John Ashbery | |
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_(2).jpg) Ashbery in 1975 | |
| Born | John Lawrence Ashbery (1927-07-28)July 28, 1927 Rochester, New York, U.S. |
| Died | September 3, 2017(2017-09-03) (aged 90) Hudson, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Poet, professor, and art critic |
| Education | Harvard University (BA) New York University Columbia University (MA) |
| Period | 1949–2017 |
| Literary movement | Surrealism,The New York School,Postmodernism |
| Notable works | Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror |
| Notable awards | MacArthur Fellowship,Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,National Book Award,National Book Critics Circle Award,Guggenheim Fellowship |
| Spouse | David Kermani |
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John Lawrence Ashbery[1] (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an Americanpoet andart critic.[2]
Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time.Oxford University literary criticJohn Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in poetry, the standard tones of the age."[3] Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department atYale University, wrote in 2008, "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery" and "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound."[4]Stephanie Burt, a poet andHarvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery toT. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible".[5]
Ashbery published more than 20 volumes of poetry. Among other awards, he received thePulitzer Prize for Poetry,National Book Award,National Book Critics Circle Award for his collectionSelf-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).[6] In 2007, he became the first living poet to be anthologized by theLibrary of America. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, his work still proves controversial. Ashbery said he wished his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, not a private dialogue with himself.[2][7] He also joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic ofSurrealism."[8] He reflected: "I’m not very good at explaining my work... I'm unable to do so because I feel that my poetry is the explanation. The explanation of what? Of my thought, whatever that is. As I see it, my thought is both poetry and the attempt to explain that poetry; the two cannot be disentangled."[9]
Ashbery was born inRochester, New York,[10] the son of Helen (née Lawrence), a biology teacher, and Chester Frederick Ashbery, a farmer.[11] He was raised on a farm nearLake Ontario; his brother died when they were children.[12] Ashbery was educated atDeerfield Academy, an all-boys school, where he read such poets asW. H. Auden andDylan Thomas and began writing poetry. Two of his poems were published inPoetry magazine by a classmate who had submitted them under his own name, without Ashbery's knowledge or permission.[13] Ashbery also published a piece of short fiction and a handful of poems—including asonnet about his frustrated love for a fellow student—in the school newspaper, theDeerfield Scroll. His first ambition was to be a painter: from the age of 11 until he was 15, Ashbery took weekly classes at the art museum in Rochester.
Ashbery graduated in 1949 with an A.B.,cum laude, fromHarvard College, where he was a member of theHarvard Advocate, the university's literary magazine, and theSignet Society. He wrote his senior thesis on the poetry of W. H. Auden. At Harvard he befriended fellow writersKenneth Koch,Barbara Epstein,V. R. Lang,Frank O'Hara andEdward Gorey, and was a classmate ofRobert Creeley,Robert Bly andPeter Davison. Ashbery went on to study briefly atNew York University before receiving an M.A. fromColumbia University in 1951.
After working as acopywriter inNew York from 1951 to 1955,[14] from the mid-1950s, when he received aFulbright Fellowship, through 1965, Ashbery lived inFrance. He was an editor of the 12 issues ofArt and Literature (1964–67) and theNew Poetry issue ofHarry Mathews'Locus Solus (# 3/4; 1962). To make ends meet he translated French murder mysteries, served as the art editor for the European edition of theNew York Herald Tribune and was an art critic forArt International (1960–65) and a Paris correspondent forARTnews (1963–66), when Thomas Hess took over as editor. During this period he lived with the French poetPierre Martory, whose booksEvery Question but One (1990),The Landscape is behind the Door (1994) andThe Landscapist he translated (2008), as he didArthur Rimbaud (Illuminations),Max Jacob (The Dice Cup),Pierre Reverdy (Haunted House), and many titles byRaymond Roussel. After returning to the United States, he continued his career as anart critic forNew York andNewsweek magazines while also serving on the editorial board ofARTnews until 1972. Several years later, he began a stint as an editor atPartisan Review, serving from 1976 to 1980.
During the fall of 1963, Ashbery became acquainted withAndy Warhol at a scheduled poetry reading at theLiterary Theatre in New York. He had previously written favorable reviews of Warhol's art. That same year he reviewed Warhol'sFlowers exhibition at GalerieIleana Sonnabend in Paris, describing Warhol's visit to Paris as "the biggest transatlantic fuss sinceOscar Wilde brought culture toBuffalo in the nineties". Ashbery returned to New York near the end of 1965 and was welcomed with a large party atthe Factory. He became close friends with poetGerard Malanga, Warhol's assistant, on whom he had an important influence as a poet. In 1967 his poemEurope was used as the central text inEric Salzman'sFoxes and Hedgehogs as part of theNew Image of Sound series atHunter College, conducted byDennis Russell Davies. When the poet sent SalzmanThree Madrigals in 1968, the composer featured them in the seminalNude Paper Sermon, released byNonesuch Records in 1989.[15]
In the early 1970s, Ashbery began teaching atBrooklyn College, where his students included poetJohn Yau. He was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983.[1] In the 1980s, he moved toBard College, where he was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature, until 2008, when he retired but continued to win awards, present readings, and work with graduate and undergraduates at many other institutions. He was thepoet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003,[16] and also served for many years as a chancellor of theAcademy of American Poets. He served on the contributing editorial board of the literary journalConjunctions. In 2008 Ashbery was named the first poet laureate ofMtvU, a division ofMTV broadcast to U.S. college campuses, with excerpts from his poems featured in 18 promotional spots and the works in their entirety on the broadcaster's website.[17]
Ashbery was a Millet Writing Fellow atWesleyan University in 2010, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.[18] He was a founding member ofThe Raymond Roussel Society, withMiquel Barceló, Joan Bofill-Amargós,Michel Butor, Thor Halvorssen and Hermes Salceda.
Ashbery lived in New York City andHudson, New York, with his husband, David Kermani.[19] He died of natural causes on September 3, 2017, at his home in Hudson, at the age of 90.[20][21]
Ashbery's long list of awards began with theYale Younger Poets Prize in 1956. The selection, byW. H. Auden, of Ashbery's first collection,Some Trees, later caused some controversy.[22][23][24] The volume was screened out in the contest's early stages and was given to Auden byChester Kallman after Auden had decided not to award the prize that year because of the poor quality of the volumes he received.[25] Ashbery's early work shows the influence of Auden, along withWallace Stevens,Boris Pasternak, and many of the Frenchsurrealists (his translations from French literature are numerous), though he claimed in a 1956 letter to "hate all modern French poetry, except forRaymond Roussel" and to like his own "wildly inaccurate translations of some of the 20th-century ones, but not the originals".[26]
In the late 1950s, John Bernard Myers, co-owner of theTibor de Nagy Gallery, categorized Ashbery'savant-garde poetry and that ofKenneth Koch,Frank O'Hara,James Schuyler,Barbara Guest,Kenward Elmslie and others as a "New York School", despite their very different styles.[27] In 1953 Myers launched the magazineSemi-Colon, in which New York School poets appeared amid an eclectic mix of authors, such as Auden,James Merrill andSaul Bellow.[28]
Ashbery published some work in the avant-gardelittle magazineNomad at the beginning of the 1960s. He then wrote two collections while in France, the highly controversialThe Tennis Court Oath (1962) andRivers and Mountains (1966), before returning to New York to writeThe Double Dream of Spring, published in 1970.[29]
Increasing critical recognition in the 1970s transformed Ashbery from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important poets (though still one of its most controversial). After the publication ofThree Poems (1973) cameSelf-portrait in a Convex Mirror, for which he was awarded the three major American poetry awards: thePulitzer Prize,[30] theNational Book Award,[31] and theNational Book Critics Circle Award.[32] The collection's title poem is considered one of the masterpieces of late 20th century American poetic literature.
His subsequent collection, the more difficultHouseboat Days (1977), reinforced Ashbery's reputation, as did 1979'sAs We Know, which contains the long, double-columned poem "Litany". In 1988, his "Bridge Poem" was installed, using metal letters, on the 375-foot-wideIrene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis; the poet was selected by the bridge's architect, artistSiah Armajani, and commissioned by theWalker Art Center.[33] By the 1980s and 1990s, Ashbery had become a central figure in American and more broadly English-language poetry, as his number of imitators attested.[34]
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. He once said that his goal was "to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about".[35] Formally, the earliest poems show the influence of conventional poetic practice, yet byThe Tennis Court Oath a much more revolutionary engagement with form appears.[36] Ashbery returned to something approaching a reconciliation between tradition and innovation with many of the poems inThe Double Dream of Spring,[37] though hisThree Poems are written in long blocks of prose. Although he never again approached the radical experimentation ofThe Tennis Court Oath poems or "The Skaters" and "Into the Dusk-Charged Air" from his collectionRivers and Mountains, syntactic and semantic experimentation, linguistic expressiveness, deft, often abrupt shifts of register, and insistent wit remained consistent elements of his work.
Ashbery's art criticism has been collected in the 1989 volumeReported Sightings, Art Chronicles 1957–1987, edited by the poetDavid Bergman.[38] He wrote one novel,A Nest of Ninnies, with fellow poetJames Schuyler,[39] and in his 20s and 30s penned several plays, three of which have been collected inThree Plays (1978).[40] Ashbery'sCharles Eliot Norton Lectures atHarvard University were published asOther Traditions in 2000.[41] A larger collection of his prose writings,Selected Prose, appeared in 2005.[42] In 2008, hisCollected Poems 1956–1987 was published as part of theLibrary of America series. This made Ashbery the first living poet to have his work published by the LOA.[43]
| Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected in |
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| East February | 2014 | Ashbery, John (March 24, 2014)."East February".The New Yorker. Vol. 90, no. 5. p. 78. RetrievedFebruary 26, 2015. | |
| At North Farm | 1984 | [48] |
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