The poetry scholar Kamran Javadizadeh recently launched a fun and edifying new podcast called “Close Readings.” As Javadizadeh describes it, each week he “talks to a different leading scholar of poetry about a single short poem that the guest has loved. You’ll have a chance to see the poem from the expert’s perspective—and also to think about some big questions: How do poems work? What can they make happen? How might they change our lives?”

You can find episodes of “Close Readings” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, and you can (and should!) also sign up to receive a newsletter from Kamran, in which he sends program notes, links, and summaries of each episode.

Last month, I had the delightful opportunity myself to go on the podcast to discuss one of my favorite John Ashbery poems, “Street Musicians,” the first poem in his 1977 book Houseboat Days. Kamran and I talk about Ashbery’s life and work in general, before turning to this haunting and beautiful poem of mid-career, which I read as an elegiac poem about what it’s like to outlive a friend or brother, and about Ashbery “feeling called to move on” — from his friend Frank O’Hara’s death, from his own youth, from living on the margins.  (An excerpt from my first book about “Street Musicians” can be found here, too). You can listen to our discussion of this poem here, or on Spotify, etc), and you can also read Kamran’s comments about our conversation here.

As I recently noted here, it’s been almost exactly 10 years since I decided to create a website devoted to the New York School of poets and artists and name it Locus Solus, after the legendary little magazine that briefly served as the movement’s house journal.

To mark the occasion of this anniversary, the Flow Chart Foundation (the wonderful organization devoted to the legacy of John Ashbery) and the critic Mandana Chaffa generously invited me to have a conversation about the blog, its mission and history, and the New York School more broadly, which was held virtually on Wednesday, 6/15/23.

Here is a recording of the event. Thank you to all who came and to everyone for reading it over the years!

An essay of mine about the legendary indie rock musician and poet David Berman (of Silver Jews fame) was recently included in a terrific new cluster of essays devoted to Berman’s work at “Post45 Contemporaries.”

In my essay, I wrote about Berman’s mixed feelings about his own incredible gift for creating pithy, memorable phrases: “He was strangely good at crafting aphorisms, he knew it, and that fact made him sick. How could someone so distrustful of truth claims be so good at dispensing truth claims?”

The whole set of essays, edited by Sarah Osment and David Hering, is wonderful, and I’m very happy to have my piece appear in such fine company. There’s an extra bonus, too — the musician Bob Nastanovich, a member of both Pavement and Silver Jews and dear friend of Berman’s, contributed a touching afterword to the collection. (I’m not sure what my 20-something self would’ve thought about having something he wrote in the same collection with one of the guys from Pavement, but I think he would’ve been surprised and delighted).