbery apparently went into a bookshop in Paris in the late 1950s and said something along the lines of what’s the craziest French writing around, and the shopkeeper had no hesitation in handing him a book by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933). Ashbery brought Roussel’s writing back to New York and showed his friends and not only did they sit wide-mouthed as they imagined the temerity in Roussel’s commitment to a beautifully strange literature, they named their new poetry journal after one of his novels – Locus Solus. Ashbery and Schuyler later went and wrote a collaborative novel,…

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The Painterly Eye

by Nicolette Stasko It would be an understatement to say that almost every poet has written about art. I could use this entire post to list only the Australians. In his preface to Writers on Artists, Daniel Halpern comments, ‘many important writers have spent a significant part of their non-writing time thinking about painting and sculpture’[1]. The American poet, John Ashbery, also an art critic and friend of artists, immediately comes to mind along with his brilliant long poem, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, ‘As Parmigianino did it, the right hand/Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer. … The…

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Homage and influence, naked and otherwise

Jill Jones I was looking over some notes the day I wrote this post (Wednesday). They were towards a piece I had begun some time ago, not completed, about the Canadian poet, Phyllis Webb. As well as reminding me about life’s unfinished projects, it got me thinking about homage, paying respects. I have a wonderful book by John Ashbery, Other Traditions: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Harvard University Press). In the introduction, Ashbery says he did not want to explain his poetry and chose to speak about poets “who have probably influenced me”. The word “probably” seems to be a…

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