John Ashbery and Paolo Javier

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York in 1927. He earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia University, and went to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955, living there for much of the next decade. His many collections of poetry include Planisphere (2009) and Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007), which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize; an early book, Some Trees, was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series (1956), and in 2008 the Library of America published the first volume of his collected poems. He has published numerous translations from the French, including works by Pierre Reverdy, Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, and several collections of poems by Pierre Martory. Also active in other areas of the arts, including theater and film, he has served as executive editor of ARTnews, and as art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek. He taught for many years at Brooklyn College and Bard College, and in 1989-90 delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1985 to 1990. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He lives in New York.

Too bad I have this idea of him
based on someone else, named Matt
(another uncluttered name), whom I disliked
for no reason other than having once thought
he misprised me, which I didn’t really believe. (Whew!)
This is getting complicated, like always.

Let’s leave Steve at the wellhead of a dream,
where he belongs, and belongs also to others
who will make fun of him and gradually come to despise
themselves for doing so. He was a nice person and besides
didn’t deserve our unremitting attention, though
his bumper stickers indicated otherwise. Susan was different.
Who dials the phone and is further gone into snow
than the mass of individuals could be? She is quiet now,
she too.

—John Ashbery

Paolo Javier is the 2010-13 Queens Borough Poet Laureate. He is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, including The Feeling Is Actual (Marsh Hawk Press, Fall 2011). Javier curates two reading series: PRJCTNS, devoted to live film narration and performance, and Queens Poet Lore, a roving poetry series set across the borough. He edits 2nd Avenue Poetry (2ndavepoetry.com), a tiny press of innovative language art, and lives with his wife in Queens.

Love as a maximum ablution
No tenements. L’amour at sea
    	       unwrit a diver riddle
a diver riddle fraction lyric animé
somber, frisky, fed supplicant chose sequence
Sarajevo’s era recalled


	Will fucking among stranger armadas question the equation
taunt port of entry for adored id dulcinea
ocular riddles pattern importune
lair Im in rattled at two
hail circuitry!
between grand echelon laid open port west of entry



	border to border borders sold in glove
color of rose averred, intoxicated envy at scenic rate
sex lead lantern
to know crescendo in summit question colloquy



	lair Im rattled into
rigorous voyage a picador Jihad
in total tyranny, carnage, sullied ladle deicide
what murder they’ll second next
					all gold in us
	despair, anxiety, plain entry 



	Saddam for Sunni ranks satyrs
magnificent diaspora of Amazons to heed us
I comfort Eros, buttons intact
lost seismic nautilus
o diem italic dads Ive bitten


		I brag! 
	  o Oracle ruins



my entire sustenance induce coma all experience
all gold in us, sanguine, solar, terrible entry synapse appear
			synapse
I compare a supplicant
murder, grave, pulsating
sub-prime synod atlas serbis soiled I 



	assume redundant agave tan
Etreus destiny Aquinas in lessons
pigeons in the circle sojourn kneeling
Christian aspersion aspersion simpering

—Paolo Javier