SUMMER READING LIST
It would be great if you read all or at least some of the works below this summer to get an idea of
where John Ashbery is ‘coming from’. These authors have all been cited by John Ashbery as crucial
influences on his work. All books are available at Sussex Library.
ASHBERY INFLUENCES
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays
John Clare, Selected Writings
Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Raymond Roussel, Selections From Certain of His Books
Laura Riding, The Poems
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
David Schubert, Works and Days
Marianne Moore, A Marianne Moore Reader
Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems
Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems
ASHBERY HIMSELF
These are the books we’ll be reading over the course of the Autumn term. It would be great if you
could start reading them over the summer.
Ashbery, John. The Mooring Of Starting Out. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1997. Print.
Ashbery, John, and Joe Brainard. Vermont Notebook. Granary Books, 2001. Print.
Ashbery, John. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems. Penguin, 1990. Print.
Ashbery, John. Houseboat Days. Carcanet Press Ltd, 1984. Print.
Ashbery, John. Flow Chart. New York: Knopf, 1991. Print.
Ashbery, John. Wakefulness. Carcanet Press Ltd, 1998. Print.
Ashbery, John. Girls on the Run. Carcanet Press Ltd, 1999. Print.
Ashbery, John. Where Shall I Wander. Carcanet Press Ltd, 2005. Print.
Ashbery, John. Quick Question. Carcanet Press Ltd, 2013. Print.
Ashbery, John and James Schuyler. A Nest of Ninnies. Dalkey Archive Press, 2009. Print.
CRITICS ON ASHBERY
The following are good sources for you to get a ‘handle’ on Ashbery:
Ashbery, John, and Mark Ford. John Ashbery in conversation with Mark Ford. London;
Chester Springs, PA: Between the Lines, 2003. Print.
---. Other Traditions: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University Press, 2001. Print.
---. Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-1987 (art criticism), edited by David Bergman,
Knopf (New York, NY), 1989.
---. Selected Prose, edited by Eugene Richie, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor,MI),
2005.
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Politics and form in postmodern poetry : O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and
Merrill. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.
Bloom, Harold. John Ashbery. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Print.
Burckhardt, Rudy. Poetry films by Rudy Burckhardt. New York, NY: St. Mark’s Poetry Project,
1998. VHS.
Davidson, Michael. On the outskirts of form : practicing cultural poetics. Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Print.
Diggory, Terence and Stephen Paul Miller The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York
School Poets.
DuBois, Andrew. Ashbery’s forms of attention. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
2006. Print.
Epstein, Andrew. Beautiful enemies : friendship and postwar American poetry. Oxford
[England]; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.
Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s prose : the crisis in American verse. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire];
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Print.
Herd, David. John Ashbery and American Poetry. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Print.
Hickman, Ben. John Ashbery and English Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2012. Print.
Kelly, Lionel. Poetry and the sense of panic : critical essays on Elizabeth Bishop and John
Ashbery. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Print.
Lehman, David. Beyond amazement : new essays on John Ashbery. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1980. Print.
Lehman, David. The last avant-garde : the making of the New York School of Poets. New
York: Doubleday, 1998. Print.
Nelson, Maggie. Women, the New York School, and other true abstractions. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2007. Print.
Perloff, Marjorie. The poetics of indeterminacy : Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1981. Print.
Schultz, Susan M. The tribe of John : Ashbery and contemporary poetry. Tuscaloosa, Ala.:
University of Alabama Press, 1995. Print.
Shoptaw, John. On the outside looking out : John Ashbery’s poetry. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1994. Print.
Silverberg, Mark. The New York School poets and the neo-avant-garde : between radical art
and radical chic. Farnham, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Print.
Vincent, John Emil. John Ashbery and You: His Later Poems. Georgia: University of Georgia
Press, 2007. Print