July 28th: John Ashbery Panel
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Jeffrey Lependorf will celebrate the release of Something Close to Music and John Ashbery’s birthday with Mónica de la Torre, Lucy Ives, Shiv Kotecha, Emily Skillings, and John Yau
The live event will stream directly on this page on Thursday, July 28th at 7 pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards.
John Ashbery—Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists, edited by Jeffrey Lependorf, with an introduction by Mónica de la Torre. (Published by David Zwirner Books-ekphraisis series, 2022)
This book places poetry by Ashbery, gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing. In addition, as Ashbery loved music and listened to it while writing, the “playlists” here present samplings of music from these same years, culled from his own library of recordings.
Ashbery’s poetry is frequently described as ekphrastic, though, rather than writing a poem “based on” or “inspired” by the content of an artwork or piece of music, he engages with how the experience of seeing it and the artistic strategies employed offer ways of thinking about it and through it. Many observations from Ashbery’s art writing also provide keys to how we might read his poetry. Many recordings he listened to feature contemporary classical works that emphasize complex textures, disparate sounds, and disjunct phrases—qualities which are mimicked in his poetry.
In exploring this ekphrastic book project, the reader is invited to discover how, for Ashbery, these three forms might illuminate and inform one another. In Mónica de la Torre’s introduction, she explores the connection between the three muses of music, art, and poetry, and the ekphrastic experience of reading Ashbery.
Jeffrey Lependorf serves as Executive Director of The Flow Chart Foundation, an organization that explores the interrelationships of poetry and various art forms as guided by the legacy of John Ashbery. He served formerly as Executive Director to both Small Press Distribution and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. A composer and visual artist, he is also most recently the editor of Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists by John Ashbery (David Zwirner Books).
Mónica de la Torre is a poet and essayist. Her most recent book of poems and translations is Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat). Other collections include The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse)—a riff on a riff on Kafka’s Amerika—and Public Domain (Roof Books). With Alex Balgiu, she co-edited the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (Primary Information). The recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant, she teaches at Brooklyn College
Lucy Ives is the author of the novels Impossible Views of the World and Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, as well as editor of The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader. In October, 2022, Graywolf Press will release her third novel, Life Is Everywhere.
Shiv Kotecha writes across genres. The Switch (Wonder, 2018) makes a case for friendship over love using fiction and verse, and EXTRIGUE novelizes Billy Wilder’s noir Double Indemnity shot-by-shot. His criticism appears in publications like 4Columns, Aperture, BOMB, MUBI’s Notebook, and frieze, where he is a contributing editor. He is based in New York where he co-edits Cookie Jar, a forthcoming pamphlet series of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, and currently teaches at Yale, NYU, and Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn.
John Yau is a poet, fiction writer, critic, and publisher of Black Square Editions. His reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Bookforum, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. He was the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Rail from 2006–2011 and is an associate editor of the online arts magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. The author of over fifty books, his recent is the poetry collection Bijoux in the Dark, and the essay collection, Foreign Sounds. Forthcoming in the fall are a book of poetry, Genghis Chan on Drums, and two monographs, Liu Xiaodong and William Tillyer. His current project is a monograph on Joe Brainard. He lives in the Garment District neighborhood in New York City.