Something Close to Music

John Ashbery (1927–2017) was born in Rochester, New York. He was the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, including Commotion of the Birds, Breeze way, Quick Question, Planisphere, Notes from the Air, which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize, A Worldly Country, Where Shall I Wander, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and Some Trees, which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1955. The winner of many other prizes and awards both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama at the White House, in 2012. Mónica de la Torre is a poet and essayist. Her books include Repetition Nineteen (2020) and The Happy End/All Welcome (2017), a riff on Martin Kippenberger’s 1994 art installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” itself a riff on Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika. Born and raised in Mexico City, she is also the author of several collections in Spanish, including the image text volume Taller de Taquimecanografía (2011), an exquisite corpse composed with the eponymous women’s art collective she helped form. Recent writing appears in Felix Gonzalez Torres’s Photostats and Lucy Raven’s Dia Chelsea publication. She coedited the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979 (2020) and teaches at Brooklyn College.