Poet John Ashbery died

John Lawrence Ashbery  (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet. He published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, Ashbery's work still proves controversial. Ashbery stated that he wished his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, and not to be a private dialogue with himself. At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism."
Wikipedia

John Ashbery in  The New York Review of Books

A Holiday in Reality
Mark Ford   
Where Shall I Wander   
by John Ashbery
Ecco, 81 pp.
June 9, 2005 Issue The New York Review of Books

Making It New
Helen Vendler   
June 14, 1984 Issue
A Wave   
by John Ashbery
Viking, 89 pp.
The New York Revbiew of Books, issue June 14, 1984

The London Review of  Books:

John Ashbery 1927-2017

The Editors 4 September 2017

‘Part of John Ashbery’s charm,’ Mark Ford wrote in the LRB in 1989, ‘is his self-deprecating uncertainty about the whole business: “Some certified nut/Will try to tell you it’s poetry.”’ The LRB published more than fifty poems by him,[*] the first of them in 1995 (a late start for us, nearly forty years after his first collection and twenty after Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror). ‘Die Meistersinger’, from last year, begins:

Only those who actively dislike poetry didn’t like him. The others could care less. There were too many other things to worry about, like is my licence expired yet? Fortunately there were a few in-between, those who school themselves to take an interest in everything, which is not to say they’re not truly, deeply interested in the things that matter most. To them he was a special case, something to take home and place on the library table, and talk about. To them he was truly unique, like the first in what would become a memorable series.

‘The clock is running over,’ it ends, ‘and an octopus wears my wallet now.’

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[*] We’ve temporarily taken down the paywall, so non-subscribers can read them too.

A fine chance to get some great poems free of charge!