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I can see that Ashbery might stake a claim to being the most influential poet since 1955, though, given how many of his poetic descendants fall over themselves to be even more willfully inscrutable and opaque than Ashbery. For instance, there’s Not Even Then, a recent volume by Brian Blanchfield (who teaches at Pratt Institute),…

Harold Bloom calls John Ashbery in the upcoming Poetry Issue of the Sunday New York Times Book Review “our major poet since the death of Wallace Stevens in 1955.” I don’t know where that leaves Allen Ginsberg, for example, but it seems a highly dubious claim, especially given inscrutable, maddening lines like these, from a…

I had some time to kill this afternoon, so I did some reading in one of the carrels on the third floor of Hatcher. I turned to look out the window and saw a fascinating display on the radiator below the window. The radiator was one of those old 1960s/1970s models with hundreds of vents,…