Katherine (“Hava”) Koch’s Memoir of Her Dad and His Circle

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John
Ashbery wrote a postcard to my mother in Rome, in 1955, when she was
about seven months pregnant with me. From the turn of the twentieth
century, the card shows a slim-waisted woman wearing a huge hat,
beating away—with her parasol—a giant stork, from whose neck hangs a
baby in a sling. "And The Villain Still Pursues Her," runs the caption
at the bottom. The stork looks as though he's about to pierce her
parasol with his long beak. It's hard to imagine what someone would
have been thinking, in the early part of the century, to send this
card. Would it have been addressed to a man? A woman? With what
purpose? The idea seems to be that this slender woman can't stop
getting pregnant, or can't keep herself from having a baby. "Unusually unreliable sources here have it that
you're about to favor us with a poet," writes John on the other side,
"I hope it's true. Suggest you make me the child's Aristotle … P.S.
If it's a girl, I suggest "Hava" as a nice first name."
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— from "Love and Irony: Postcards from a Child of the New York School" by Katherine Koch