June 29th: John Ashbery Panel Discussion
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Emily Skillings will discuss her new collection of John Ashbery’s poems, Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works, with Farnoosh Fathi, Adam Fitzgerald, Michael Silverblatt, Dara Wier, and John Yau.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, June 29th at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be archived and posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
John Ashbery — Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works. Edited by Emily Skillings, with a foreword by Ben Lerner. (Ecco Press, 2021)
Parallel Movement of the Hands gathers unpublished, book-length projects and long poems written between 1993 and 2007, along with one (as yet) undated work, to showcase Ashbery’s diverse and multifaceted artistic obsessions and sources, from children’s literature, cliffhanger cinema reels, silent films, and classical music variations by Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny to the history of early photography. Ashbery even provides a fresh and humorous take on a well-worn parable from the Gospel of Matthew. These works demonstrate that while producing and publishing the shorter, discrete poems often associated with his late career, Ashbery continued to practice the long-form, project-based writing that has long been an important element of his œuvre.
Edited and introduced by Ashbery’s former assistant poet Emily Skillings and including a preface by acclaimed poet and novelist Ben Lerner, this compelling and varied collection offers new insights into the process and creative interests of a poet whose work continues to influence generations of artists and poets with its signature intertextuality, openness, and simultaneity.
Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Great Guns (Canarium, 2013), editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB Poets, 2018) and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA).
Adam Fitzgerald is the author of the poetry collections The Late Parade (2013) and George Washington (2016), both published by Liveright. They teach creative writing at Rutgers University and live in Chelsea.
Michael Silverblatt is the host of KCRW’s Bookworm, a nationally syndicated radio program showcasing writers of fiction and poetry. Joyce Carol Oates once called him the "reader writers dream about." As host and guiding spirit of this weekly show, Silverblatt has reinvented the art of literary conversation, introducing listeners to new and emerging authors along with writers of renown. A New York native, Silverblatt graduated from the State University of New York in Buffalo. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970's, working in motion picture public relations and script development. He created Bookworm for KCRW in 1989. As a student, he came under the influence of such cutting-edge author-teachers as Donald Barthelme and John Barth; as a radio talk-show host, he learned to appreciate a much wider range of writing—making him, he hopes, "a person of ferocious compassion instead of ferocious intellect." Describing his interviews as “conversations,” Silverblatt has hosted hundreds of celebrated writers.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” 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, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She teaches creative writing at Yale and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Dara Wier's fifteen books include Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina (Wave Books, 2022), In the Still of the Night (Wave, 2017), You Good Thing, (Wave, 2013), Selected Poems (Wave, 2009), Remnants of Hannah (Wave, 2006) Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005), Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002) and Voyages in English (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2001). Her first book, Blood, Hook & Eye, was chosen by Stanley Kunitz as the 1976 Yale Younger Poets runner-up; Kunitz arranged for its 1977 publication by University of Texas Press. Also among her works are limited editions (X In Fix) in Rain Taxi’s Brainstorm Series, Thru (Scram Press, 2020), Fly on the Wall (Oat City Press), and The Lost Epic, co-written with James Tate (Waiting for Godot Books,1999). Wier's poetry has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives, and the American Poetry Review. Her work has appeared in Granta, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, The Fairytale Review, Incessant Pipe, Iterant, jubilat, New American Writing, and Volt, among other magazines. She is publisher and editor of the small, independent press factory hollow press, and from 2015–2021 was the publisher of the literary journal jubilat. She lives and works in Western Massachusetts.
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 works include the poetry collection Bijoux in the Dark, and a new book of essays, Foreign Sounds. He has three books forthcoming in the fall, 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.
Correction for 1:02:31 via the Estate of John Ashbery:
What really happened (per David Kermani): “This may not have been in 1976, the year of JA’s Pulitzer Prize; it could possibly have been in 1977 when JA would have turned 50. John Ashbery and David Kermani came home one day and checked in with Ashbery's telephone answering service (in the days before answering machines, you could use an answering service with a real person taking your messages; you sort of got to know them after a while). She said there was a message from a Mrs. Onassis, and asked excitedly if it could be Jackie. Ashbery had met her a few times at events, so that may be how she had his unlisted phone number, but with her connections, she could have gotten it from many places. When he called the number, the butler said he would see if Mrs. Onassis was ‘at home,’ meaning would she take the call. She was not ‘at home,’ so Ashbery left the message that he was returning her call, but she never called back. Ashbery fantasized that because their birthdays were on the same day that she wanted to plan a joint birthday party. Later, when Ashbery told his mother that he had had a phone call from her (she did not call his mother in Pultneyville), his mother, being a Republican, sternly advised him: ‘Don’t get mixed up with that one!’”