John (Lawrence) Ashbery - Life, Works, Bibliography, Secondary Sources
Poet and critic, born in New York City, USA. He studied at Harvard, Columbia, and New York universities, then spent some years as an art critic in Europe. He became associated with the New York School of poetry, publishing his first volume in 1953. Some Trees (1956) attracted considerable critical attention, and his 12th collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received several prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize. Later volumes include The Ice Storm (1987), Hotel Lautreamont (1992), Chinese Whispers (2002), and A Worldly Country: New Poems (2007). He is recognized as the major postmodern poet of his generation, and was given a lifetime achievement award by the Academy of American Poets in 2001.
John Ashbery (born July 28, 1927) is an American poet.
Life
Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York and raised on a farm near Lake Ontario; At Deerfield, Ashbery read such poets as W. one of his poems was actually published in Poetry Magazine, though under the name of a classmate who had submitted it without Ashbery's knowledge or permission. Ashbery went on to study briefly at New York University, and received a M.A.
In the early 1970s, Ashbery began teaching at Brooklyn College, where his students included poet John Yau, and in the 1980s, he moved to Bard College, where he is the Charles P. He was the poet laureate of New York state from 2001 to 2003, and also served for many years as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Works
Ashbery has won nearly every major American award for his poetry, beginning with the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1956, selected by W. In the late 1950s, the critic John Bernard Myers categorized the common traits of Ashbery's avant-garde poetry, as well as that of Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenward Elmslie and others, as constituting a "New York School." Ashbery 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, which was published in 1970.
Increasing critical recognition in the 1970s transformed Ashbery from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important (though also still most controversial) poets. After the publication of Three Poems (1973), Ashbery in 1975 picked up all three major American poetry prizes (the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award) for his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
His subsequent collection, the more difficult Houseboat Days (1977) reinforced Ashbery's reputation as did As We Know in 1979, which contains the long, double-columned poem "A Litany." By the 1980s and 1990s, Ashbery had become a central figure in American and more broadly English-language poetry, as a number of imitators evidenced. His own poetry was accused of a staleness in this period, but books like A Wave (1985) and the later And the Stars Were Shining (1994), particularly in their long poems, show an unmistakably original and great poet in practice.
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. Ashbery returned to something approximating conventional verse, at least on its surface, with many of the poems in The Double Dream of Spring, though his Three Poems are written in long blocks of prose.
Ashbery art criticism has been collected in the 1989 volume Reported Sightings, Art Chronicles 1957-1987, edited by the poet David Bergman. Auden Wallace Stevens Raymond Roussel John Clare Marianne Moore
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