LOUDNAIJA360GIST

Usher says there's no way he went to a Days Inn to hook up with the woman suing him ... because he was too busy falling in love with the woman who's now his wife. Sources close to the singer tell TMZ ... he says there was never a hotel hookup with Quantasia Sharpton , telling friends, in November 2014 he was on the verge of getting engaged to Grace Miguel . Usher tells them at the time of his alleged encounter, Grace was his manager and they spent ALL their free time together. His people say when the two weren't enjoying free time, it was all business, and they were inseparable. The couple got engaged less than 2 months after the alleged Days Inn tryst. Usher's people also say on the night in question his show ran late, which pushed the meet-and-greet well after midnight ... and that flies in the face with Quantasia's timeline in which she claims she hooked up with the singer around 12. We're told his travel schedule was super tight too ... ma...

THE SONGS WE KNOW BEST John Ashbery’s Early Life By Karin Roffman Illustrated. 316 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30. “My own autobiography has never interested me very much,” John Ashbery once told an interviewer. “Whenever I try to think about it, I seem to draw a complete blank.” Over the course of his long career as one of America’s most celebrated poets, Ashbery has fiercely defied a central premise of the lyric poetic tradition: that a poem should be a “song of myself,” an utterance that springs from the circumstances of the writer’s life and gives insight into the author’s mind and feelings. “I have always been averse to talking about myself and so I don’t write about my life the way the confessional poets do,” he has said. Instead, Ashbery aims to create “paradigms of common experience which I hope other peopl...