John Ashbery
John Ashbery was a prominent American poet, widely recognized as one of the most significant figures in postwar poetry. Born in Rochester, New York, and raised on a fruit farm, Ashbery's early life was marked by solitude, which influenced his artistic development. He pursued his education at Harvard University and Columbia University, where he honed his literary skills and developed a unique poetic voice characterized by breakthrough syntax and multidirectional language. His first major collection, *Some Trees* (1956), garnered national acclaim, showcasing his innovative approach to form and meaning.
Throughout his career, Ashbery received numerous prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for his celebrated work *Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror* (1975). His poetry often explores the complexities of perception and the interplay between art and reality, reflecting a fascination with external phenomena. In addition to his poetry, Ashbery contributed to art criticism and translated works from French literature. Over the decades, he published a variety of collections, continuing to experiment with style and form, and his influence remains prominent among contemporary poets. His legacy includes a rich body of work that has shaped modern American poetry and continues to resonate with readers and critics alike.
John Ashbery
American poet, writer, translator, and art critic.
- Born: July 28, 1927
- Birthplace: Rochester, New York
Biography
John Lawrence Ashbery has been called one of the most significant American postwar poets. His breakthrough syntax and artistic vision make his poetry exceptional among that produced in the twentieth century. He has received some of the most prestigious national and international honors, including the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America; the Feltrinelli Prize from Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei; fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Fulbright, and MacArthur Foundations; the Bollingen Prize; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poesie from Brussels; and the Frank O’Hara Prize. He served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was named New York State Poet in 2001.
Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, and raised on his father’s fruit farm in Sodus (upstate New York), near Lake Ontario. His only brother died as a child, and Ashbery led a solitary life as a youth, attending Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, hours from his home. Abstract impressionist painting as an adolescent hobby proved useful years later, furnishing techniques for forming poetry.
He earned his bachelor of arts in English at Harvard University, where he served on the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate. Ashbery moved to Columbia University to complete a master of arts in English literature in 1951. He copyedited for Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill before receiving a Fulbright scholarship in 1955, when he moved to Paris to study French literature.
His first widely read book, Some Trees (1956), captured an extended daydream Ashbery had of evading his dull office life. The collection attracted national attention for its multidirectional language and use of form to create meaning and also in part to the pathos created through an attempt to propel desire into a workaday life. The title poem, “Some Trees,” and sestina “The Painter” are each extensively anthologized.
In 1957 Ashbery left France, enrolling at New York University, but after ten months he returned to France, where he stayed seven years. In 1962 the controversial Tennis Court Oath was published, a complex set of poems juxtaposing lonely images with a resistance to the politics of mass 1960’s culture. Critics like Harold Bloom disparaged it for “swerving too far” from the structured echoes of “Stevens and Whitman,” and being too far askew from traditional speech.
Ashbery began translating French poetry and essays from writers Noel Vixen, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, Genevieve Manceron, Jacques Dupin, and later Pierre Martory. While in Paris, Ashbery worked as art critic for Art International and the New York Herald Tribune’s Paris edition and editor for Art and Literature. He returned to New York in 1965 as executive director for Art News and published his linguistically innovative, introspective Rivers and Mountains, different from his previous two in its meditative aim. One of Ashbery’s few fiction pieces, A Nest of Ninnies (1969), was also written at this time, collaboratively with fellow New York school poet James Schuyler.
Ashbery began teaching in 1974 at Brooklyn College, becoming a distinguished professor of poetry. The work for which he is best known, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, marked one of his most celebrated achievements, taking three prestigious literary awards: a National Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. The new, “readable” title poem, said critic John Tranter, caused resistant readers of “the Establishment to come around.”
In 1976 Ashbery became poetry editor for Partisan Review, publishing Houseboat Days (1977) and later Shadow Train (1981), which was a series of fifty sixteen-line meditations in quatrains. Both books shifted syntactically from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), drawing on succinct phrases to energize “little” poems. As We Know (1979) was another departure in form for Ashbery. The poem “Litany” was presented as an independent, side-by-side monologue for the first half of the book, anchored with more coherent content.
Ashbery eventually returned to art criticism, editing for Newsweek (1980), and teaching English at Harvard and then Bard College. Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987, a collection of his art criticism, was published in 1989. He also edited Best American Poetry, 1988 and published April Galleons (1987), Flow Chart (1991), Hotel Lautrémont (1992), A Wave (1984), and Can You Hear, Bird (1995), each varying in method. In the twenty-first century his poetry collections have included Chinese Whispers (2002), Where Shall I Wander? (2005), A Worldly Country (2007), Quick Question (2012), and Breezeway (2015). The Library of America published John Ashbery: Collected Poems, 1956–1987 in 2008, its first ever collection by a living poet.
In his poetry, Ashbery continued the difficult project of painting “external phenomena” behind how events transpire, a fascination positioned in Some Trees and continually experimented with through his vision of art, music, and imagination as truth shapers within the uncertainty of human perception. Ashbery’s quality, vigorous verse continually attracts critical recognition, and alongside contemporaries W. S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, and James Merrill, he is anthologized among the most influential of contemporary American poets.
Author Works
Poetry:
Turandot, and Other Poems, 1953
Some Trees, 1956
The Poems, 1960
The Tennis Court Oath, 1962
Rivers and Mountains, 1966
Selected Poems, 1967
Sunrise in Suburbia, 1968
Three Madrigals, 1969
Fragment: Poem, 1969
The Double Dream of Spring, 1970
The New Spirit, 1970
Three Poems, 1972
The Serious Doll, 1975
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1975
The Vermont Notebook, 1975 (Joe Brainard, illustrator)
Houseboat Days, 1977
As We Know, 1979
Apparitions, 1981
Shadow Train, 1981
A Wave, 1984
Selected Poems, 1985
April Galleons, 1987
The Ice Storm, 1987
Three Poems, 1989 (not the same work as 1977 Three Poems)
Haibun, 1990
Flow Chart, 1991
Hotel Lautrémont, 1992
Three Books: Poems, 1993
And the Stars Were Shining, 1994
Can You Hear, Bird: Poems, 1995
The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry, 1997
Wakefulness: Poems, 1998
Girls on the Run: A Poem, 1999
Your Name Here, 2000
As Umbrellas Follow Rain, 2002
Chinese Whispers, 2002
Where Shall I Wander?, 2005
A Worldly Country: New Poems, 2007
Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, 2007
Planisphere, 2009
John Ashbery: Collected Poems, 1956–1987, 2010 (Mark Ford, editor)
Quick Question: New Poems, 2012
Breezeway, 2015
Collected Poems, 1990–2000, 2017 (Mark Ford, editor)
Long Fiction:
A Nest of Ninnies, 1969 (with James Schuyler)
Drama:
Everyman, pr. 1951
The Heroes, pr. 1952
The Compromise: Or, Queen of the Carabou, pr. 1956
The Philosopher, pb. 1964
Three Plays, pb. 1978
Nonfiction:
The Poetic Medium of W. H. Auden, 1949 (senior thesis)
Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction, 1983
Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987, 1989
Pistils, 1996 (Robert Mapplethorpe, photographer)
Other Traditions, 2000
John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford, 2003
Selected Prose, 2004 (Eugene Richie, editor)
Translations:
Murder in Montmartre by Noel Vixen, 1960
Melville, by Jean-Jacques Mayoux, 1960
The Deadlier Sex by Genevieve Manceron, 1961
Alberto Giocometti by Jacques Dupin, 1962
The Dice Cup: Selected Prose Poems by Max Jacob, 1979 (Michael Brownstein, editor)
Every Question but One by Pierre Martory, 1990
The Landscape Is Behind the Doorby Pierre Martory, 1994
Giacometti: Three Essays by Jacques Dupin, 2002
Landscapist: Selected Poems by Pierre Martory, 2008
Illuminations by Rimbaud, 2011
Collected French Translations: Poetry, 2014 (Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie)
Edited Text:
Light in Art, 1971 (with Thomas B. Hess)
Painterly Painting, 1971 (with Thomas B. Hess)
Best American Poetry, 1988, 1988
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. John Ashbery: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Philadelphia: Chelsea , 2004. Print. Overview of Ashbery’s published work through 1985, discussing his form, complex linguistics, and vision.
Carroll, Paul. The Poem in Its Skin. Chicago: Follett, 1968. Print. Collection of ten essays about poets includes one on Ashbery and his work.
Chiasson, Dan. “American Snipper: New Poems from John Ashbery.” Review of Breezeway, by John Ashbery. The New Yorker, 1 June 2015, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/01/american-snipper-books-chiasson. Accessed 21 Apr. 2017. Provides a review of Ashbery’s 2015 poetry collection, including excerpts and analysis of several individual poems in the collection.
Herd, David. John Ashbery and American Poetry. 2000. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Print. Chronicles Ashbery’s poetic career, analyzing his continuities, differences, and improvements over time.
Jackson, Richard. Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets. 1983. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2014. Print. Interviews with contemporary poets including Ashbery, who discusses his revelation processes and self-referential voice.
“John Ashbery.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2015. Web. 31 Mar. 2016. A biography of the poet, including a bibliography of his work.
Keller, Lynn. Re-making It New: Contemporary Poetry and the Modernist Tradition. 1987. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987. Print. Explores the impact of the modernist tradition of “making it new” on four poets, including Ashbery.
Lehman, David. Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery. 1980. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002. Print. Ten essays investigating Ashbery’s work for its painting framework, music, and function of irony, among other things.
Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Print. Chronicle of New York school of poets, closely tracing Ashbery’s life and analyzing elements contributing to the back drop of his poetry.
Malinowska, Barbara. Dynamics of Being, Space, and Time in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz and John Ashbery. New York: Lang, 2000. Print. Discusses poetic visions of reality in terms of space, time, and culture as seen in the poetry of two poets, including Ashbery.
Schultz, Susan M., ed. The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. 1995. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2014. Print. Collection of essays investigating Ashbery’s influences and themes and his place among postmodern poetry.
Shapiro, David. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1979. Print. Provides analysis and close readings of poems from Some Trees, The Tennis Court Oath, Rivers and Mountains, and Three Poems (1979).
Shoptaw, John. On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. Print. Drawing on full access to Ashbery’s manuscripts and source materials, Shoptaw provides insights into Ashbery’s process, as well as biographical and historical context, and critical analysis of the poet’s work.
Stitt, Peter. Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997. Print. Discusses Ashbery as one of five contemporary poets using avant-garde poetry to make sense of uncertainty.
Vendler, Helen H. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, and Critics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Print. Essays on the function of poetry and criticism. Includes discussion of poems by a range of poets, including Ashbery.