Poet
Born: July 28, 1927;
Died: September 3, 2017
JOHN Ashbery, who has died aged 90, was an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights.
Ashbery was the first living poet to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work.
His 1975 collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, was the rare winner of the book world's unofficial triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize.
In 2011, he was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing "how we read poetry".
Writing for Slate, the critic and poet Meghan O'Rourke advised readers "not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music".
"I don't find any direct statements in life," Ashbery once explained. "My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation."
Interviewed in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, "to Ashbery," it would mean "to confuse the hell out of people".
Ashebry was born in Rochester, New York, and grew up in Wayne County where his father was a fruit farmer. His maternal grandfather, the physicist Henry Lawrence, was a big influence on him early in life, introducing him to the greats of literature. The death of Ashbery's younger brother from leukaemia also had a profound effect, shattering much of the innocence and breaking up his group of friends.
"My younger brother died just around the beginning of the Second World War,” he said. “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. I think I’ve always been trying to get back to this mystical kingdom.”
His work as poet began early when he was still at boarding school and a classmate submitted his work (without his knowledge) to Poetry magazine. In 1955, he won the Yale Younger Poets prize for his first collection Some Trees and went on to work in France and the US as an art critic for Newsweek and other publications. He later taught at Brooklyn College.
Ashbery enjoyed a long and productive career, so fully accumulating words in his mind that he once said he rarely revised a poem once he wrote it down.
More than 30 Ashbery books were published after the 1950s, including poetry, essays, translations and a novel, A Nest of Ninnies, co-written with poet James Schuyler.
His masterpiece was probably the title poem of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a densely written epic about art, time and consciousness that was inspired by a 16th century Italian painting of the same name.
In 400-plus lines, Ashbery shifted from a critique of Parmigianino's painting to a meditation on the besieged 20th century mind.
Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York.
His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.
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