Sospeso was honored to present John Ashbery in a poetry reading during a 1999 concert devoted to music and poetry.  The ensemble's new recording of Syringa, a work for two singers, guitar, and ensemble (soprano Lucy Shelton, baritone Andre Solomon-Glover, guitarist Paul Bowman, and conductor Jeffrey Milarsky) was released in 2003.  The work combines Elliott Carter's music with Ashbery's poem.

Mr Ashbery was born in 1927 and raised in Sodus, New York, near Lake Ontario. He is the author of eighteen previous collections of poetry, as well as a volume of art criticism, Reported Sightings (1993). He is also the co-author, with James Schuyler, of the novel A Nest of Ninnies (1969). 

Throughout his career, Mr. Ashbery has been recognized by critics as one of the most important contemporary American poets. He has been the recipient of countless prizes and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award (1975). He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship; in 1992, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Feltrinelli Prize. Mr. Ashbery was the first recipient of the Horst Bienek Prize for poetry, issued in 1991 by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and in 1996 became the first English-language poet to receive the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poésie. He has also received the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, and has served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Most recently, Mr. Ashbery was the co-recipient (with fellow FSG poet Frank Bidart) of the 1997 Belinda Bingham Pierce Poetry Prize, given by The Boston Book Review. 

A graduate of Harvard University, Mr. Ashbery was Charles Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard in 1989. Now the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, he lives in New York City and Hudson, New York. The publication of John Ashbery's Girls on the Run coincides with the paperback reissue of two of the poet's most celebrated works, April Galleons and Houseboat Days, published by FSG in April 1999.

"Ashbery's Girls on the Run, like its charming Peggy, is a poem both persnickety and 'frequently at the heart of things.' It will make its readers happier and wiser. This is our universal poet, as Walt Whitman was before him." (Harold Bloom.)

"This beautiful long poem presents Ashbery at his most contradictory: it is both his most Homeric and 'narrative' long poem, yet at the same time his most joissant, collage-based work in years. It borrows from the imagery of Henry Darger (1892-1972), an American 'outsider' artist who devoted decades to a mammoth, illustrated novel about the plight of the fictional 'Vivian' girls. Ashbery's adaptation follows the adventures of dozens of characters with names like Pliable, Bunny, Mr. McPlaster, Uncle Margaret, and Fred—recalling 'Farm Implements and Rutabegas in Landscape,' Ashbery's talismanic Popeye riff from the '70s. The sentences are often short, somewhat 'off' ('Trevor his dog came, half jumping.'), and they set up deeply bizarre narrative situations. Classic Surrealism erupts frequently in well-timed bursts: 'The tame suburban landscape excited him. / He had met his match. / Dimples replaced the mollusk with shoe-therapy.' Elsewhere, Ashbery jibes obliquely at the epic tradition, laconically laying down the blandest of similes with pseudo-stentorian bluster, while at other moments the meditative, universal Ashberian persona breaks through, with apt sophistication and terrible humanist relevance: 'The oblique flute sounded its note of resin. / In time, he said, we all go under the fluted covers / of this great world, with its spiral dissonances, / and then we can see, on the other side, / what the rascals are up to.' More memory than dream—the never-was memory of constant companionship, of 'fun,' of names that resonate with mystery (even 'Fred')—the poem recalls a land that was never boring and whose physical environment, while somewhat foreboding, was as safe as the womb and as colorful as Oz." (Publishers Weekly.)