John Ashbery at Modern American Poetry

I’m sometimes kind of jealous of my work. It keeps getting all the attention and I’m not. After all, I wrote it.

John Ashbery the Academy of American Poets

Meghan O'Rourke on How to read John Ashbery

On the one hand, the poems have the dashed-off look and feel of pop culture-inflected postmodernism, inspired by the radical innovations of Dada and French Surrealism. On the other hand, at their heart is a kind of high Romantic yearning for wholeness: In a sense the poems are simply about being unable to give up that longing.

Notes from the Air

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