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John Ashbery, Prize-Winning Poet, Is Dead at 90 John Ashbery, Prize-Winning Poet, Is Dead at 90
(about 2 hours later)
John Ashbery, who was one of the most original and enigmatically challenging poets of the late 20th century and hailed as one of its greatest, died on Sunday at his home in Hudson, N.Y. He was 90. John Ashbery, who was one of the most original and enigmatically challenging poets of the late 20th century and hailed as one of its greatest and most influential, died on Sunday at his home in Hudson, N.Y. He was 90.
His husband, David Kermani, confirmed his death.His husband, David Kermani, confirmed his death.
The critic Harold Bloom once said of Mr. Ashbery: “No one now writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgment of time. He is joining the American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens and Hart Crane.” Mr. Ashbery’s early work was mostly known in avant-garde circles, but his arrival as a major figure in American literature was signaled in 1976, when he became the only writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year, for his collection “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” The title poem of the volume is a 15-page meditation on the painting of the same name by Parmigianino, the Italian Renaissance artist.
“No one now writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgment of time,” the critic Harold Bloom, an early advocate, once wrote. “He is joining the American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens and Hart Crane.”
Mr. Ashbery was originally associated with the New York school of poetry of the 1950s and ’60s, joining Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, John O’Hara and others as they swam in the currents of modernism, surrealism and Abstract Expressionism then coursing through the city, drawing from and befriending artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Jane Freilicher.Mr. Ashbery was originally associated with the New York school of poetry of the 1950s and ’60s, joining Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, John O’Hara and others as they swam in the currents of modernism, surrealism and Abstract Expressionism then coursing through the city, drawing from and befriending artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Jane Freilicher.
Mr. Ashbery was one of the most honored poets of his generation. He was the first to win that triple crown of literary prizes — the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award — doing so in one year, 1976, for “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a book-length meditation inspired by a painting of the same title by the late-Renaissance artist Parmigianino. But while other eminent poets of his generation became widely known for social activism (Adrienne Rich and Gary Snyder, for example) or forays into fiction (James Dickey) or the details of their own harrowing lives (Sylvia Plath), Mr. Ashbery was known primarily for one thing: writing poetry.
At one point he sees a planetary reflection in the painting’s calm composition, writing, “The whole is stable within / Instability, a globe like ours, resting / On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball / Secure on its jet of water.” That poetry is by turns playful and elegiac, absurd and exquisite — but more than anything else, it is immediately recognizable. If some poets remind us of the richness of American poetry by blending seamlessly into one of its many traditions, Mr. Ashbery has frequently seemed like a tradition unto himself. It is a cliché to praise a writer by saying no one has ever sounded quite like him, and yet: No one has ever sounded quite like him.
Mr. Ashbery’s poetry could read like an extended murmur, rich in associations and majestic in emotional resonances though difficult to decipher. After Mr. Ashbery’s first book, “Some Trees” (1956), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the competition’s judge, W.H. Auden, confessed that he had not understood a word of it. Not that they have not tried. Charles McGrath, the editor of The New York Times Book Review from 1995 to 2004, recalled that a large portion of new poetry titles during his tenure could be (and often were) tossed into a pile labeled “Ashbery impersonations.” And Mr. Ashbery remains far and away the most imitated American poet.
The poet Stephen Koch described Mr. Ashbery’s poetry as “a hushed, simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent whisper with a weird pulsating rhythm that fluctuates like a wave between peaks of sharp clarity and watery troughs of obscurity and languor.” That widespread imitation has served mostly to underscore the distinctive qualities of the original — and those qualities are singular indeed. An Ashbery poem cycles through changes in diction, register and tone with bewildering yet expertly managed speed, happily mixing references and obscuring antecedents in the service of capturing what Mr. Ashbery called “the experience of experience.”
It is conversational in tone, full of jump cuts and shrugs at literary conventions; modifiers sometimes seem deliberately misplaced. His lines can carry what appear to be random thoughts, or what Wallace Stevens once called “the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind.” The effect can be puzzling, entrancing or, more frequently, a combination of the two — as if one were simultaneously being addressed by an oracle, a PTA newsletter and a restless sleep talker. The beginning of Mr. Ashbery’s 1974 poem “Grand Galop” is representative of his approach:
If the verse is challenging, that was in part Mr. Ashbery’s aim — to compel readers to rethink their presumptions about poetry, just as the Abstract Expressionists asked viewers to discard their preconceptions about painting. All things seem mention of themselves
The poetry could have an equivocal relationship with meaning, cycling through changes in diction, register and tone with bewildering yet expertly managed speed, happily mixing in references to pop culture, as in “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.” Mr. Ashbery liked clichés and obscuring antecedents in the service of capturing what he called “the experience of experience.” The effect could be puzzling, entrancing or a combination of the two, as in the beginning of “Flow Chart,” a 1991 book-length poem: And the names which stem from them branch out to other referents.
Though the sun’s crisply charred Hugely, spring exists again. The weigela does its dusty thing
entrails have slumped behind yonder peak, no one has In fire-hammered air. And garbage cans are heaved against
stepped forward to claim The railing as the tulips yawn and crack open and fall apart.
the amazing sum promised by the clerk. You know not And today is Monday. Today’s lunch is: Spanish omelet, lettuce and tomato salad,
one minnesinger has ever Jell-O, milk and cookies. Tomorrow’s: sloppy joe on bun,
reneged on a pledge. Scalloped corn, stewed tomatoes, rice pudding and milk.
The same poem contains lines of a brooding melancholy, as when he envisioned a river god rowing on the Hudson River near his apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan: The names we stole don’t remove us:
Sad grows the river god as he oars past us We have moved on a little ahead of them
downstream without our knowing him And now it is time to wait again.
Mr. Ashbery was drawn to the difficult areas of human experience, to themes of hesitancy, doubt and uncertainty — qualities Keats considered central to poetry — and he wrote movingly, if obliquely, on the difficulties of self-perception and the burden of aging, as in the final section of his poem “And the Stars Were Shining”: Stephen Koch, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described Mr. Ashbery’s work as “a hushed, simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent whisper with a weird pulsating rhythm that fluctuates like a wave between peaks of sharp clarity and watery droughts of obscurity and languor.”
I let so many people go by me It is often easier to say what an Ashbery poem feels like than what it is about, and Mr. Ashbery relished that uncertainty.
I sort of long for one of them, any But if his poetry is rarely argumentative or polemical, this does not mean it avoids the more difficult areas of human experience. Mr. Ashbery was attracted to themes of hesitancy, doubt and uncertainty (John Keats was an early and lingering influence), and he wrote movingly if obliquely on the difficulties of self-perception and the burden of aging. The final section of his 1994 collection “And the Stars Were Shining” has these lines:
one, to turn back toward me, I’ve told you before how afraid this makes me,
forget these tears. As children we played at being grown-ups. but I think we can handle it together,
Now there’s trouble brewing on the horizon. and this is as good a place as any
Some critics found Mr. Ashbery’s work willfully inscrutable. In 1970, John W. Hughes of Saturday Review wrote that he played “nasty Symbolist-Imagist tricks on his audience” and that some of his lines “have about as much poetic life as a refrigerated plastic flower.” to unseal my last surprise: you, as you go,
James Fenton wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1985 that when he read Mr. Ashbery’s work, there were times “when I actually thought I was going to burst into tears of boredom.” “I don’t believe in this aesthetic,” he added. “I still respect the talent, but not the resort to the sad shadows.” diffident, indifferent, but with the sky for an awning
The mere suggestion that his poetry was difficult was enough to make the normally mild-mannered Mr. Ashbery querulous. “I don’t know that my poetry is difficult,” he said. “It’s not for me! I free-associate and come up with all kinds of extra material that doesn’t belong — but does.” for as many days as it pleases it to cover you.
The best way to read his poetry, Mr. Ashbery suggested, was to think of it as music. “Words in proximity to one another take on another meaning,” he said. “That is, words, like individual notes in music, when put together, form a new meaning, and sometimes an entire symphony.” That’s what I meant by “get a handle,” and as I say it,
There was little in his background that would suggest that Mr. Ashbery would become the leading poet of his generation. John Lawrence Ashbery was born in Rochester on July 28, 1927, the oldest of two sons of Chester Ashbery and the former Helen Lawrence. both surface and subtext subside quintessentially
His mother was a biology teacher, and he grew up east of Rochester on his father’s fruit farm in Sodus, N.Y. The town is near Lake Ontario, and perhaps as a consequence his poetry was permeated with water images. “The sky is bright and very wide,” he wrote in “The Waves,” “and the waves talk to us / Preparing dreams we’ll have to live with and use.” and the dead-letter office dissolves in the blue acquiescence of spring.
As a child he was withdrawn and loved word games and puzzles. One of his most meaningful early relationships was with his maternal grandfather, Henry Lawrence, a well-known physicist and professor at the University of Rochester; it was in his large, dark Victorian house that as a young child he discovered Dickens, Eliot and Thackeray. The inclusion of the cliché “get a handle” is typical of Mr. Ashbery. He enjoyed mixing elements of everyday speech with self-consciously elevated language, allowing the demotic and the literary to build on each other’s unique energies and occasionally deflate them.
He attributed his shyness to his mother. “She was constantly telling me not to put myself forward or draw attention to myself and to try the patience of others. I would be going to visit a friend, and she would say, ‘Don’t wear out your welcome.’ This is something that I’ve constantly thought about, and still when I visit people I try to determine whether I’m in the process of wearing out my welcome.” One way to read his poetry, Mr. Ashbery suggested in a 1991 interview, was to think of it as music. “Words in proximity to one another take on another meaning,” he said. “What you hear at a given moment is a refraction of what’s gone before or after.”
His father was a “good person,” he said, but had an unpredictable temper and “would slap us, my brother and me, around.” He and his father grew distant. “When I was about 3 or 4 years old, he said to me one day, ‘Who do you love more, me or your mother?’ and I said, ‘My mother.’” Some poets resemble oysters, taking years to yield a single pearl, but Mr. Ashbery was a more like a fountain: He produced 28 individual collections of poetry, and his poems ranged from a handful of lines to more than 200 pages.
When he was 12, his younger brother, Richard, whom he thought of as his father’s favorite, died of leukemia. He was proficient in an abundance of poetic techniques, and often enjoyed highlighting the artificiality of the traditions in which he worked. For example, “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” is one of the best-known modern examples of the sestina form, which originated in 12th-century Provence, yet the poem is centered on characters from the Popeye comic strip, like Swee’Pea and the Sea Hag.
Shortly afterward, a neighbor came to young John’s rescue, providing the tuition that enabled him to leave Sodus and go to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He once wrote poems in French and then translated them back into English in order to avoid customary word associations. (The poems are called, of course, “French Poems.”) Every line of his lengthy poem “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” includes the name of a river.
Then, in 1945 he was accepted to Harvard, where his fellow students included Harold Brodkey, Robert Bly, Donald Hall, Frank O’Hara, Robert Creeley, John Hawkes and Adrienne Rich. While an undergraduate Mr. Ashbery wrote one of his best-known poems, “Some Trees,” which begins, “These are amazing: each / Joining a neighbor, as though speech / Were still a performance.” Given the idiosyncratic nature of his talent, it is perhaps unsurprising that Mr. Ashbery had his share of bad reviews from critics who found his work either willfully inscrutable or devoted to aesthetics at the expense of political engagement.
After graduation, he went to New York and got an M.A. in English from Columbia. He worked writing advertising copy for Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill, but he also discovered the music of John Cage, whose atonal compositions with their eccentric rhythms had a lasting influence. In New York, he befriended young painters such as Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, Nell Blaine and Ms. Freilicher. The English poet James Fenton wrote in The Times Book Review that in reading Mr. Ashbery’s work, there were times “when I actually thought I was going to burst into tears of boredom.” Mr. Fenton concluded: “I don’t believe in this esthetic. I still respect the talent, but not the resort to the sad shadows.”
But his most significant artistic relationships were with other poets, including James Schuyler, who were rebelling against the formalism of Allen Tate and Robert Lowell. When Mr. Ashbery praised the poems of Frank O’Hara in 1967 for having “no program,” and in particular for avoiding commentary on the Vietnam War, the poet Louis Simpson angrily responded that it was “not amusing to see a poet sneering at the conscience of others.”
Influenced by the Abstract Expressionist painters and the French Symbolists, they used street diction and cinematic techniques in their work, jump cuts and crosscuts, flashbacks and odd juxtapositions. Along with poets like Ms. Guest and Ron Padgett, they became known as the New York School, a label that Mr. Ashbery disliked because, he said, “it seems to be trying to pin me down to something.” “I was not ‘sneering at the conscience of other poets,’” Mr. Ashbery replied, “but praising Frank O’Hara for giving a unique voice to his own conscience, far more effective than most of the protest ‘poetry’ being written today.” He continued: “Poetry is poetry. Protest is protest.”
He went to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship and began writing art criticism and editing small journals. In Paris, he lived with Pierre Martory, whose poems he later translated to critical acclaim. John Ashbery was born on July 28, 1927, in Rochester, and his father was a fruit farmer in Wayne County. One of his most meaningful early relationships was with his maternal grandfather, Henry Lawrence, who was a well-known physicist and professor at the University of Rochester. Mr. Ashbery spent long periods of time in his grandfather’s large, dark Victorian house, where he discovered Dickens, Eliot and Thackeray.
After roughly a decade in France, Mr. Ashbery returned to New York, where he became executive editor of ARTnews and met Mr. Kermani, then a graduate student in Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, who later became director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. When Mr. Ashbery was 12, his younger brother died of leukemia. In an interview with The Times in 1999, Mr. Ashbery recalled that he and some childhood playmates “had a mythical kingdom in the woods.”
In 1972, ARTnews was sold and Mr. Ashbery was fired. Jobless, he began working on perhaps his most famous poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” inspired by the painter Parmigianino’s early-16th-century experiment in fun-house perspective. Though it became the signature piece in the collection that won Mr. Ashbery the Pulitzer and other prizes, Mr. Ashbery had reservations about the poem. ”It’s not one of my favorite poems, despite all the attention,” he said. “I was always very unsure of the quality.” “Then my younger brother died just around the beginning of World War II,” he added. “The group dispersed for various reasons, and things were never as happy or romantic as they’d been, and my brother was no longer there.” He continued, “I think I’ve always been trying to get back to this mystical kingdom.”
Still in need of a day job, Mr. Ashbery began teaching at Brooklyn College. He became the art critic for New York magazine, and later moved to Newsweek. The stress of daily journalism, however, exhausted him. He once told a reporter that he nearly had a nervous breakdown at New York magazine, and that, at Newsweek, he was constantly afraid that a famous artist would die, requiring him to go to the magazine’s offices in the middle of the night to write an obituary. In 1945, he was admitted to Harvard, where his fellow students included a host of future literary eminences, including Harold Brodkey, Robert Bly, Donald Hall, Kenneth Koch, Robert Creeley, John Hawkes, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Zimmerman, and later, Barbara Epstein, the founding co-editor of The New York Review of Books.
Eventually, in 1985, a MacArthur Foundation grant saved Mr. Ashbery from the need for full-time employment. In 1992 he won another large prize, the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry. Mr. Ashbery received an M.A. from Columbia in English, and then got a job writing advertising copy for Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill. In New York, he discovered the work of John Cage, whose atonal compositions had a lasting influence on him.
In 1990, Mr. Ashbery began teaching at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., spending much of his time at the house he shared with Mr. Kermani. Mr. Ashbery also befriended the young painters Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, Nell Blaine, Fairfield Porter and Ms. Freilicher, several of whom created portraits of him. (In Mr. Porter’s painting, the young Mr. Ashbery’s argyle socks — a gift from his mother — are on prominent display.)
Besides his husband, no other immediate family members survive. But Mr. Ashbery’s most significant artistic relationships were with other poets. Collectively, these writers, along with such poets as Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett, would become known as the New York School, a label that Mr. Ashbery disliked because “it seems to be trying to pin me down to something.”
In his later years, Mr. Ashbery became a revered figure for many poets. And he was increasingly visible in the broader culture. He was the first poet laureate of MtvU, the subsidiary of MTV broadcast only on college campuses, and his lifelong devotion to and influence on film was celebrated by the Harvard Film Archive. In general, the group favored indirection, spontaneity and casual wit, and most members were strongly influenced by the visual arts and French Surrealism (as is often the case with poetic circles, however, the connections among members were as much personal as technical).
Skeptical of the standard narratives of American literature, Mr. Ashbery kept to a personal aesthetic that seemed to his admirers, as he once wrote of Frank O’Hara, “entirely natural and available to the multitude of big and little phenomena which combine to make that unknowable substance that is our experience.” As he wrote in “Someone You Have Seen Before”: In 1955, Mr. Ashbery won the Yale Younger Poets prize for his first collection, “Some Trees.” While on a Fulbright to Paris, he began writing art criticism and editing small journals. In Paris, he also met Pierre Martory, a writer with whom he lived for nine years, and whose poems he would later translate to critical praise.
After roughly a decade in France, Mr. Ashbery returned to New York, where he became executive editor of ARTnews and continued to work as an arts journalist. He met Mr. Kermani, then a graduate student in Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, who was later to become director of the Tibor de Nagy gallery. Mr. Ashbery dedicated both “Flow Chart,” and “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” to Mr. Kermani.
After ARTnews was sold in 1972, Mr. Ashbery supported himself by teaching and writing art criticism, though he found the latter endeavor exhausting. Years later he recalled his tenure as the art critic for Newsweek as an especially anxious period, because he was constantly afraid that a famous artist would die, requiring Mr. Ashbery to go to the magazine’s offices in the middle of the night to write an obituary.
A MacArthur Foundation grant in 1985 ultimately saved him from the need for full time employment. In 1992, he won another large prize, the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry, and in 1993, the French government made him a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Beginning in 1990, Mr. Ashbery taught at Bard College in Annandale on Hudson, spending much of his time at the house he shared with Mr. Kermani, a weathered stone structure overlooking the city courthouse. It was a house that, he once told The Times, reminded him of his beloved grandfather’s home.
In his later years, Mr. Ashbery was a revered figure for many poets – indeed, his eminence has been one of the few things the often contentious world of American poetry could generally agree upon. And he was increasingly visible in the broader culture.
Mr. Asbery was the first poet laureate of MtvU, the subsidiary of MTV broadcast only on college campuses, and his lifelong devotion to film, and his influence on it, was celebrated by the Harvard Film Archive. Yet despite his literary celebrity, he remained for many readers enigmatic.
It was a situation of which Mr. Ashbery was well aware, and which he generally met with gentle, amused frustration. Asked by an interviewer for NPR in 2005 whether his poems were “accessible,” he responded, “Well, I’m told that they’re not.”
He continued: “What they are is about the privacy of all of us, and the difficulty of our own thinking.” He added, “And in that way, they are, I think, accessible if anyone cares to access them.”
Skeptical of the standard narratives of American literature, Mr. Ashbery kept to a personal aesthetic that seems to his admirers, as he once wrote of Frank O’Hara, “entirely natural and available to the multitude of big and little phenomena which combine to make that unknowable substance that is our experience.” As he writes in “Someone You Have Seen Before,”
So much that happens happens in small waysSo much that happens happens in small ways
That someone was going to get around to tabulate, and then never did,That someone was going to get around to tabulate, and then never did,
Yet it all bespeaks freshness, clarity and an even motor driveYet it all bespeaks freshness, clarity and an even motor drive
To coax us out of sleep and start us wondering what the new roundTo coax us out of sleep and start us wondering what the new round
Of impressions and salutations is going to leave in its wakeOf impressions and salutations is going to leave in its wake
This time. And the form, the precepts, are yours to dispose of as you will,This time. And the form, the precepts, are yours to dispose of as you will,
As the ocean makes grasses, and in doing so refurbishes a lighthouseAs the ocean makes grasses, and in doing so refurbishes a lighthouse
On a distant hill, or else lets the whole picture slip into foam.On a distant hill, or else lets the whole picture slip into foam.
Asked once about a poet’s proper relationship with his audience, Mr. Ashbery rejected the idea of deliberately “shocking” the reader, a tactic he compared to wearing deliberately outlandish clothing and which he dismissed as “merely aggressive.”
“At the same time,” he said, “I try to dress in a way that is just slightly off, so the spectator, if he notices, will feel slightly bemused but not excluded, remembering his own imperfect mode of dress.”