The Best American Poetry

Awl the way with Mark Bibbins

We're thrilled that Mark Bibbins will begin posting selections from the poems he published as the poetry editor of the now-shuttered "Awl" magazine. Mark is the author of four books of poems: Sky Lounge, which received a Lambda Literary Award; The Dance of No Hard Feelings; They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full; and 13^th Balloon, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Bibbins teaches in the graduate writing programs of The New School and Columbia University, and NYU’s Writers in Florence program. He was a cofounder of LIT magazine and edited the poetry section of The Awl from 2009 to 2018. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, and four editions of The Best American Poetry. He lives in New York City.

Celebrating the Best American Poetry 2018 at Villanova University: February 6, 2019 5:00 PM

Connelly Center Cinema 6:15 (St. David’s Room) Reception and Book Signing to follow the reading

This event is sponsored by the Honors Program, the Villanova Center for Liberal Education, the Department of English, and the Department of Humanities.
For more information, contact James Matthew Wilson, at james.m.wilson@villanova.edu

The Resurrection of "Exquisite Corpse" [by Emma Lazarus]

From 1983 to 1996, the quarterly “Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas” appeared in print. When the human world ended in 1996, Its virtual twin, “Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Life & Letters,” moved online where it led a posthuman existence until 2016. David Lehman suggested that a third resurrection in the post-Twitter age might be called for in the generous confines of the Best American Poetry blog. The Corpse agreed because it felt neither decrepit nor spent. The “Exquisite Corpse: Emma Lazarus” will revive the best of itself in a weekly column.

Andrei Codrescu, editor of "Exquisite Corpse" from womb to tomb and back, will choose the poems to be highlighted and, if we're lucky, he will say a few shrewd things about them.

Both he and I believe in a liberal immigration policy in favor of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

On this post you will find photographs of Andrei Codrescu and me. If you can tell which is which, you win. -- Emma

Vincent Katz, Guest Author January 28-February 1

Vincent Katz w David Smith Sculpture Princeton 2018 (c) Vivien Bittencourt

This week we welcome back Vincent Katz as our guest author.Vincent Katz is a poet and translator. He is the author, most recently, of the books of poems Southness and Swimming Home. His book of translations, The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius was published by Princeton University Press in 2004, and he is currently translating Hesiod’s poems Theogony and Works and Days. Katz is the curator of the “Readings in Contemporary Poetry” series at Dia:Chelsea and the editor of the Readings in Contemporary Poetry anthology. Raphael Rubinstein has characterized Katz as “A 21st-century flâneur whose wanderings range from the sidewalks and subways of New York City to the crowded beaches of Rio de Janeiro.” Thomas Fink’s interview with Vincent Katz on his book Southness can be read here.

Welcome back, Vincent. 

sdl

Lehman & Verga at the Russian Samovar, Sunday, Jan.27 at 6 PM

Andrey Gritsman's INTERCULTURAL POETRY READINGS has found a new home:

The RUSSIAN SAMOVAR RESTAURANT AND PIANO BAR
256 W 52nd St
New York, NY 10019         
between Broadway and 8th Avenue

and on Sunday, January 27, at 6 PM, David Lehman and Angelo Verga will kick off the new series by reading their poems upstairs in the Tolstoy Lounge. Andrey Gritsman will host.

The Russian Samovar is the legendary restaurant and piano bar founded by Mikhail Baryshnikov, Joseph Brodsky, and Roman Kaplan. It has a fascinating history -- and a great many wonderful flavored vodkas. In a previous incarnation, the restaurant was frequented by Sinatra, the Rat Pack, and Johnny Carson. At the Samovar you might see Philip Roth talking intensely with a comely friend in a corner banquette. The street itself is justly famous. It is "swing street," because of the many jazz bars that used to be there. And W. H. Auden begins "September 1, 1939" with these lines: "I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street."

The Russian Samovar is no dive. The poetry will be spectacular, the atmosphere equally so. No cover charge, and the poets don't get paid, so you know their motives are pure. Bring a designated driver.

Interview with Mindy Aloff, Editor of Dance in America: A Reader's Anthology

Library of America’s latest anthology, Dance in America, brings together dancers and choreographers, impresarios and critics, and enthusiastic literary observers to present a kaleidoscopic portrait of a great art form. Edited by the veteran dance writer Mindy Aloff, the book tells the story—through more than a hundred selections spanning two centuries—of how dance took on fresh life with new, vital, and distinctly American innovations and adaptations.

Aloff is Dance Editor of The University Press of Florida and has taught dance criticism and history at the Macaulay Honors College of CUNY (at Hunter College) and at Barnard College. She is a former editor of the Dance Critics Association News and serves as a consultant to The George Balanchine Foundation. The author of Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (2006) and Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation (2008) and the editor of Agnes de Mille’s Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World (2011), Aloff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The New Republic, among many other outlets.

In this interview, Aloff explains how she made her selections. 

Library of America: In your introduction, you write that Dance in America “was not intended as a book of greatest hits by hall of famers.” Can you elaborate a little on what you mean by that?

Mindy Aloff: Gladly. A “greatest hits” approach would require including pieces that are too long, too familiar, too expensive, or too arcane to be interesting to the general reader. If you wanted to put out an anthology of “greatest hits” relating to dance in America, you’d have to include some of the writings of aesthetician Susanne Langer because her legacy is so pervasive, even for writers and dancers who never heard of her. Then you’d have to include the “Burnt Norton” section of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem of universal veneration, where dance indicates a concept rather than a practice, and Edwin Denby’s game-changing essay on the photographs of Vaslav Nijinsky, which has been so widely reprinted that it’s included in other anthologies from Library of America. The same is true of Albert Murray’s chapter “The Blues as Dance Music,” from his widely admired and widely available collection Stomping the Blues, a crucial contribution for a dance hall of fame.

You’d have to include other major essays from the landmark 1940s monograph series Dance Index, which the Eakins Press has just made easily available in its historical entirety online—essays such as Ann Barzel’s 1944 “European Dance Teachers in the United States,” a unique history of the origins of ballet in America. For range of research, no subsequent history of American ballet pedagogy can touch this one-hundred-page monograph. And among the greatest hits, I think you’d have to include the full version of Lillian Ross’s “Dancers in May,” her majestic Reporter at Large story that follows one public school teacher over an academic year as she introduces a class of Lower East Side fifth graders of diverse heritages to six European folk dances, which they learn and practice for months and then perform at an annual Mayday fête of Manhattan’s public schools, in Central Park. A story that offers dance in America as a democratic ideal, it takes up most of a 1964 issue of The New Yorker and would have occupied a tremendous chunk of our current anthology.

So, instead, I opted for a counter-intuitive compendium of mostly well-known writers and mostly unfamiliar, even unclassifiable, writings on subjects that can be surprising. My first standard for choice was that the prose had to stand on its own, without accompanying illustrations. The accident of inclusion produced some improbable yet provocative associations: Janet Collins on Léonide Massine’s imperial authority and Massine himself on eking out a living at the Roxy, La Argentina in performance as rekindled in awe by Agnes de Mille and the tangos of exhibition ballroom dancer Tony De Marco as portrayed with a smile by Margaret Case Harriman, Black Elk’s sacred vision as embodied in choreography for living horses and Edmund Wilson’s gently profane invocation of the “ponies” at The Follies.

Three highly anticipated books on Balanchine are in preparation—by Arlene Croce, Elizabeth Kendall, and Jennifer Homans. All those authors are represented in our anthology, but only one small writing by Arlene, of her three here, focuses on Balanchine’s choreography. I wanted readers to see that even the most knowledgeable scholar-writers devoted to him as a subject have also written brilliantly on a great range of dancing and dancers.

LOA: The contributors to Dance in America include a number of non-specialists, or names we associate with other contexts, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and George Catlin. Why did you think it important to bring in these perspectives?

Aloff: Unlike art or theater writing, which, in the United States, were thought worthy for cultivated American readers from at least the eighteenth century, dance itself was considered so specialized, or so far outside polite society, or so downright blasphemous, that dance writing of any type, outside technical manuals, isn’t easy to find until the 1900s. Still, beginning in the nineteenth century, one encounters more than we might expect: in poems (Dickinson), journals (Emerson), travel reports by missionaries and adventurers (Catlin). Fiction writers would bring descriptions of dancing into their stories as presentation pieces: Washington Irving, for instance, apparently loved to dance himself, but Irving’s most sustained dance writing that I found discussed European social dancing when he was abroad.

The thing is, most writers—whether they dance or not—are fascinated by dancing, perhaps in part because to bring it back alive on the page presents interesting literary challenges. And, as in the poems and writings of Langston Hughes, included in our anthology, not all of the dance written about is theatrical. Another gorgeous example of such dance writing in our book is George Washington Cable’s long-ago remembrance of the Sunday dancing and music by African American slaves in the Congo Square of New Orleans. Cable not only had a great memory but also a keen eye for fast movement, and that facility is as rare today as in his time. Try it yourself: The next time you watch a dance, see if you can isolate two adjacent steps and then describe them so that a reader who wasn’t there can visualize them. Or, even harder, see if you can describe the way steps and music connect in time for one passage of the dance. Good luck!
Continue reading here.

What do Mahler, Matisse, Artie Shaw, Doris Day, and Cannonball Adderley Have in Common?

 

Coming from Pittsburgh on April 2: Lehman’s latest “writing spree” pays tribute to acclaimed poet Ammons

PITTSBURGH, Pa.—Written on the daily installment plan between November 21, 2017, and January 15, 2018, David Lehman’s new volume Playlist pays homage to A. R. (Archie) Ammons, whose great Tape for the Turn of the Year chronicled a similar period in 1963-1964. Playlist will be published this spring by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

“Writing Playlist was one of the most enjoyable writing sprees I've ever been on,” Lehman says. “Every day I would wake up looking forward to composing that day's poem. Some days I would turn on the radio and start writing about Mahler, or Artie Shaw, or Doris Day, or Cannonball Adderley,” he explained. “I wanted to record my responses to the music of my life at the same time as I chronicled those weeks my wife and I spent shuttling between Ithaca, New York, and New York City. Rereading it, I can see that Playlist is also a love poem to Stacey [Harwood, his wife]."

Lee Upton praised Playlist by saying, “What a gorgeous and ambitious poem this is—an elegy, a calendar, an enactment of beauty, a tribute to singers and musicians and those who love them, a musical compilation, a meditation on friendship and art, an evocation of hopefulness and the possibility of enhanced life,  a summoning . . .”   

“Playlist is entirely wonderful,” stated Donald Revell. “I'd meant just to take a quick glance and then to read it through with my afternoon tea. But once I began, I could not put it down . . . that hasn't happened to me since the passing of Schuyler. Really, it's splendid. Apt and tender and candid.”

James Cummins put it simply: “Pure joy.”

Lehman is is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and Great American Prose Poems. He is also the general editor of the annual The Best American Poetry, which he initiated in 1988. His recent books of poetry include Poems in the Manner Of and New and Selected Poems. He has authored eight nonfiction books, including The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014. Lehman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

#  #  #

Playlist, a poem by David Lehman, will be on sale April 2, 2019 from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Cover art: Henri Matisse.

72 pp.    ·    6 x 9    ·    ISBN 9780822965848    ·    Paper $17.00    eBook available

 

Michael Dirda Reviews The Best American Poetry 2018

Michael Dirda's review appeared in the Washington Post on January 2, 2019 under the headline "How do you define authenticity? A poetry collection explores a modern problem." Here is Dirda's opening:

<< Verbal felicities, haunting or explosive imagery, the architectonic dazzlements of rhyme and meter — all these are dwarfed by American poetry’s reverence for genuineness, for authenticity. “Look in thy heart and write” advised Sir Philip Sidney’s muse, but that injunction has long been our own literature’s credo. Yet in their introductory essays to “The Best American Poetry 2018,” the 30th installment of this always excellent annual anthology, series editor David Lehman and this year’s guest editor, Dana Gioia, present dissimilar views on precisely what authenticity entails. >>

Among the poets Dirda singles out for praise are Julia Alvarez, George Bradley, Susan deSola, Dick Davis, Ernest Hilbert, Anna Maria Hong, Mandy Kahn, Jacqueline Osherow, Michael Robbins,  Allyn Rosser, Mary Jo Salter, A. E. Stallings, Agnieszka Tworek, and Christian Wiman.

Support Poets! Here's your 2018 Holiday Gift Guide [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Of course poetry books top your gift lists but you can also support poets by ordering gifts from poets who, whether by inclination or necessity, make things that you can wear, eat, hold, and experience. Here are a few suggestions for holiday gifts. Click on the image for more information. If I've left someone out please add a description and link in a comment:

Clockwise from top left: Jennifer L. Knox makes herb and spice-infused artisanal seasoning blends with "no preservatives, MSG, dairy or other creepy shizznit." Deanna Dorangrichia makes stunning utilitarian ceramics that honor the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi. NEA fellow Molly Brodak is the genius behind the delicious and whimsical Kookie House. Follow Laura Orem on Instagram to snag one of her stunning otherworldly acrylic pour paintings. Kristy Bowen's dulcet dancing girl press and studio makes chapbooks, stationary, and beautiful custom jewelry hair clips (I want one!).  Paige Taggert created MACTAGGART Jewelry in 2003 and her beautiful wearable designs have gained a wide following. Alexandra Reisner's customizable jewelry is available from Caelum Designs. If you want want a ring engraved with “I heard a fly buzz” on the inside, she's the one for you. Combine the practical with the provocative with a tote bag, backpack or pouch inscribed with one of  Yahia Lababidi's inspirational aphorisms, available only from Lababidi Ink. This Day Too: Music from Iris America, Terence Winch's first album in roughly 10 years, is a rich gathering of traditional and original songs and tunes from one of the Washington DC area’s best-known Irish-American musical families. Winch in joined by brother Jesse and son Michael along with an all-star cast of D.C. traditional musicians.This is perfect music for your holiday celebration.

Give the gift of an experience and you will help create lasting memories: 

photo(c)www.aurorandjohn.com

Jezmina Von Theile learned card, palm, and tea leaf reading from her Romani-Sinti grandmother. You can schedule an in-person session in the New York City area, or schedule a phone session if you're out of town. Victoria Rowan is the "creatrix in chief" behind Ideasmyth, your genius amplifier. She offers a variety of services to "help creatives become more professional and professionals to become more creative. (ed note: I know from personal experience that if you have a project that's been languishing, Victoria will help you get. it. done!)

Books make fine gifts too! Here are three I recommend: 

David Lehman's Next Line, Please offers a masterclass in writing in form and collaborative composition. An inspired compilation of his weekly column on the American Scholar website, Next Line, Please makes the case for poetry open to all. Next Line, Please gathers in one place the popular column’s plethora of exercises and prompts that Lehman designed to unlock the imaginations of poets and creative writers.

The current volume of the Best American Poetry (2018) was guest edited by Dana Gioia and includes contributions from 75 poets. You'll find many newcomers alongside beloved favorites. Dana Gioia's brilliant introduction and Lehman's foreword set the stage for the poems that follow; the contributors' notes, a perennial favorite section, give readers a behind-the-scenes tutorial in how poems are made. 

Complete your loved-one's collection of the Best American Poetry series with this edition of the Best American Poetry 1988. A celebration of the first edition of Best American Poetry and a tribute to the late John Ashbery—the guest editor and one of the best American poets of all time—this thirtieth anniversary edition is a look back at the beginning of a renowned anthology series and an outstanding collection of poems.

-- sdl

The Best American Poetry 2018 at the Southern California Poetry Festival Sunday, November 18, 6:00 PM

At Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
*681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291

November 18,  6:00 p.m. *Free

Thursday, November 15, 6:00 PM: An Evening with the Poets of Sage House

Cheryl Quimba, Ange Romeo-Hall, Dean Smith, & Carmen Torrado Gonzalez with David Lehman 

Thursday November 15 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM

Buffalo Street Books
The Dewitt Mall
215 North Cayuga Street
Ithaca, New York 14850

Spend an evening with the poets of Cornell University Press: Cheryl Quimba, Ange Romeo-Hall, Dean Smith, and Carmen Torrado Gonzalez! By day – they publish some of the leading academic and trade books in the country and world. By night – they emerge from Sage House to write and share their own evocative, imaginative, and inventive works. Join us for a reading with Ithaca’s poet-publishers & special guest David Lehman!

The Mission Poetry Series presents Chella Courington, Joseph Rios, & Vandana Khanna

The tenth season of the Mission Poetry Series begins with a reading on Saturday, November 3, 2018, at 1 p.m. at the Santa Barbara Public Library. Sunlight, Leaves, & Shadows: Three Poets in Autumn features three award-winning authors: Chella Courington, Joseph Rios, and Vandana Khanna.  The title of the event is taken from “Words,” a poem by Dana Gioia, the current Poet Laureate of California.

The reading will be held at The Santa Barbara Public Library, in the Faulkner Gallery, at 40 E. Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, CA,  and is free and open to the public. The event offers complimentary broadsides, refreshments, and poets’ books for sale. The Mission Poetry Series is hosted by program director Emma Trelles and production coordinator Mark Zolezzi. For more information, visit www.facebook.com/missionpoetryseries/

Tami Haaland, Guest Author Beginning October 31

We'd like to welcome back Tami Haaland as our guest author. Tami will be posting weekly during her stint teaching at a small school near Stuttgardt, Germany. Tami is the author of three poetry collections, What Does Not Return (Lost Horse Press, 2018), When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. Haaland’s poems have recently appeared in Consequence, Ascent, The Ecopoetry Anthology Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry among other publications. She received an Artist Innovation Award from Montana Arts Council and is a 2019 recipient of a Governor’s Humanities Award. Haaland has served as Montana's Poet Laureate and is a professor of creative writing at Montana State University Billings.

Welcome, Tami.

-- sdl

Justin Jamail, Guest Author October 22-26

This week we welcome Justin Jamail as our guest author. Justin grew up in Houston, Texas, and he now lives in Montclair, New Jersey. His first collection of poems, Exchangeable Bonds, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. Justin is the Deputy General Counsel of the Metropolitan Opera. He studied poetry at Columbia University and the UMass Amherst MFA program. Find out more about Justin Jamail here. 

Welcome, Justin. 

-- sdl

"Why No Nobel Prize in Lit This Year: The Real Skinny" [by Morris Phillips]

From our Stockholm correspondent, Morris Phillips, a pretty obvious pseudonym for a chain-smoking friend of ours (pictured above):

Dear David,

By now you've heard the cover story. A bunch of women were sexually harassed, assaulted, or disrespected by a French guy married to a Swedish poet who is a member of the Swedish Academy, and the French guy, an arts promoter whatever that is, went to prison when he was convicted of raping a woman in 2011. 

All of this is true, but the real reason behind the decision to award no prize this year is more complicated and Scandinavian.

The Academy, in a fit of melancholy disguising itself as boredom, had dug itself into a trench. With Bob Dylan in 2016 and Kazuo Ishiguro last year, the odds against an English-speaking author were like the odds against tomorrow from a prisoner facing the firing squad today. Besides: Roth was dead, Updike was dead, and long gone were such nobly neglected authors as Auden, Borges, Forster, Frost, Graham Greene, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, and Gertrude Stein.

Turning to France, Stella Bergen said, "What about Patrick Modiano?" This was considered an enlightened solution until Greta Ohlsson reminded everyone that the Academy had already awarded Modiano the Nobel a few years ago.

The committee's search for an age-appropriate author of serious mediocrity and high moral aims had turned up the Platonic ideal of an author sympathetic to #Me-Too and staunchly opposed to the primitive masculine hegemony that characterizes ISIS. But while everyone loved the idea, the search was compromised by [REDACTED] and there was no concealing the fact that one of the academy members tied up with the accused rapist, though not literally, had found out the finalists' names and was making a killing in the gambling halls of Stockholm and, via proxy, at Ladbroke's of London.

Also, there was a nightclub called Forum, and don't even ask me what they were doing there, but funds from Swedish Academy members propped up the place. In one word: corruption.

 Being a member of the Swedish Academy is a lifetime appointment, so resignation by the two who were implicated in the mess was not an option. Furthermore no one likes lifetime appointments anymore. Just consider the Supreme Court and the Queen of England. 

Alicia Huberman and Joan of Arc advanced the idea that awarding no prize would make a statement more powerful for what it did not say, and Dr. Constance Peterson supplied the rationale, likening the decision to the interpretation of a dream by John Ballantyne when he thinks he is Dr. Edwardes and can't remember whom he killed, when, or how he has successfully assumed the identity of the murdered man, who looks nothing like him.

It was this motion that carried the day. A quote from Strindberg was considered for the press release but rejected as needlessly gloomy and insensitive to the tenor and alto of the time. -- M. P.

Enter to win every volume of The Best American Poetry from 1988-2018. Deadline 10/7/2018

This just in from Scribner via Instagram:

 Visit @ScribnerBooks on @Instagram and enter for your chance to win! https://t.co/hUCKOyyeIp pic.twitter.com/osTOdusyCP

scribnerbooks🌠🌠🌠#PoetryDayGiveaway🌠🌠🌠 It's National Poetry Day in the UK, and we're joining in with a poetry celebration of our own!

2018 means 30 years of the Best American Poetry series. To mark the occasion, we're giving away a complete set of all Best American Poetry editions to date!

Follow us and tag a friend in the comments below for a chance to win - a paperback copy of each Best American Poetry from 1988 to 2018, including two Best of the Best editions and our 1988 reissue out this year, are going to one lucky reader! An instant poetry collection could be yours.

No purchase necessary. Enter between 10:00 am ET on 10/4/18 and 11:59 pm ET on 10/7/18. Open to residents of the fifty United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. Winner/s will be selected at random on or about 10/8/18. Odds of winning depend on number of eligible entries received. Void where prohibited or restricted by law. Official rules: https://tinyurl.com/yb65ldap.

 

 Visit @ScribnerBooks on @Instagram and enter for your chance to win! #PoetryDay @BestAmPo https://t.co/hUCKOyyeIp pic.twitter.com/osTOdusyCP

— Scribner (@ScribnerBooks) October 4, 2018

Introducing The Best American Poetry 2018: Guest Editor Dana Gioia [video by Blank Verse Films]

This video was created by Mike Gioia for Blank Verse Films. For more BAP videos, scroll here. For more videos, subscribe to the Blank Verse YouTube channel. 

-- sdl

Introducing The Best American Poetry 2018: Guest Editor Dana Gioia [video by Blank Verse Films]

This video was created by Mike Gioia for Blank Verse Films. For more BAP videos, scroll here. For more videos, subscribe to the Blank Verse YouTube channel. 

-- sdl

". . .not a cemetery but a crowded, noisy maternity ward": Dana Gioia on the state of American poetry

Here is a brief excerpt from Dana Gioia's introduction to The Best American Poetry 2018:

<<<
The situation of poetry is impossible to describe but easy to summarize. No one fully understands what is happening because poetry and its audience are changing too quickly in too many places. There is considerable continuity with the past. The traditional ways in which poetry has been written, read, and evaluated still have relevance, but those methods don’t always seem very useful in understanding new developments. Old theories (including postmodern ones) are incommensurate with the present realities. There is no emerging mainstream replacing a dying old order. There is no mainstream at all — only more alternatives. The best metaphor is not death but birth. The poetry scene isn’t a cemetery; it’s a crowded, noisy maternity ward.

So don’t panic. Poetry is not in danger, at least no more than usual. New forms of poetry don’t eliminate established forms, though they do influence and modify them. Culture is not binary but dialectical. A new generation of poets and readers drawn from every segment of society is expanding the art to meet new needs and seize new opportunities. Poetry now has as many categories as popular music. What plays at Harvard won’t get anyone on the dance floor in East Los Angeles, and that’s just fine. All styles are possible, all approaches open, and everyone is invited.
>>>

A fuller excerpt from Dana's introduction appears in the current Los Angeles Review of Books. The book itself will reach bookstore shelves any day now. -- DL

Ashbery Collages at Tibor de Nagy, September 5 -- October 14, 2018

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The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Oh, What Fun! an exhibition of John Ashbery's collages made from 2015 until his death in September 2017. This will be Ashbery’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery and his first at the gallery’s Rivington Street location.

Oh, What Fun! consists of group of works inspired, as with his previous collages, by Ashbery’s long held fascinations, many since childhood, with cartoons, movies and other forms of popular culture.  Much of the imagery and source material is culled from his personal trove of collections, such as board games, French puzzle plates, old postcards, and other treasured knick-knacks that fill his homes in Manhattan and Hudson, New York.  Ashbery became interested at a young age by surrealism, particularly the collage novels of Max Ernst and the work of Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell. A more direct and collaborative influence was his friend Joe Brainard, at times making collages side-by-side with him in Brainard’s house in Vermont and sharing found materials for future collages.  Although Ashbery started making collages as an undergraduate at Harvard with one appearing on the cover of the Harvard Advocate in 1948 (a collaboration with Fred Amory), and he first publicly exhibited a single collage in a group exhibition at the Drawing Center in 1977, it has only been in the last decade that his collages have become more widely known.

​Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 15 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side
Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: info@tibordenagy.com