Poets.org Poems and Bio
Poems at Poemhunter
Poems, Interviews, and Photographs
Modern American Poetry Page
NPR: A conversation with John Ashbery
Jacket Interviews: 1985, 1988
Articles and Criticism
The Selected Poems
Also, check out the most hilarious Amazon review of all time, by a certain In One Ear Out Your Mother: "Ashbery taught me how to keep pace with the world, to saturate the atoms of life with an inward stare, yoking myself nakedly to the ebon flight of his lush written world. With Ashbery's deep intellect and dickety-slippity wit, his pretzelly stanzas and mind-torquing conceptual corkscrewing, I could go on forever relighting my own image, against steady palls of black pain." !!!
Now might be a good time to tell you that I saved up my money when I was a teenager to buy a copy of The Last Avant-Garde--this was the same year that I asked for a copy of Inventions of the March Hare for my birthday; I needed to get laid. My formal introduction to John Ashbery's poems had come earlier that year at the hands of Kenneth Koch, whom I met shortly before he died of leukemia and who was kind to me like whoa. Reading The Last Avant-Garde, I remember being deeply struck by how fantastic Ashbery looked in a pair of chinos, and how no man's mustache before or since had I so wanted to rip off his face and drown deeply in two pots of paint. Surely I was not alone in this?
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