"Paradoxes and Oxymorons" appears in Ashbery's 1981 collection Shadow Train, which collects fifty poems, each consisting of four quatrains.

In his interview with John Tranter in a 1986 issue of Scripsi, an Australian magazine, Ashbery discusses his own poetry and its relation to language.

Bob Perleman's 1996 book The Marginalization of Poetry discusses the politics of much contemporary experimental poetry, including Ashbery's.

Early criticism on Ashbery often labeled him a Language writer. Language writers is a name given to a group of like-minded writers, most of whom are from the West Coast and most of whom experiment with language and see poetry as a vehicle for criticism and theory as much as self-expression. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein and published in 1984, collects essays from this group of writers.

A number of...