John Ashbery

From Philosopedia

John Lawrence Ashbery (28 July 1927 - )

Born in Rochester, New York, but raised on a farm near Lake Ontario, Ashbery was the son of a farmer (Chester F. Ashbery) and a biology teacher (Helen L. Asbery). His younger brother died when nine, and Ashbery wrote later,

Once upon a time there were two brothers.

Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,

even. There was I: a stinking adult.

I thought of developing interests

someone might take an interest in. No soap.

Ashbery, who was to become a major American poet, was educated at Deerfield Academy, received his B.A. from Harvard University in 1949, his M.A. from Columbia University in 1951, and completed postgraduate work at New York University from 1957 to 1958. He has an honorary D. Litt from Southampton College of Long Island University.

From 1951 to 1954, he was a copywriter for Oxford University Press, then from 1954 to 1955 for McGraw Hill Book Company. From 1960 to 1965 he was art critic for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune in Paris; from 1961 to 1962 the art critic foArt International in Lugano, Switzerland; from 1964 to 1967 edited the quarterly review, Art and Literature in Paris; edited Locus Solus from 1960 to 1962 in Lans-en-Vercors, France; from 1964 to 1965 being the Paris correspondent for Art News.

From 1965 to 1972 he taught English at Brooklyn College and since 1990 has taught in the Department of Languages at Bard College in Annandale on Hudson, New York. and from 1976 to 1980 was poetry editor of Partisan Review.

Ashbery spent time as an art critic in Europe, became associated with the New York school of poetry and published his first volume in 1953. His Some Trees in 1956 and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in 1975 led to many awards, including in 1975 the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award. and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ashbery worked for Newsweek (1980 - 1985) and was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (1989 - 1990).

In 1989 Reported Sightings, Art Chronicles 1957 - 1987) was a collection edited by the poet David Bergman of his art criticism.

Ashbery wrote a novel, A Nest of Ninnies, with fellow poet James Schuyler, and his plays have been colleced in Three Plays (1978)

Stephen Burg, writing in The Times Literary Supplement (26 March 2008), described Ashbery as a poet for our times who has been called a romantic, a surrealist, and as clear-as-glass, impenetrable charlatan.

Dinitia Smith in The New York Times wrote of Ashbery's homosexuality in American Culture's Debt to Gay Sons of Harvard (29 May 2003), as did Douglass Shand-Tu in The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality and the Shaping of American Culture (2003).

Works

Turandot and Other Poems (1953)

Some Trees (1956),

winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize that year

The Tennis Court Oath (1962)

Rivers and Mountains (1966)

The Double Dream of Spring (1970)

Three Poems (1972)

Vermont Notebook (1975)

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975),

awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, 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 by Yale University

April Galleons (1987)

The Ice Storm (1987)

Flow Chart (1991)

Hotel Lautréamont (1992)

And the Stars Were Shining (1994)

Can You Hear, Bird? (1995)

Wakefulness (1998)

Girls on the Run (1999),

a book-length poem inspired by the work of artist Henry Darger

Your Name Here (2000)

100 Multiple-Choice Questions (2000)

Other Traditions (2000)

As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001)

Chinese Whispers (2002)

Selected Prose 1953-2003 (2005)

Where Shall I Wander (2005)

A Worldly Country (2007)

Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007),

(shortlisted for the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize)

Planisphere, New Poems (2009)

Ashbery is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters - he received the Gold Medal in 1997.

His 2009 work was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review Section (13 December 2009).