Emily Skillings and John Yau: John Ashbery’s “Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works” (Re-air)

April 28, 2022·30 min·1 clip

John Yau recalls Ashbery watching a man dance with his dead friend in a bar and saying 'that's something I've never seen in the movies before.'

John Ashbery is the missing presence everyone keeps circling. Michael Silverblatt presents the posthumous Parallel Movement of the Hands as proof that Ashbery was still trying longer forms near the end of his life, even when readers thought the late work had shrunk into shorter poems. The mood is reverent, but not sealed in glass. Emily Skillings and John Yau come in as poets shaped by Ashbery, not outside explainers brought in to make him behave. The five unfinished longer works push back against any easy story about decline or narrowing. Skillings speaks most sharply when she describes the editor's problem: how much can you restore before you start pretending the mystery was cleaner than it was? Her story about accidentally scrambling a narrative sequence gives the episode its best charge. Ashbery's strangeness is not the same thing as chaos. In one experimental poem, a woman leaving an apartment and reaching the street still matters as sequence. Once Skillings sees that, the poem changes under her. Silverblatt seems to prize that kind of bewilderment. He suggests that not knowing how to read Ashbery may be part of reading him with any honesty. Yau carries the personal weight: Silverblatt places him as a Brooklyn College student who became Ashbery's best friend. The episode feels archival, affectionate, and alert. It honors Ashbery's language, humor, influence, and difficulty while asking what care is owed to unfinished writing after a poet dies. It does not make Ashbery easier. It makes the case for staying lost with him a little longer.

As heard by us

A close, affectionate conversation on Ashbery's unfinished longer poems, with Skillings's editorial work as the clearest way in.

John Ashbery's posthumous longer works give this Bookworm conversation its charged center. Michael Silverblatt opens with a personal claim for Ashbery's force in American poetry, then turns to Emily Skillings, editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands, and John Yau, a former…

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For when you want John Ashbery's posthumous book of five unfinished longer works discussed by Emily Skillings and John Yao.

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