The Ashbery Files
by Lorin Stein
Sep 06, 2017
4 minutes
John Ashbery was a prolific contributor to The Paris Review. Over the years, we published forty of his poems, plus two long prose pieces, a series of collages, and an Art of Poetry interview.
From an early age, he started cropping up in other people’s interviews, too. Already in 1966, Allen Ginsberg was comparing Ashbery to Alexander Pope (“I was listening to him read The Skaters, and it sounded as inventive and exquisite, in all its parts, as The Rape of the Lock”). By the 1980s, Philip Larkin could use Ashbery as a stand-in for all that was hip and threatening in American poetry: “I’ve never been to America … And of
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