John Ashbery

John Ashbery
Poet John Ashbery giving a lecture at a University.
Born	July 28, 1927(1927-07-28) Rochester, New York, USA
Occupation	Poet, Professor
Nationality	American
Writing period	1949-
Literary movement	Surrealism
Notable work(s)	Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Notable award(s)	National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Guggenheim Fellowship
Domestic partner(s)	David Kermani

John Ashbery (born July 28, 1927) is an American poet.^[1] He has won nearly every major American award for poetry and is recognized as one of America's most important, though still controversial, poets. In an article on Elizabeth Bishop in his Selected Prose, he characterizes himself as having been described as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism."

"No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery," Langdon Hammer, chairman of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008. "[N]o American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound".^[2] Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, the "last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible".^[3]

Life

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Ashbery was born in Rochester^[4], New York, and raised on a farm near Lake Ontario; his brother died when they were children.^[5] Ashbery was educated at Deerfield Academy. At Deerfield, an all-boys school, Ashbery read such poets as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Wallace Stevens, and began writing poetry. One of his poems was published in Poetry magazine, although under the name of a classmate who had submitted it without Ashbery's knowledge or permission. He also published a handful of poems, including a sonnet about his frustrated love for a fellow student, and a piece of short fiction in the school newspaper, the Deerfield Scroll. His first ambition was to be a painter. From the age of eleven until fifteen he took weekly classes at the art museum in Rochester.

Ashbery graduated in 1949 with an A.B., cum laude, from Harvard College, where he was a member of the Harvard Advocate, the university's literary magazine, and the Signet Society. He wrote his senior thesis on the poetry of W. H. Auden. At Harvard he befriended fellow writers Kenneth Koch, Barbara Epstein, V. R. Lang, Frank O'Hara and Edward Gorey, and was a classmate of Robert Creeley, Robert Bly and Peter Davison. Ashbery went on to study briefly at New York University, and received an M.A. from Columbia in 1951.

From the mid-1950s, when he received a Fulbright Fellowship, through 1965, he lived in France. He served as the art editor for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune, while also translating potboilers and contemporary French literature. During this period he lived with the French poet Pierre Martory. After returning to the United States, he continued his career as an art critic, for New York and Newsweek magazines, while also serving on the editorial board of ARTNews until 1972. Several years later, he began a stint as an editor at Partisan Review, serving from 1976 to 1980.

During the fall of 1963, Ashbery became acquainted with Andy Warhol at a scheduled poetry reading at the Literary Theatre in New York. He had also previously written favorable reviews of Warhol's art. That same year he reviewed Warhol's Flowers exhibition at Galerie Illeana Sonnabend in Paris, describing Warhol's visit to Paris as "the biggest transatlantic fuss since Oscar Wilde brought culture to Buffalo in the nineties." Ashbery returned to New York near the end of 1965 and was welcomed with a large party at the Factory. He became close friends with poet Gerard Malanga, Warhol's assistant, on whom he had an important influence as a poet.

In the early 1970s, Ashbery began teaching at Brooklyn College, where his students included poet John Yau. In the 1980s, he moved to Bard College, where he is the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature. He was the poet laureate of New York state from 2001 to 2003, and also served for many years as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He serves on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. Ashbery lives in New York City and Hudson, New York, with his partner, David Kermani.

Works

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Ashbery's long list of awards began with the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1956, selected by W. H. Auden, for his first collection, Some Trees. His early work shows the influence of W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Boris Pasternak, and many of the French surrealists (his translations from French literature are numerous). In the late 1950s, the critic John Bernard Myers categorized the common traits of Ashbery's avant-garde poetry, as well as that of Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenward Elmslie and others, as constituting a "New York School." Ashbery then wrote two collections while in France, the highly controversial The Tennis Court Oath (1962), and Rivers and Mountains (1966), before returning to New York to write The Double Dream of Spring, which was published in 1970.

Increasing critical recognition in the 1970s transformed Ashbery from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important (though still one of its most controversial) poets. After the publication of Three Poems (1973), Ashbery in 1975 won all three major American poetry prizes (the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award) for his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The collection's title poem is considered to be one of the masterpieces of late-20th-century American poetic literature.

His subsequent collection, the more difficult Houseboat Days (1977), reinforced Ashbery's reputation, as did 1979's As We Know, which contains the long, double-columned poem "Litany." By the 1980s and 1990s, Ashbery had become a central figure in American and more broadly English-language poetry, as his number of imitators evidenced. His own poetry was accused of a staleness in this period, but books like A Wave (1985) and the later And the Stars Were Shining (1994), particularly in their long poems, show the unmistakable originality of a great poet in practice.

Ashbery's works are characterized by a free-flowing, often disjunctive syntax; extensive linguistic play, often infused with considerable humor; and a prosaic, sometimes disarmingly flat or parodic tone. The play of the human mind is the subject of a great many of his poems. Ashbery once said that his goal was "to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about."^[6] Formally, the earliest poems show the influence of conventional poetic practice, yet by The Tennis Court Oath a much more revolutionary engagement with form appears. Ashbery returned to something approximating conventional verse, at least on its surface, with many of the poems in The Double Dream of Spring, though his Three Poems are written in long blocks of prose. Although he has never again approached the radical experimentation of The Tennis Court Oath poems or "The Skaters" and "Into the Dusk-Charged Air" from his collection Rivers and Mountains, syntactic and semantic experimentation, linguistic expressiveness, deft, often abrupt shifts of register, and insistent wit remain consistent elements of his work.

Ashbery's art criticism has been collected in the 1989 volume Reported Sightings, Art Chronicles 1957-1987, edited by the poet David Bergman. He has written one novel, A Nest of Ninnies, with fellow poet James Schuyler, and in his 20s and 30s penned several plays, three of which have been collected in Three Plays (1978). Ashbery's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University were published as Other Traditions in 2000. A larger collection of his prose writings, Selected Prose, appeared in 2005, and a Collected Poems 1956–1987 in the Library of America series during 2008.

Influences

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• W. H. Auden
• Wallace Stevens
• Raymond Roussel
• John Clare
• Marianne Moore
• Giorgio de Chirico
• Jasper Johns
• Gertrude Stein

Writings

Reviews

This past October, the Library of America released John Ashbery’s Collected Poems (1956-1987), making him the first living poet to be “canonised” in the series. It is a fitting honour for a man whose decades-long reign as one of the high priests of the contemporary American poetry scene has always been something of a paradox. Having received nearly every major award for achievement in the humanities, he continues to incite considerable debate as to whether his poems “mean” anything at all. To read an Ashbery poem with the intent to explicate in the traditional sense is to make a daring, perhaps foolhardy, leap of semantic faith.^[7]

Further reading

• Stephen Shore, Lynne Tillman, The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-1967
• David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, Volume II, Modernism and After, Harvard University Press, 1987
• Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination
• Laura Quinney, The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery
• John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, Harvard University Press, 1995
• Helen Vendler, Soul Says, Harvard University Press, 1996
• Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006)
• John Emil Vincent, John Ashbery and You: His Later Books

References

External links

• Brendan Bernhard (March 30, 2005). "The Blather is Profound and Beautifully Formed". New York Sun Newspaper. http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=11390. 

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Ashbery

• Poems by John Ashbery at PoetryFoundation.org
• The Ashbery Resource Center
• John Ashbery at EPC
• John Ashbery--the Academy of American Poets
• Works by or about John Ashbery in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Ron Silliman

• Part 1:"Think about John Ashbery’s Three Poems..."
• Part 2:"The only part of writing that is literally organic..."
• Part 3:"Nowhere is this resistance more fully enacted than in Three Poems"
• Part 4:"As such, it represents one of the most intellectually ambitious literary projects ever written".

• "Normalizing John Ashbery" by Marjorie Perloff
• Still Time for Surprises: John Ashbery's Recent Books by Marjorie Perloff
• "A Kind of Musical Space": Interview with John Ashbery by Craig Burnett
• "Ashbery the Charlatan" by Said Shirazi.
• Podcast: Ashbery reading from Chinese Whispers at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2003
• "John Ashbery and his poetry of Mud" - An interview with Aryanil Mukherjee @ Kaurab
• Carcanet Press - John Ashbery's UK publisher
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography, including audio and video clips
• Ashbery author page and archive from The New York Review of Books