An intimate and unique collection of the work of John Ashbery--a prolific poet and art critic--pairing poetry and art Writings with Playlists of music from his personal library.
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..
In exploring this ekphrastic book project, the reader is invited to discover how, for Ashbery, these three forms might illuminate and inform one another.
He rarely offers linear stories or focuses on evocative descriptions of a scene or object.
Ashbery\'s poetry similarly plays with a diversity of poetic textures and sudden turns such that a reader might construct multiple narratives or pathways of meaning.
Many recordings he listened to feature contemporary classical works that emphasize complex textures, disparate sounds, and disjunct phrases.
Many observations from Ashbery\'s art writing also provide keys to how we might read his poetry.
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.
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.
This book places poetry by Ashbery (1927-2017), gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing.
An intimate and unique collection of the work of John Ashbery--a prolific poet and art critic--pairing poetry and art Writings with Playlists of music from his personal library
