fbpx
Wikipedia

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery[1] (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic.[2]

John Ashbery
Ashbery in 2010
BornJohn Lawrence Ashbery
(1927-07-28)July 28, 1927
Rochester, New York, U.S.
DiedSeptember 3, 2017(2017-09-03) (aged 90)
Hudson, New York, U.S.
OccupationPoet, professor, and art critic
Alma materHarvard University
Columbia University
Period1949–2017
Literary movementSurrealism, The New York School, Postmodernism
Notable worksSelf-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Notable awardsMacArthur Fellowship, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Guggenheim Fellowship
SpouseDavid Kermani
Signature

Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in poetry, the standard tones of the age."[3] Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale 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 and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. 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 and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. 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][6] At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism."[7]

Life edit

 
Photo portrait of Ashbery from the dust jacket of his 1975 poetry collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Ashbery was born in Rochester,[8] New York, the son of Helen (née Lawrence), a biology teacher, and Chester Frederick Ashbery, a farmer.[9] He was raised on a farm near Lake Ontario; his brother died when they were children.[10] Ashbery was educated at Deerfield Academy, an all-boys school, where he read such poets as W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas and began writing poetry. Two of his poems were published in Poetry magazine by a classmate who had submitted them under his own name, without Ashbery's knowledge or permission.[11] Ashbery also published a piece of short fiction and a handful of poems—including a sonnet about his frustrated love for a fellow student—in the school newspaper, the Deerfield 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 at a 2007 tribute to W. H. Auden at Cooper Union in New York City

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 before receiving an M.A. from Columbia University in 1951.

After working as a copywriter in New York from 1951 to 1955,[12] from the mid-1950s, when he received a Fulbright Fellowship, through 1965, Ashbery lived in France. He was an editor of the 12 issues of Art and Literature (1964–67) and the New Poetry issue of Harry 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 the New York Herald Tribune and was an art critic for Art International (1960–65) and a Paris correspondent for ARTnews (1963–66), when Thomas Hess took over as editor. During this period he lived with the French poet Pierre Martory, whose books Every Question but One (1990), The Landscape is behind the Door (1994) and The Landscapist he translated (2008), as he did Arthur Rimbaud (Illuminations), Max Jacob (The Dice Cup), Pierre Reverdy (Haunted House), and many titles by Raymond Roussel. 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 previously written favorable reviews of Warhol's art. That same year he reviewed Warhol's Flowers exhibition at Galerie Ileana 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 1967 his poem Europe was used as the central text in Eric Salzman's Foxes and Hedgehogs as part of the New Image of Sound series at Hunter College, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. When the poet sent Salzman Three Madrigals in 1968, the composer featured them in the seminal Nude Paper Sermon, released by Nonesuch Records in 1989.[13]

In the early 1970s, Ashbery began teaching at Brooklyn College, where his students included poet John Yau. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983.[1] In the 1980s, he moved to Bard 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 the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003,[14] and also served for many years as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He served on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. In 2008 Ashbery was named the first poet laureate of MtvU, a division of MTV 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. [15]

 
Paul Auster and Ashbery discussing their work at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival

Ashbery was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University in 2010, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.[16] He was a founding member of The Raymond Roussel Society, with Miquel Barceló, Joan Bofill-Amargós, Michel Butor, Thor Halvorssen and Hermes Salceda.

Ashbery lived in New York City and Hudson, New York, with his husband, David Kermani.[17] He died of natural causes on September 3, 2017, at his home in Hudson, at the age of 90.[18][19]

Work edit

Ashbery's long list of awards began with the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1956. The selection, by W. H. Auden, of Ashbery's first collection, Some Trees, later caused some controversy.[20][21][22] The volume was screened out in the contest's early stages and was given to Auden by Chester Kallman after Auden had decided not to award the prize that year because of the poor quality of the volumes he received.[23] Ashbery's early work shows the influence of Auden, along with Wallace Stevens, Boris Pasternak, and many of the French surrealists (his translations from French literature are numerous), though he claimed in a 1956 letter to "hate all modern French poetry, except for Raymond Roussel" and to like his own "wildly inaccurate translations of some of the 20th-century ones, but not the originals".[24]

In the late 1950s, John Bernard Myers, co-owner of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, categorized Ashbery's avant-garde poetry and that of Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenward Elmslie and others as a "New York School", despite their very different styles.[25] In 1953 Myers launched the magazine Semi-Colon, in which New York School poets appeared amid an eclectic mix of authors, such as Auden, James Ingram Merill and Saul Bellow.[26]

Ashbery published some work in the avant-garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s. He 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, published in 1970.[27]

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 of Three Poems (1973) came Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, for which he was awarded the three major American poetry awards: the Pulitzer Prize,[28] the National Book Award,[29] and the National Book Critics Circle Award.[30] The collection's title poem is considered 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". In 1988, his "Bridge Poem" was installed, using metal letters, on the 375-foot-wide Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis; the poet was selected by the bridge's architect, artist Siah Armajani, and commissioned by the Walker Art Center.[31] 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.[32]

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".[33] 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.[34] Ashbery returned to something approaching a reconciliation between tradition and innovation with many of the poems in The Double Dream of Spring,[35] though his Three Poems are written in long blocks of prose. Although he 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 remained 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.[36] He wrote one novel, A Nest of Ninnies, with fellow poet James Schuyler,[37] and in his 20s and 30s penned several plays, three of which have been collected in Three Plays (1978).[38] Ashbery's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University were published as Other Traditions in 2000.[39] A larger collection of his prose writings, Selected Prose, appeared in 2005.[6] In 2008, his Collected Poems 1956–1987 was published as part of the Library of America series. This made Ashbery the first living poet to have his work published by the LOA.[40]

Awards and honors edit

Bibliography edit

Poetry edit

Collections edit

Poems edit

Title Year First published Reprinted/collected in
East February 2014 Ashbery, John (March 24, 2014). "East February". The New Yorker. Vol. 90, no. 5. p. 78. Retrieved February 26, 2015.
At North Farm 1984 [45]

Prose, plays and translations edit

  • A Nest of Ninnies (1969), with James Schuyler. (Carcanet Press 1987, Paladin Books 1990)
  • Three Plays (1978). Carcanet Press (1988).
  • Mayoux, Jean-Jacques (1960). Melville. Trans. by John Ashbery. New York, Grove Press.
  • The Ice Storm (1987), (32-page pamphlet)
  • Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987 (1989) (Alfred A. Knopf), ed. David Bergman, Art Criticism and Commentary
  • Other Traditions(2001)Subjects and Series | Harvard University Press
  • 100 Multiple-Choice Questions (2000) (reprint of 1970 experimental pamphlet)
  • Selected Prose 1953–2003 (2005)
  • Martory, Pierre The Landscapist Ashbery (Tr.) Carcanet Press (2008)
  • Rimbaud, Arthur Illuminations Ashbery (Tr.) W. W. Norton & Company (2011)
  • Collected French Translations: Poetry, edited by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie (2014)
  • Collected French Translations: Prose, edited by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie (2014)

References edit

  1. ^ a b "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter A" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved April 25, 2011.
  2. ^ a b Ryzik, Melena (August 27, 2007). "80-Year-Old Poet for the MTV Generation". New York Times. Retrieved August 21, 2007.
  3. ^ Bayley, John (August 15, 1991). "Richly Flows Contingency". New York Review of Books. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved September 10, 2019.
  4. ^ Hammer, Langdon, "‘But I Digress’", review of Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, by John Ashbery, New York Times Book Review, April 20, 2008, accessed same day.
  5. ^ Burt, Stephen (March 26, 2008). "John Ashbery a poet for our times". The Times. London. Retrieved May 6, 2010.
  6. ^ a b c NPR interview with Ashbery about his collection Where Shall I Wander – including poem audio. March 19, 2005
  7. ^ Ashbery, John. "On Elizabeth Bishop." Selected Prose. 2005.
  8. ^ "John Ashbery". Academy of American Poets. February 4, 2014. Retrieved August 26, 2014.
  9. ^ Curry, Jennifer; Ramm, David; Rich, Mari, eds. (2007). World Authors, 2000–2005. H.W. Wilson. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-8242-1077-9.
  10. ^ . Academy of American Poets. 2008. Archived from the original on June 22, 2019. Retrieved August 26, 2014.
  11. ^ "Remembering John Ashbery". Poetry Foundation. September 11, 2017. Retrieved September 12, 2017.
  12. ^ "John Ashbery". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved August 26, 2014.
  13. ^ "Ashbery Research Center archive". Archived from the original on December 14, 2014. Retrieved September 3, 2017.
  14. ^ "New York". US State Poet Laureates. Library of Congress. Retrieved May 8, 2012.
  15. ^ Ryzik, Melena (August 27, 2007). "John Ashbery – mtvU". The New York Times.
  16. ^ John Ashbery Visits, Presents His Poetry, Wesleyanargus. By Marjorie Rivera, Contributing Writer. February 19, 2010. Retrieved October 14, 2012.
  17. ^ Orr, David; Smith, Dinitia (September 3, 2017). "John Ashbery is Dead at 90; a Poetic Voice Often Echoed, Never Matched". The New York Times.
  18. ^ . ABC News. Archived from the original on September 4, 2017. Retrieved September 3, 2017.
  19. ^ . Archived from the original on September 4, 2017. Retrieved September 3, 2017.
  20. ^ "Jascha Kessler – ArtsBeat Blog – The New York Times". papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com. December 12, 2008. Retrieved September 3, 2017.
  21. ^ "The Times & The Sunday Times". entertainment.timesonline.co.uk. Retrieved September 3, 2017.
  22. ^ "The Times & The Sunday Times". entertainment.timesonline.co.uk. Retrieved September 3, 2017.
  23. ^ Shetley, Vernon Lionel (1993). After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America. Durham & London: Duke University Press. p. 109. ISBN 978-0-8223-1342-7.
  24. ^ McGuinness, Patrick (November 15, 2014). "Collected French Translations: Poetry by John Ashbery – review". The Guardian. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  25. ^ "The Meaning of All This: Talking to John Ashbery About His Past, Present and Future". Observer. January 1, 2013. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  26. ^ Diggory, Terence (2013). Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets. New York: Infobase Learning. ISBN 978-1-4381-4066-7.
  27. ^ Jordan, Perrin Robert (December 2013). "Rivers and mountains" : the conceptual wedding of the temporal and spatial in the early volumes of John Ashbery. University of Texas Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Thesis).
  28. ^ "Winners in Poetry: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery (Viking)". www.pulitzer.org. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  29. ^ a b "National Book Awards – 1976". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
    (With acceptance speech by Ashbery and essay by Evie Shockley from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
  30. ^ . bookcritics.org. Archived from the original on September 15, 2009. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  31. ^ Schmelzere, Paul (September 12, 2017). "Not a Conduit but a Place: John Ashbery Reads his Poem for Siah Armajani's Bridge" – via Walker Reader.
  32. ^ "Let Us Now Praise John Ashbery – Open Source with Christopher Lydon". radioopensource.org. September 8, 2017. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  33. ^ O'Rourke, Meghan (March 9, 2005). "The Instruction Manual". Slate. Retrieved September 3, 2017.
  34. ^ Straub, Peter (2007). "The Oath Unbroken: The Tennis Court Oath (1962)". Conjunctions (49): 259–262. JSTOR 24516471.
  35. ^ Longenbach, James (September 3, 1997). "Ashbery and the Individual Talent". American Literary History. 9 (1): 103–127. doi:10.1093/alh/9.1.103. JSTOR 490097.
  36. ^ Brunet, Elena (September 24, 1989). "REPORTED SIGHTINGS: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987 by John Ashbery edited by David Bergman (Alfred A. Knopf: $35; 417 pp.)". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  37. ^ "The Making of John Ashbery and James Schuyler's A Nest of Ninnies | Dalkey Archive Press". www.dalkeyarchive.com. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  38. ^ Ashbery, John (1988). Three Plays. Carcanet. ISBN 978-0-85635-745-9.
  39. ^ Other Traditions — John Ashbery | Harvard University Press. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Harvard University Press. December 2001. ISBN 9780674006645. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  40. ^ "The second volume of John Ashbery's collected poems is a tribute". The Economist. Retrieved January 26, 2018.
  41. ^ "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
  42. ^ "John Ashbery: The existential loneliness of a brilliant poet". America Magazine. September 8, 2017. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  43. ^ "Robert Creeley Award". robertcreeleyfoundation.org. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  44. ^ "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 11, 2012.
    (With acceptance speech by Ashbery.)
  45. ^ Ashbery, John (April 9, 1984). "At North Farm". The New Yorker.

Further reading edit

  • Kacper Bartczak, In Search of Communication and Community: the Poetry of John Ashbery (Peter Lang, 2006)
  • Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination
  • Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: John Ashbery (Chelsea House Publishers, 1985)
  • Andrew Dubois, Ashbery's Forms of Attention (University of Alabama Press, 2006)
  • Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006)
  • David Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry (Manchester University Press, 2000)
  • Ben Hickman, John Ashbery and English Poetry (, 2012)
  • David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of The New York School of Poets (Anchor Books, 1999)
  • David Lehman, ed., Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery (Cornell University Press, 1980)
  • David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, Volume II, Modernism and After (Harvard University Press, 1987)
  • Laura Quinney, The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery
  • David Shapiro, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry (Columbia University Press, 1979)
  • John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1995)
  • Stephen Shore, Lynne Tillman, The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965–1967
  • Susan M. Schultz, ed., The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (The University of Alabama Press, 1995)
  • Mark Silverberg, The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Ashgate, 2010)
  • Helen Vendler, Soul Says (Harvard University Press, 1996)
  • John Emil Vincent, John Ashbery and You: His Later Books (University of Georgia Press, 2007)
  • Pierre Vinclair, Autoportrait de John Ashbery. Une cérémonie improvisée [fr], Paris, Hermann, 2021.

External links edit

  • John Ashbery’s Whisper Out of Time Ben Lerner on John Ashbery in The New Yorker
  • ‘a serpentine | Gesture’: The Synthetic Reconstruction of Ashbery’s Poetic Voice in Cordite Poetry Review
  • Poems by John Ashbery at PoetryFoundation.org
  • John Ashbery at EPC
  • John Ashbery—the Academy of American Poets
  • Peter A. Stitt (Winter 1983). "John Ashbery, The Art of Poetry No. 33". Paris Review. Winter 1983 (90).
  • Audio recordings from Key West Literary Seminar, 2003: Ashbery reading from Chinese Whispers; Ashbery's 'mini-lecture' on Elizabeth Bishop
  • Audio recordings of John Ashbery July 29, 2014, at the Wayback Machine, from the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University
  • Carcanet Press – John Ashbery's UK publisher
  • Griffin Poetry Prize biography
  • Griffin Poetry Prize reading, including video clip
  • Modern American Poetry, critical essays on Ashbery's works
  • Bookworm Interviews (Audio) with Michael Silverblatt: May 2007, May 2009, April 2010
  • John Ashbery by Adam Fitzgerald in BOMB Magazine

john, ashbery, john, lawrence, ashbery, july, 1927, september, 2017, american, poet, critic, ashbery, 2010bornjohn, lawrence, ashbery, 1927, july, 1927rochester, york, diedseptember, 2017, 2017, aged, hudson, york, occupationpoet, professor, criticalma, materh. John Lawrence Ashbery 1 July 28 1927 September 3 2017 was an American poet and art critic 2 John AshberyAshbery in 2010BornJohn Lawrence Ashbery 1927 07 28 July 28 1927Rochester New York U S DiedSeptember 3 2017 2017 09 03 aged 90 Hudson New York U S OccupationPoet professor and art criticAlma materHarvard UniversityColumbia UniversityPeriod1949 2017Literary movementSurrealism The New York School PostmodernismNotable worksSelf Portrait in a Convex MirrorNotable awardsMacArthur Fellowship Pulitzer Prize for Poetry National Book Award National Book Critics Circle Award Guggenheim FellowshipSpouseDavid KermaniSignatureAshbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery sounded in poetry the standard tones of the age 3 Langdon Hammer chair of the English Department at Yale 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 and Harvard professor of English has compared Ashbery to T 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 and won nearly every major American award for poetry including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror 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 6 At the same time he once joked that some critics still view him as a harebrained homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism 7 Contents 1 Life 2 Work 3 Awards and honors 4 Bibliography 4 1 Poetry 4 1 1 Collections 4 1 2 Poems 4 2 Prose plays and translations 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External linksLife edit nbsp Photo portrait of Ashbery from the dust jacket of his 1975 poetry collection Self Portrait in a Convex MirrorAshbery was born in Rochester 8 New York the son of Helen nee Lawrence a biology teacher and Chester Frederick Ashbery a farmer 9 He was raised on a farm near Lake Ontario his brother died when they were children 10 Ashbery was educated at Deerfield Academy an all boys school where he read such poets as W H Auden and Dylan Thomas and began writing poetry Two of his poems were published in Poetry magazine by a classmate who had submitted them under his own name without Ashbery s knowledge or permission 11 Ashbery also published a piece of short fiction and a handful of poems including a sonnet about his frustrated love for a fellow student in the school newspaper the Deerfield 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 nbsp Ashbery at a 2007 tribute to W H Auden at Cooper Union in New York CityAshbery 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 before receiving an M A from Columbia University in 1951 After working as a copywriter in New York from 1951 to 1955 12 from the mid 1950s when he received a Fulbright Fellowship through 1965 Ashbery lived in France He was an editor of the 12 issues of Art and Literature 1964 67 and the New Poetry issue of Harry 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 the New York Herald Tribune and was an art critic for Art International 1960 65 and a Paris correspondent for ARTnews 1963 66 when Thomas Hess took over as editor During this period he lived with the French poet Pierre Martory whose books Every Question but One 1990 The Landscape is behind the Door 1994 and The Landscapist he translated 2008 as he did Arthur Rimbaud Illuminations Max Jacob The Dice Cup Pierre Reverdy Haunted House and many titles by Raymond Roussel 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 previously written favorable reviews of Warhol s art That same year he reviewed Warhol s Flowers exhibition at Galerie Ileana 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 1967 his poem Europe was used as the central text in Eric Salzman s Foxes and Hedgehogs as part of the New Image of Sound series at Hunter College conducted by Dennis Russell Davies When the poet sent Salzman Three Madrigals in 1968 the composer featured them in the seminal Nude Paper Sermon released by Nonesuch Records in 1989 13 In the early 1970s Ashbery began teaching at Brooklyn College where his students included poet John Yau He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983 1 In the 1980s he moved to Bard 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 the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003 14 and also served for many years as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets He served on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions In 2008 Ashbery was named the first poet laureate of MtvU a division of MTV 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 15 nbsp Paul Auster and Ashbery discussing their work at the 2010 Brooklyn Book FestivalAshbery was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University in 2010 and participated in Wesleyan s Distinguished Writers Series 16 He was a founding member of The Raymond Roussel Society with Miquel Barcelo Joan Bofill Amargos Michel Butor Thor Halvorssen and Hermes Salceda Ashbery lived in New York City and Hudson New York with his husband David Kermani 17 He died of natural causes on September 3 2017 at his home in Hudson at the age of 90 18 19 Work editAshbery s long list of awards began with the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1956 The selection by W H Auden of Ashbery s first collection Some Trees later caused some controversy 20 21 22 The volume was screened out in the contest s early stages and was given to Auden by Chester Kallman after Auden had decided not to award the prize that year because of the poor quality of the volumes he received 23 Ashbery s early work shows the influence of Auden along with Wallace Stevens Boris Pasternak and many of the French surrealists his translations from French literature are numerous though he claimed in a 1956 letter to hate all modern French poetry except for Raymond Roussel and to like his own wildly inaccurate translations of some of the 20th century ones but not the originals 24 In the late 1950s John Bernard Myers co owner of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery categorized Ashbery s avant garde poetry and that of Kenneth Koch Frank O Hara James Schuyler Barbara Guest Kenward Elmslie and others as a New York School despite their very different styles 25 In 1953 Myers launched the magazine Semi Colon in which New York School poets appeared amid an eclectic mix of authors such as Auden James Ingram Merill and Saul Bellow 26 Ashbery published some work in the avant garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s He 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 published in 1970 27 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 of Three Poems 1973 came Self portrait in a Convex Mirror for which he was awarded the three major American poetry awards the Pulitzer Prize 28 the National Book Award 29 and the National Book Critics Circle Award 30 The collection s title poem is considered 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 In 1988 his Bridge Poem was installed using metal letters on the 375 foot wide Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis the poet was selected by the bridge s architect artist Siah Armajani and commissioned by the Walker Art Center 31 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 32 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 33 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 34 Ashbery returned to something approaching a reconciliation between tradition and innovation with many of the poems in The Double Dream of Spring 35 though his Three Poems are written in long blocks of prose Although he 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 remained 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 36 He wrote one novel A Nest of Ninnies with fellow poet James Schuyler 37 and in his 20s and 30s penned several plays three of which have been collected in Three Plays 1978 38 Ashbery s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University were published as Other Traditions in 2000 39 A larger collection of his prose writings Selected Prose appeared in 2005 6 In 2008 his Collected Poems 1956 1987 was published as part of the Library of America series This made Ashbery the first living poet to have his work published by the LOA 40 Awards and honors editMain article List of honors received by John Ashbery 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 41 1995 Robert Frost Medal 2002 Bestowed the rank of Officier de la Legion d honneur by the Republic of France 42 2005 finalist for National Book Award for Where Shall I Wander 2005 2008 Robert Creeley Award 43 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 44 2017 The Raymond Roussel Society MedalBibliography editMain article John Ashbery bibliography Poetry edit Collections edit Turandot and other poems 1953 Some Trees 1956 winner of the 1955 Yale Series of Younger Poets The Tennis Court Oath 1962 Rivers and Mountains 1966 The Double Dream of Spring 1970 Three Poems 1972 The Vermont Notebook 1975 illustrated prose poems Self portrait in a Convex Mirror 1975 awarded the Pulitzer Prize the National Book Award 29 and the National Book Critics Circle Award Houseboat Days 1977 As We Know 1979 Shadow Train 1981 A Wave 1984 awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize April Galleons 1987 Flow Chart 1991 book length poem Hotel Lautreamont 1992 And the Stars Were Shining 1994 Can You Hear Bird 1995 The Mooring of Starting Out The First Five Books of Poetry 1997 Wakefulness 1998 Girls on the Run 1999 a book length poem inspired by the work of Henry Darger Your Name Here 2000 As Umbrellas Follow Rain 2001 Chinese Whispers 2002 Where Shall I Wander 2005 finalist for the National Book Award 6 Notes from the Air Selected Later Poems 2007 winner of the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize A Worldly Country 2007 Planisphere 2009 Collected Poems 1956 87 Carcanet Press 2010 ed Mark Ford Quick Question 2012 Breezeway 2015 Commotion of the Birds 2016 They Knew What They Wanted Collages and Poems 2018 Parallel Movement of the Hands Five Unfinished Longer Works 2021 Poems edit Title Year First published Reprinted collected inEast February 2014 Ashbery John March 24 2014 East February The New Yorker Vol 90 no 5 p 78 Retrieved February 26 2015 At North Farm 1984 45 Prose plays and translations edit A Nest of Ninnies 1969 with James Schuyler Carcanet Press 1987 Paladin Books 1990 Three Plays 1978 Carcanet Press 1988 Mayoux Jean Jacques 1960 Melville Trans by John Ashbery New York Grove Press The Ice Storm 1987 32 page pamphlet Reported Sightings Art Chronicles 1957 1987 1989 Alfred A Knopf ed David Bergman Art Criticism and Commentary Other Traditions 2001 Subjects and Series Harvard University Press 100 Multiple Choice Questions 2000 reprint of 1970 experimental pamphlet Selected Prose 1953 2003 2005 Martory Pierre The Landscapist Ashbery Tr Carcanet Press 2008 Rimbaud Arthur Illuminations Ashbery Tr W W Norton amp Company 2011 Collected French Translations Poetry edited by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie 2014 Collected French Translations Prose edited by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie 2014 References edit a b Book of Members 1780 2010 Chapter A PDF American Academy of Arts and Sciences Retrieved April 25 2011 a b Ryzik Melena August 27 2007 80 Year Old Poet for the MTV Generation New York Times Retrieved August 21 2007 Bayley John August 15 1991 Richly Flows Contingency New York Review of Books ISSN 0028 7504 Retrieved September 10 2019 Hammer Langdon But I Digress review of Notes from the Air Selected Later Poems by John Ashbery New York Times Book Review April 20 2008 accessed same day Burt Stephen March 26 2008 John Ashbery a poet for our times The Times London Retrieved May 6 2010 a b c NPR interview with Ashbery about his collection Where Shall I Wander including poem audio March 19 2005 Ashbery John On Elizabeth Bishop Selected Prose 2005 John Ashbery Academy of American Poets February 4 2014 Retrieved August 26 2014 Curry Jennifer Ramm David Rich Mari eds 2007 World Authors 2000 2005 H W Wilson p 14 ISBN 978 0 8242 1077 9 Video The Other Twenty Three Hours Academy of American Poets 2008 Archived from the original on June 22 2019 Retrieved August 26 2014 Remembering John Ashbery Poetry Foundation September 11 2017 Retrieved September 12 2017 John Ashbery Encyclopaedia Britannica Retrieved August 26 2014 Ashbery Research Center archive Archived from the original on December 14 2014 Retrieved September 3 2017 New York US State Poet Laureates Library of Congress Retrieved May 8 2012 Ryzik Melena August 27 2007 John Ashbery mtvU The New York Times John Ashbery Visits Presents His Poetry Wesleyanargus By Marjorie Rivera Contributing Writer February 19 2010 Retrieved October 14 2012 Orr David Smith Dinitia September 3 2017 John Ashbery is Dead at 90 a Poetic Voice Often Echoed Never Matched The New York Times John Ashbery regarded as one of the world s greatest poets dies at age 90 his husband confirms ABC News Archived from the original on September 4 2017 Retrieved September 3 2017 John Ashbery celebrated and challenging poet dies at 90 Archived from the original on September 4 2017 Retrieved September 3 2017 Jascha Kessler ArtsBeat Blog The New York Times papercuts blogs nytimes com December 12 2008 Retrieved September 3 2017 The Times amp The Sunday Times entertainment timesonline co uk Retrieved September 3 2017 The Times amp The Sunday Times entertainment timesonline co uk Retrieved September 3 2017 Shetley Vernon Lionel 1993 After the Death of Poetry Poet and Audience in Contemporary America Durham amp London Duke University Press p 109 ISBN 978 0 8223 1342 7 McGuinness Patrick November 15 2014 Collected French Translations Poetry by John Ashbery review The Guardian Retrieved November 18 2018 The Meaning of All This Talking to John Ashbery About His Past Present and Future Observer January 1 2013 Retrieved November 18 2018 Diggory Terence 2013 Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets New York Infobase Learning ISBN 978 1 4381 4066 7 Jordan Perrin Robert December 2013 Rivers and mountains the conceptual wedding of the temporal and spatial in the early volumes of John Ashbery University of Texas Electronic Theses and Dissertations Thesis Winners in Poetry Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery Viking www pulitzer org Retrieved November 18 2018 a b National Book Awards 1976 National Book Foundation Retrieved 2012 02 25 With acceptance speech by Ashbery and essay by Evie Shockley from the Awards 60 year anniversary blog National Book Critics Circle In Retrospect Maureen N McLane on John Ashbery s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror Critical Mass Blog bookcritics org Archived from the original on September 15 2009 Retrieved November 18 2018 Schmelzere Paul September 12 2017 Not a Conduit but a Place John Ashbery Reads his Poem for Siah Armajani s Bridge via Walker Reader Let Us Now Praise John Ashbery Open Source with Christopher Lydon radioopensource org September 8 2017 Retrieved November 18 2018 O Rourke Meghan March 9 2005 The Instruction Manual Slate Retrieved September 3 2017 Straub Peter 2007 The Oath Unbroken The Tennis Court Oath 1962 Conjunctions 49 259 262 JSTOR 24516471 Longenbach James September 3 1997 Ashbery and the Individual Talent American Literary History 9 1 103 127 doi 10 1093 alh 9 1 103 JSTOR 490097 Brunet Elena September 24 1989 REPORTED SIGHTINGS Art Chronicles 1957 1987 by John Ashbery edited by David Bergman Alfred A Knopf 35 417 pp Los Angeles Times ISSN 0458 3035 Retrieved November 18 2018 The Making of John Ashbery and James Schuyler s A Nest of Ninnies Dalkey Archive Press www dalkeyarchive com Retrieved November 18 2018 Ashbery John 1988 Three Plays Carcanet ISBN 978 0 85635 745 9 Other Traditions John Ashbery Harvard University Press The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures Harvard University Press December 2001 ISBN 9780674006645 Retrieved November 18 2018 The second volume of John Ashbery s collected poems is a tribute The Economist Retrieved January 26 2018 Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement www achievement org American Academy of Achievement John Ashbery The existential loneliness of a brilliant poet America Magazine September 8 2017 Retrieved November 18 2018 Robert Creeley Award robertcreeleyfoundation org Retrieved March 19 2015 Distinguished Contribution to American Letters National Book Foundation Retrieved March 11 2012 With acceptance speech by Ashbery Ashbery John April 9 1984 At North Farm The New Yorker Further reading editKacper Bartczak In Search of Communication and Community the Poetry of John Ashbery Peter Lang 2006 Harold Bloom Figures of Capable Imagination Harold Bloom ed Modern Critical Views John Ashbery Chelsea House Publishers 1985 Andrew Dubois Ashbery s Forms of Attention University of Alabama Press 2006 Andrew Epstein Beautiful Enemies Friendship and Postwar American Poetry Oxford University Press 2006 David Herd John Ashbery and American Poetry Manchester University Press 2000 Ben Hickman John Ashbery and English Poetry Edinburgh University Press 2012 David Lehman The Last Avant Garde The Making of The New York School of Poets Anchor Books 1999 David Lehman ed Beyond Amazement New Essays on John Ashbery Cornell University Press 1980 David Perkins A History of Modern Poetry Volume II Modernism and After Harvard University Press 1987 Laura Quinney The Poetics of Disappointment Wordsworth to Ashbery David Shapiro John Ashbery An Introduction to the Poetry Columbia University Press 1979 John Shoptaw On the Outside Looking Out John Ashbery s Poetry Harvard University Press 1995 Stephen Shore Lynne Tillman The Velvet Years Warhol s Factory 1965 1967 Susan M Schultz ed The Tribe of John Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry The University of Alabama Press 1995 Mark Silverberg The New York School Poets and the Neo Avant Garde Ashgate 2010 Helen Vendler Soul Says Harvard University Press 1996 John Emil Vincent John Ashbery and You His Later Books University of Georgia Press 2007 Pierre Vinclair Autoportrait de John Ashbery Une ceremonie improvisee fr Paris Hermann 2021 External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to John Ashbery nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to John Ashbery John Ashbery s Whisper Out of Time Ben Lerner on John Ashbery in The New Yorker a serpentine Gesture The Synthetic Reconstruction of Ashbery s Poetic Voice in Cordite Poetry Review Poems by John Ashbery at PoetryFoundation org The Ashbery Resource Center John Ashbery at EPC John Ashbery the Academy of American Poets Peter A Stitt Winter 1983 John Ashbery The Art of Poetry No 33 Paris Review Winter 1983 90 Audio recordings from Key West Literary Seminar 2003 Ashbery reading from Chinese Whispers Ashbery s mini lecture on Elizabeth Bishop Audio recordings of John Ashbery Archived July 29 2014 at the Wayback Machine from the Woodberry Poetry Room Harvard University Carcanet Press John Ashbery s UK publisher Griffin Poetry Prize biography Griffin Poetry Prize reading including video clip Modern American Poetry critical essays on Ashbery s works Bookworm Interviews Audio with Michael Silverblatt May 2007 May 2009 April 2010 John Ashbery by Adam Fitzgerald in BOMB Magazine Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title John Ashbery amp oldid 1210930846, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

article

, read, download, free, free download, mp3, video, mp4, 3gp, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, picture, music, song, movie, book, game, games.