John Ashbery

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John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927-1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic who wrote in many languages of his time.

Ashbery "sounded, in poetry, the normal tones of the period," Oxford University literary scholar John Bayley said. "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery," Langdon Hammer, chair of Yale University's English Department, wrote in 2008. Not Whitman, not Pound." Stephanie Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, the last figure for whom half the English-language poets alive considered a great model and the other half thought incomprehensible" and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976.

His work, which has been lauded for its postmodernity and opacity, is also controversial.

Ashbery said he wanted his work to be available to as many people as possible, not a personal conversation with him.

At the same time, he once joked that some commentators still think of him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even Surrealistic theory and logic."

Life

Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, the son of Helen (née Lawrence), a biology instructor, and Chester Frederick Ashbery, a farmer. He was raised on a farm near Lake Ontario; his brother died when they were children. Ashbery was educated at Deerfield Academy, an all-boys academy, where he read poetry by W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. A classmate who had submitted them under his own name, without Ashbery's knowledge or permission, published two of his poems in Poetry magazine. In the Deerfield Scroll, Ashbery also published a piece of short fiction and a handful of poems, including a sonnet about his ardent love for a fellow student. Ashbery's first ambition was to be a painter: Ashbery took weekly classes at the Rochester art museum from the age of 11 to 15.

Ashbery graduated with an A.B. from Harvard College, where he was a member of the Harvard Advocate, the university's literary journal, and the Signet Society. W. H. Auden's poetry was the subject of his senior thesis. Kenneth Koch, Barbara Epstein, V. R. Lang, Frank O'Hara, and Edward Goy, a classmate of Robert Creeley, Robert Bly, and Peter Davison, was a classmate of Robert Creeley, Robert Bly and Peter Davison. Ashbery went on to study briefly at New York University before receiving a Master's degree. In 1951, Columbia University was founded in Columbia University.

Ashbery lived in France from 1951 to 1955 after being a copywriter in New York from 1951 to 1955, from the mid-1950s, when he received a Fulbright Fellowship to 1965. He edited the 12 issues of Art and Literature (1964–67) and Harry Mathews' Locus Solus (# 3/4; 1962). To bring an end to a meeting, he translated French murder mysteries, worked as the art editor for the New York Herald Tribune and was a Paris reporter for ARTnews (1963–66), when Thomas Hess assumed as editor. During this period, he worked with French poet Pierre Martory, whose books Every Question But One (1990) and The Landscapist (1996) he translated (2008) as he did Arthur Rimbaud (Illuminations), Pierre Reverdy (Haunted House), and several titles by Raymond Roussel. Since returning to the United States, he continued his work as an art critic for New York and Newsweek magazines, as well as serving on the editorial board of ARTnews until 1972. Several years later, he began writing at Partisan Review, from 1976 to 1980.

Ashbery became acquainted with Andy Warhol in the fall of 1963 at a scheduled poetry reading at the Literary Theatre in New York. He had previously written glowing reviews of Warhol's art. Warhol's Flowers exhibition at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris this year, he wrote about Warhol's trip to Paris as "the biggest transatlantic protest since Oscar Wilde brought culture to Buffalo in the nineties." Ashbery returned to New York at the end of 1965 and was welcomed with a large crowd at the Factory. On whom he had a major influence as a poet, he became close friends with poet Gerard Malanga, Warhol's assistant, on whom he had a strong following as a writer. He wrote Europe in 1967 as the central text in Eric Salzman's Foxes and Hedgehogs as part of the New Image of Sound collection at Hunter College, directed by Dennis Russell Davies. In 1968, Salzman Three Madrigals were included in the composer's seminal Nude Paper Sermon, which was released by Nonesuch Records in 1989.

Ashbery began teaching at Brooklyn College in the 1970s, where his students included poet John Yau. In 1983, he was appointed a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He moved to Bard College, where he was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature, from 2008 to 2008, where he continued to gain honors, present readings, and work with undergraduate and undergraduate students at many other colleges. He served as the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, as well as as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for many years. He served on the editorial board of Conjunctions, the literary journal. Ashbery was named the first poet Laureate of MtvU in 2008, a MTV affiliate of MTV broadcast to U.S. college campuses, with excerpts from his poems appearing in 18 promotional spots and the entire collection on the broadcaster's website.

Ashbery was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University in 2010 and was a member of Wesleyan University's Distinguished Writers Collection. He was a founding member of The Raymond Roussel Society, alongside Miquel Barceló, Joan Bofill-Amargós, Michel Butor, Thor Halvorssen, and Hermes Salceda.

Ashbery and his partner, David Kermani, lived in New York City and Hudson, New York. He died of natural causes on September 3, 2017, at his Hudson home at the age of 90.

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Awards and honors

• 1956: Yale Younger Poets Prize, for Some Trees (1956) awarded by W.H. Auden
• 1962: Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship
• 1972: Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship
• 1976: National Book Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).
• 1976: National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).
• 1976: Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).
• 1984: Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for A Wave (1984)
• 1984: Bollingen Prize in Poetry for A Wave (1984)
• 1985: MacArthur Fellows Program Fellowship
• 1987: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
• 1995: Robert Frost Medal
• 2002: Bestowed the rank of Officier de la Légion d'honneur by the Republic of France.
• 2005: finalist for National Book Award for Where Shall I Wander (2005)
• 2008: Robert Creeley Award
• 2008: America Award for a lifetime contribution to international writing
• 2011 National Humanities Medal
• 2011: Inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame
• 2011: National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
• 2017: The Raymond Roussel Society Medal