Virtual Reading of Our New Publication by John Ashbery

Join us for a celebration of the late poet and art critic John Ashbery’s birthday with a live reading of and conversation about our new publication in our ekphrasis series, Something Close to Music by John Ashbery. The live reading and conversation will be moderated by Jeffrey Lependorf, the book’s editor and the Executive Director of The Flow Chart Foundation, with special guests Lucy Ives, Shiv Kotecha, Emily Skillings, and Mónica de la Torre. 

Thursday, July 28, 7 PM EDT
Online | 192 Books

This live virtual event is presented by 192 Books, David Zwirner Books, and Paula Cooper Gallery, and will be streamed directly on PCG Studio. RSVP or login is not required. A recording will be available following the event.

Jeffrey Lependorf serves as Executive Director of The Flow Chart Foundation, an organization that explores the interrelationships of poetry and various art forms as guided by the legacy of John Ashbery. A composer and visual artist, he is also most recently the editor of Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists by John Ashbery.

Mónica de la Torre is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her most recent book of poems and translations is Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat, 2020), and she is the author of Something Close to Music’s introduction. The recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant, she teaches at Brooklyn College.

Lucy Ives is the author of Impossible Views of the World, Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, Cosmogony, and the forthcoming The Word is Everything. Ives’s writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Believer, frieze, Granta, and Vogue, among other publications. She received a 2018 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Shiv Kotecha is a writer and the author of The Switch (Wonder, 2018) and EXTRIGUE (Make Now Press, 2015). His criticism has appeared in 4Columns, Aperture, BOMB, MUBI’s Notebook, and frieze, where he is a contributing editor. He is based in New York where he co-edits Cookie Jar, a forthcoming pamphlet series of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017). She is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2021) and a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, and currently teaches at Yale, NYU, and Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn.

To order Something Close to Music, visit 192 Books at Bookshop.org. Learn more about the publication at David Zwirner Books.


Cover image: John Ashbery, Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists (David Zwirner Books, 2022)