John Ashbery (USA)
1927-2017
John
Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York on July 28, 1927. He was raised mostly on a
farm near Lake Ontario. He graduated from Deerfield Academy before going on to
a university education at Harvard—where he wrote on Wallace Stevens under the
supervision of F. O. Mathiessen—and at Columbia University where he received in
M.A. degree.
Early in his education, Ashbery read poets
such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Wallace Stevens, but his first ambition
was to become a painter, and from the ages of 11 to 15 he took weekly classes
at the art museum in Rochester. His first poems appeared in Poetry,
which were submitted by a classmate while he was still in high school. In the
mid-1950s, he moved to France, just before the publication of his second volume
of poetry. There he worked as an art critic and edited the famed international
review Art and Literature.
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It was in the late 1950s that critic John Bernard Myers categorized his writing as sharing traits with other rising poets such as Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and Kenward Elmslie, all of whom would later to characterized as the first generation of a “New York School.” Ashbery also wrote a novel, A Nest of Ninnies, with fellow poet James Schuyler, and wrote several plays early in his career. His Three Plays were published in 1978. He also translated several works of poetry and prose from French into English, particularly the works of Rimbaud and Pierre Martory. His Selected Prose appeared in 2005.
Ashbery won nearly every major American
award for poetry, beginning with the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1956 (selected
by W. H. Auden) for his first book of poetry, Some Trees. He was awarded
the Pulitzer Prize (for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror), the National
Book Award (for the same title), the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the
Bollingen Prize (both for A Wave). Among his many other awards and
recognitions were a MacArthur Fellows Program Fellowship in 1985, the Golden
Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1987), the National
Humanities Medal (2011), and the National Book Foundation Medal for
Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2011).
Notes from the Air was chosen as
the winner of the International Griffin Prize. In 2008 Ashbery was chosen as a
recipient of the America Awards for a Lifetime Contribution to International
Writing.
From the highly experimental The
Tennis-Court Oath to more romantically-inspired meditative works such as Self-Portrait
in a Convex Mirror, Ashbery remained a major force in contemporary American
poetry.
Ashbery died in Hudson, New York on
September 3, 2017.
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Turandot
and Other Poems
[art by Jane Freilicher] (New York: Tibor De Nagy Gallery, 1953); Some Trees
(New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1956; New York: Corinth Books,
1970; New York: Ecco Press, 1978); The Tennis Court Oath: A Book of Poems
(Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1962); Rivers and
Mountains (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966; New York: Ecco
Press, 1977); Three Madrigals (New York: Poet’s Press, 1968); Fragment:
Poem (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1969); A New Spirit (New
York: Adventures in Poetry, 1970); The Double Dream of Spring (New York:
Dutton, 1970); Three Poems (New York: Viking Press, 1972; Harmondsworth,
English, 1972; New York: Penguin Books, 1977); Self-Portrait in a Convex
Mirror (New York: Viking Press, 1975; Manchester, England: Carcanet New
Press, 1977); Fragment: Clepsydre, Poemes Francais (Paris: Seuil, 1975);
Houseboat Days (New York: Penguin Books, 1977; New York: Viking Press,
1977); As We Know: Poems (New York: Viking Press, 1979; New York:
Penguin, 1979); Shadow Train: Poems (New York: Viking Press, 1981); Apparitions
(Northridge, California: Lord John Press, 1981); A Wave (New York:
Viking Press, 1984; Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 1984); April
Galleons (New York: Viking, 1987); The Ice Storm (Madras, India/New
York: Hanuman Books, 1987); Flow Chart (New York: Knopf, 1991); Three
Books: Poems (New York: Penguin, 1993); And the Stars Were Shining (New
York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994); Hotel Lautréamont (New York:
Knopf, 1992); Girls on the Run (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1999); Can You Hear, Bird? (New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); Wakefulness
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); Your Name Here: Poems (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); Chinese Whispers (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002; Manchester, England: Carcanet, 2002); Where
Shall I Wander (New York: Ecco Press, 2005); A Worldly Country (New York:
Ecco Press, 2007); Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (New York:
Ecco Press, 2007); Collected Pomes 1956-1978 (New York: Library of
America; reprinted in 2010 by Manchester, English: Carcanet Press); Planisphere
(New York: Ecco Press, 2009); Quick Question (New York: Ecco Press, 2012);
Breezeway: New Poems (New York: Ecco Press, 2015); Commotion of the
Birds (New York: Ecco Press, 2016); They Knew What They Wanted: Collages
and Poems (New York: Rizzoli Electra, 2018); Parallel Movement of the
Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works (New York: Ecco Press, 2021)
For a large selection of Ashbery's readings of his own poems and interviews, click below:
http://ubu.com/sound/ashbery.html
╬Winner
of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English
2005-2006
A
Darning Egg
He
had emerged from the woods. Two poachers fired their rifles above his head. He
couldn't restrain his joy.
He
danced with the cypress, and stopped.
Cancel
the order. The choir of aging starlets that blundered halfway through here
tonight shrugged, appalled probably. Wasn't it time to go? Wearily they turned
back down the cobalt and terra cotta ramp, singing a song to hoist their
spirits, the "marche militaire." Now eyeballs close on the distant
porousness. It's not liquor that gets us there.
Think
tiny and big, the "experiment perilous."
Evelyn
surveyed the shadow. Later, he'd see.
And
the heavens, it was all duty after that. Duty calls. Which isn't to say
pleasure doesn't too, and louder. My head is so screwed up I can't find your
name in the yearbook. Years ago, it was like mist.
The
cat is trained to touch base, scout out new locations. We'll all be back in a
year's time, to the day. We'll see how it looks then. Meantime grades and
awards are to be given out. Sheepskin hung on the walls in brocaded taverns. It
was all over for them. But like them, a kiss comes to light our way in the
eccentric competition.
Remember
that I loved you. See no more.
_____
Reprinted
from Denver Quarterly, XXXIX, no. 3 (2005). Copyright ©2005 by John
Ashbery. Permission to reprint granted by Ecco Press.
Review
of Ashbery's Wakefulness by Marjorie Perloff
Wakefulness, John Ashbery
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 84 pages
I
have been rereading John Ashbery’s nineteenth book of poems in the Santa Monica
Courthouse, where I am on jury duty. The waiting is interminable (I was first
assigned to the Zubin Metha vs. Susan McDougal jury pool!) and not enhanced by
the now ubiquitous proximity of other people’s cell phones. “Face it, Myrna!”
says the scruffy old gent to my right, “You’re into total denial.”
What
a great setting in which to read Wakefulness! For despite the charges of
difficulty, incomprehensibility, and non-sense, Ashbery is, as Douglas Crase
argued some fifteen years ago in his contribution to David Lehman’s Beyond
Amazement, eminently our realist poet. When he begins “Cousin Sarah’s
Knitting,” with the lines:
You
keep asking me that four times.
Why
trust me I think.
There
is, in fact nobody here
He
is recording, with only the slightest heightening, the way people (in this case
his own relatives) actually do talk. And when, in “Laughing Gravy,” the poet
declares, “The crisis has just passed. Uh oh, here it comes again, / looking
off to blame itself on,” he is pinpointing, with droll humor, precisely the way
information is disseminated. Indeed, one can hear the White House officials
declaring that the crisis has just passed, and then – Uh oh!
But
despite these great comic moments, Wakefulness is a somber book. At
seventy, Ashbery is more overtly haunted by the past than was the poet of Self-Portrait
in a Convex Mirror and Houseboat Days. “Everything,” we read in the
title poem, “was as though it had happened long ago / in ancient-peach-colored
funny papers,” and again, “History goes on and on, / rolling distractedly on
these shores.” The past and the future–or the fear that soon there won’t be
one. “Each day, dawn condenses like a very large star.” And night thoughts
become pervasive.
A
kind gnome
of
fear perched on my dashboard once, but we had all been instructed
to
ignore the conditions of the chase. Here it
seems
to grow lighter with each passing century. No matter how you
twist
it,
life
stays frozen in the headlights.
Funny,
none of us heard the roar.
We
now have many Ashberyian poets, but none that can rival the master at this sort
of effect. The note of anxiety in lines 1-2 is common enough, but who else
could personify fear as a “kindly gnome...perched on my dashboard”–a very just
metaphor because it actually is when one is driving along somewhat aimlessly
that such thoughts intrude. The “chase,” whose “conditions” we have “been
instructed / to ignore” can refer to its diminishing weight, but it can also
refer to the increasing sense of constantly living under floodlights from which
there is no escape. The poet’s anxiety, in any case, is characteristically
deflated by the cliché “No matter how you twist it.” But at that very moment,
his car seems to hit something. A deer crossing the road? A human being? A
shadow of oneself? The “light” of line 4–the light of common day–becomes the
specific headlight in which “life stays frozen.” It is thus we meet death,
never heeding the warning signs: “Funny, none of us heard the roar.”
Such
intimations of mortality are chilling but never self-pitying. As the poet puts
it in “Added Poignancy,” “What could I tell you? I couldn’t tell you any other
way. / We, meanwhile, have witnessed changes, and now change / floods in from
every angle.” Then immediately the deflationary impulse kicks in: “Stop me if
you’ve heard this one.” Like many of the poems in Wakefulness, “Added
Poignancy” has an intimacy of address that is new to Ashbery. The second-person
mode, latent in poems as early as “They Dream Only of America,” now becomes
pervasive: “Stop me if you’ve heard this one, / but if you haven’t, just go
about your business.” Here, as usual in Ashbery, the final clause makes a
U-turn: the expected conclusion would be, “but if you haven’t, then listen!” or
“But if you haven’t, stay a moment.”
Such
non-sequiturs are by now an Ashbery trademark, but the poet is endlessly
inventive (or is it by now second nature?) at producing deflationary gestures
as when, in “The Burden of the Park” (the title is just two letters away from
the familiar “The Burden of the Past”) the “park” is defined as “all over,” and
becomes the scene for a series of fragmentary narratives of childhood, part
memory, part dream, my favorite being the “inner tube on a couch,” which
becomes a way “out,” taking the poet and his friends on a trip “down the Great
Array river.” One “Each of the inner tubes,” we now learn, “was of a ‘different
color’: Mine was lime green, yours was pistachio.” But–wait a minute–pistachio
is lime green: so much for the ability to make meaningful distinctions.
Despite
its greater emphasis on history and memory, on death and Last things, on a new,
more intimate relationship with “you,” Wakefulness does not mark a notable
departure for Ashbery. He is not writing in a new mode or experimenting with
new techniques. One might complain, therefore, as my students sometimes do,
that Ashbery’s poems have become repetitive, that however effective, say, “The
Burden of the Park” may be, Ashbery has already written this kind of poem many
times before, creating a sense of replacability.
It’s
a case, I suppose, of finding the cup half empty or half full. From the
perspective of the total oeuvre, Wakefulness may not be an absolutely
essential link in the chain. The mastery its poems exhibit is a mastery that
has been witnessed before. On the other hand, taken in itself, Ashbery’s new
book is still more accomplished, more pleasurable, more profound than nearly
any of its current rivals. A sifting out process will take place later. But for
the moment, we can take each new Ashbery volume as it comes, relishing the
exquisite sense of timing that produces lines like
You
know I adore ceremony,
Even
while refusing to stand on it.
Or,
as he puts it later in this poem (“Homecoming”):
I
need your disapproval.
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