I first learned about the artist Joe Brainard in two articles published in Art In America in July 1997, written by Edmund White and by Carter Ratcliff. I saved those features and came across them recently. Sharing my renewed enthusiasm for this artist with a friend, he informed me that he had seen a wonderful retrospective of Joe Brainard at the Berkeley Art Museum last year and that he had purchased a fine catalogue of the exhibit. I was delighted to find this incredible catalogue at Amazon.com. A tremendous overview of this underappreciated genius with relevant text and fantastic color reproductions of exhibited work. Amazing to see work created 20-30 years ago that has so obviously influenced a generation of contemporary artists. This book is highly recommended to anyone interested in contemporary art. If you don't know the work of Joe Brainard, this retrospective will impress, and if you are already an admirer of this extraordinary talent, this is a must have for your art library.

Wesleyan University Press has reissued a volume in its series of "classics" which deserves a place on the shelves of everyone interested in poetry in the last forty-five years. THE TENNIS COURT OATH is a series of experiments in poetry which are as daring and fresh today as they were in 1962, when the book (Ashbery's second) first appeared. Though the book contains some often anthologized pieces--"Faust" and "They Dream Only of America" for instance--the book reprints the less familiar "America," "Rain," and the 110 part poem "Europe." It is these more obscure poems that seem to offer the best glimpse of the possibilities of Ashbery as a poet as well as the possibilities for language and poetry in general. Reading these poems in the light of Ashbery's interceding success as a poet, the book emerges as a kind of rough blueprint for his career. No one who knows Ashbery's poem "Litany" (in AS WE KNOW, Viking, 1979) can look at the parallel text of "To the Same Degree" in OATH and not see it as the fledgling form of the later work. Even "Europe," which the author himself admits was a kind of failure, demonstrates the daring search for a method of communication which Ashbery described (in 1962)as "perhaps a new kind of poetry which tries to use words in a new way....to use words abstractly as an abtract painter would use paint....This has nothing to do with 'Imagism' or using words because of their sound--words are inseparable from their meaning and cannot be said to exist apart from it. My aim is to give the meaning free play and the fullest possible range [in an] attempt to get a greater, more complete kind of realism." "Europe," if it is a failure, is a brilliant one, saturated with the possibilities of language which dares to venture, as T. S. Eliot put it, at "the frontiers of consciousness, where meaning fails but feelings still persist." It is that sense of experimentation, of the avante-garde and the seemingly limitless possibilities for the language of poetry that the complete text of OATH, now reprinted, captures and presents to the reader. Those already familiar with Ashbery's work will find the book an indispensible high-point in his canon, those unfamiliar with Ashbery will see a different kind of poetry, rife with new ideas and new hopes for relating language to the world it seeks to describe and of which it is part. John Ashbery's TENNIS COURT OATH, like his SELECTED POEMS (Viking, 1985) is simply a must for any serious reader of late Twentieth-century and contemporary poetry.

_Three Poems_ is a journey of language itself; no destination of intention or meaning. One experiences a transparency--no mediation of form--of emotional states. These Ashbery poems are linguistic potential, potentially linguistic . . . nothing ever actualized by "saying". Ashbery circumambulates the thresholds of silence to collapse a medium shown to be inadequate to its content. It is this particular work that forced critical theories such as Deconstruction. These poems are not texts . . . the best "language poetry" since Stein's _Tender Buttons_.

A treasure trove of a mini monograph on the man who colorizes the skeletons in everyone's jumbled childhood's closet. Mr. Winkfield is a magical artist who profoundly blends whimsy with sincere aspiration for a full aesthetic life.

This is a superb, well-crafted, and capacius collection of the post-Ashbery US poetics which pervades the very climate of Americanist thinking about poetic subjectivity, language, identity, the trauma of broken narcissism, the promise of the sublime after Wallace Stevens and Andre Breton and so on.

The range of poets who consider themselves in what she calls "the tribe of John" is quite amazing in itself, what you might congregate as "the other tradition" of dis-Americanizing, wild, and risk-taking poetics from Bernstein to Creeley, Walter Lew, and John Yau et al. Saludos, Susan, for your care and transnational vision of the future. This is a fine work of cultural poetics, that should move out beyond poetry enclaves as such into "cultural studies." of US selfhood and the mongrel banality/ of American language.

Stitt's analyses of the five poets are superb and full ofinsights, butperhaps most striking is his use of the philosophy of modern physics, fully explained in the introduction and developed throughout. An impressive performance and an excellent book overall. Beautiful design too!

O'Hara was a brilliant poet who seemingly had nothing to write about. His language is incredibly imaginative, and his productivity was astounding. But in the end the vast majority of his poems were little more than frivolous ditties about his friends and the artsy scene around New York City. It's almost a shame that with his amazing talents O'Hara didn't live in a somewhat more challenging set of circumstances - it would have been interesting to hear what he had to say. But reading his poems is like reading the work of an incredibly gifted, yet ultimately vacuous, artist.

An earlier reviewer describes O'Hara's poetry as shallow and vacuous. Shallow, maybe. But not vacuous. O'Hara's interested in the minutiae of daily life - buying a pack of Gauloises on the way to friends for dinner, seeing a headline about Lana Turner collapsing, the hard hats worn by construction workers. Read one poem and you might come away thinking it's trivial. But his life's work - taken as a whole - is an intelligent, alert, funny and perceptive record of a life lived to the full (I think someone else may have said that before me, somewhere). Thing is, O'Hara's interested in surfaces - things, events, trivia - because they have meaning. So his poetry is shallow in a very real and virtuous sense. He's not trying to make big statements, a la Charles Olson or Robert Lowell. What I find amazing is how moving his poetry can so often be, as in The Day Lady Died. On one reading, it's simply a list of things he does on the way to friends for dinner. But the impact is enormous. The poem gets you right up close to O'Hara as he learns of Billie Holiday's death and remembers hearing her sing. Nothing vacuous about that.

This poet changed my life. This poet had style, made his own breaks (luck), had great friends because he gave a damn about them, and loved art unconditionally in any form but with a special love for the city, for the life and art and noise (music) of the city. This poet wore a tie and jacket and swiveled out the door of the Museum of Modern Art with more hip in his pocket than you, Bro. This poet was gay and and every man considered him their best friend and every woman wanted to sleep with him. This poet grew up near Boston, went to the Navy and Hafvard and spent a year in Ann Arbor but was New York all the way, the very heart and soul of New York and the New York School of poets. This poet extends the line from Keats to Rimbaud into the American future.

This collection of poems, especially the title poem, is jarring and bewildering in its swiftness and complexity, and in the crossed-paths of struggle, you will encounter spectacular images and conclusions. The images like "now from the unbuttoned corner moving out" and "recurring wave of arrival" are vividly childlike and nostalgic but also remind me of nothing I have encountered before. Ashberry's images sometimes bang against each other like the organized chaos of bumper cars. If you find yourself lost, keep reading and re-reading, no one needs to point out subtlety. Stick around, the confusion and overlapping delay the release at the end of his movements, which rival T.S. Eliot, in their polite, mythic send-offs.

This collection of poems, especially the title poem, is jarring and bewildering in its swiftness and complexity, and in the crossed-paths of struggle, you will encounter spectacular images and conclusions. The images like "now from the unbuttoned corner moving out" and "recurring wave of arrival" are vividly childlike and nostalgic but also remind me of nothing I have encountered before. Ashberry's images sometimes bang against each other like the organized chaos of bumper cars. If you find yourself lost, keep reading and re-reading, no one needs to point out subtlety. Stick around, the confusion and overlapping delay the release at the end of his movements, which rival T.S. Eliot, in their polite, mythic send-offs.

John Ashbery with "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" redefines American poetry by shattering syntax and "meaning" into a million facets. Even cliches and conversational speech take on the tone of epic poetry in Ashbery's gaze. His indirect mannerism leaves the reader haunted by images that are unique in American writing. Though drawing heavily from modern French poetic technique, Ashbery lives up to Pound's dictum, "...make it new" and Rimbaud's decree that "...one must be absolutely modern." Above all, his portraits of stream-of-consciousness always surprise with their cinematic, sleight-of-hand, air of freshness. Along with Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara, Ashbery remains the ringleader of the New York School of poetry.

Well, we've always been sleepily ardent in our admiration of John Ashbery, a boosterism which borders on a fanatical apathy: his perky atonality has a certain depressingly insistent gaiety about it. We value the kinky ecumenism between the patois and the mandarin, the somewhat dopey collision between the vernacular and the highfalutin. Not everyone can get away with that, it says here. We can't wait until the biography comes out, along with its subject, so we can gain some insight into his methods. Of course, we remember with fondness the clepsydra, the fragment called "Fragment," the raindrop of milk slipping down the spine of the obelisk, and those peonies tipped in soot from "o.blek" poems of the early 1990s. Similar marvels, or unmarvels, are thronged hereabouts, like panicles of umber: an austere seraglio of tawdriness and splendour, assembled by a poet's poet.

We have here lyrics of a rehearsed suddenness, of a customary unpredicability : language whose smooth bumps & well-paved potholes inspire both fearer and farer, both reader and rider, to explore more deeply the simplistic intricacies of Ashbery's frabjously deadpan patois. The images rustled into this semi-solipsistic corral collide in an amiable showdown, a triumphantly graceful slapstick, a dreadfully solemn opera bouffe, which we cannot readily forget. Herein we have the greeting and the greening of a life with all its happy calamities & soulshattering lucky breaks -- a lexical rhizopus that reveals the casual emergencies of existence, an ennui that is at least as jazzy as those halcyon ecstasies of yore, those drab celebrations of the past's disastrous victories.

Ashbery's writing with the crackle of someone just starting out. It's like now that he knows he's in the canon (thanks, Bloom), he can really go looby and make English swing. The autumn leaves fall a little lighter in these poems; reverie (always present) takes a back seat to inspired goofiness. I've admired other Ashbery books--this one I loved. It's made my own elite canon of bathroom reading and not a poem's let me down. I hope I grow old just like this.

Aw nerts this guy is too much for me. I feel like one of the girls with names like Linda, Ruth, and Pat from the 1940s who stand next to an airplane when this poet comes along from the next century. "Your Name Here", the very title, suggests his "negative capability" is acting up again, with results typically mind-blowing, keeping everyone guessing. I rank this almost on the level of the great "Can You Hear, Bird."

I picked this up on impulse. I'm interested in the work of Henry J. Darger. But I was not taken by this book at all. Ashbery flows a lot of beautiful verbiage together. But it's incomprehensible at a first reading and I'm not going to spend more time trying to root anything out of it. It seems like a lot of surrealist automatic writing. There were occasional images that would surface in an appealing way like, "count the dogs as furniture as otherwise there will be no chairs," but few of the images recurred enough to give any sense of narrative or unifying theme. I bet Darger's naive literature is a lot more fascinating than this.

Predictable surprises -- and a few unpredictable ones -- inhabit this volume, a single long poem loosely based on the illustrations of Henry Darger. There are chuckleworthy phrases that rattle about the brain with a happy insouciance for several days after one has read the thing. "The oxymoron gets his rocks off" and "pink shrouds fell on the pansy jamboree." And we like going for the ride, even if we get a little dizzy and a little seasick. The "androgynous truths" bubble perkily to the surface, in a verbal universe where what matters matters as much as what doesn't matter. We know a few of the magician's tricks, but there are always a few swerves and slides which we can't anticipate. The honey drips from a blighted bough -- or is it a bright and sprightly bough? -- and the housepets lap the gruel in their gaily-coloured bowls, and the narrator stands back and lets it all happen. As with anything by Ashbery, there are unwholesome things and things from which the reader runs away, but we marvel at the ingenuity nonetheless.

I, too, have always admired but never been bowled over by John Ashberry's work. With this work I am convinced he is our greatest American poet. Since I am familiar with Henry Darger's pictures and style, Ashberry's imagery seems natural even as it is surreal. The two share an aesthetic of using common cultural artifacts and twisting them so that even though you're staring right at them, you no longer recognize what you're seeing. It is a dream language, and Ashberry has never been so adept at navigating that territory. The poetry, like Darger's paintings, mix the pastoral and the apocalyptic, the innocent and the decadent with such unsettling virtuostic ease that you're not sure which is which. If I had to pick a poetry to compare it to, I might pick Blake--both for the lyric sweetness and hinted threats of "Innocence and Experience," and the cultural commentary/prophecy of his later, longer work. If, like me, your experience with Ashberry's work has left you shrugging, this os the place to start. I don't read much poetry anymore--this will reaffirm your faith in it.