A Poet’s Reading · John Ashbery’s personal library of some five thousand volumes ‘will now be getting space on the shelves at Harvard University, his alma mater’, Jennifer Schuessler wrote in the New York Times. Harvard’s Houghton Library began acquiring the poet’s manuscripts and other papers in 1986. His ‘reading library’ includes poetry, art criticism, architectural history, philosophy, religious history and cookbooks. The collection was donated by David Kermani, Ashbery’s long-time partner, and includes annotated editions of books by Pasternak, Kafka, Nietzsche and many others. His undergraduate Oxford Book of American Verse contains pressed flowers used as bookmarks.


A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue between East & West · In late May 2019, Gingko will publish A New Divan to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Goethe’s great poem sequence the West-Eastern Divan, which was inspired by his reading of Joseph von Hammer’s 1814 translation of the poems of the fourteenth­century Persian poet Hafiz and by his love affair with Marianne von Willemer, ‘Suleika’ to his ‘Hatem’. Gingko facilitates dialogue between the Middle East and the Western world through conferences, events and scholarly publications. Its aim is to enable constructive, informed and open discussion, giving a voice to a new generation of thinkers and opinion formers. A New Divan extends this conversation into the realm of poetry.

A New Divan is an anthology of two dozen original poems – twelve by poets from the ‘East’ (including Adonis, Abbas Beydoun, Mohammed Bennis and Fatemeh Shams) and a dozen from ...