Parallel Movement of the Hands

Parallel Movement of the Hands collects five long, serial poems (and prose poems) which John Ashbery left unfinished and will become part of his archive at Harvard University's Houghton Library. 'In-progress and realised' as their editor Emily Skillings puts it, these abundant poems are characteristic of the mature work of this American master, an adept of the glories of American speech, who is alert to its insinuating logics and its wild goose chases through popular culture and secret histories. In these poems, Carl Czerny rubs shoulders with the Hardy Boys, Robert Mapplethorpe and Eadweard Muybridge, all of them integrated into Ashbery's generous, omnivorous forms. 'How could I have had such a good idea?' the poet asks in 'The History of Photography'. So many good ideas, such a wealth of surprising points of departure.

John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York. At Harvard he met Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara and they became known as the 'New York School of Poets.' In 1955 Ashbery went to France on a Fulbright Scholarship and spent much of the next decade there, including several years as art critic of the International Herald Tribune and executive editor of ARTnews magazine. His 2008 translation of Pierre Martory's The Landscapist was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Ashbery has produced over twenty volumes of poetry including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. He passed away in September 2017.; Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (2017), which Publishers Weekly called a 'fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.' She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series in Brooklyn. She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow. Skillings was John Ashbery's assistant from 2010 to 2017.; Ben Lerner is the author of seven books of poetry and prose. His most recent book is the novel The Topeka School (2019), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur foundations, he is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.