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ASHBERY, JOHN (1927 --). John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He is the author of nineteen books of poetry, including Girls on the Run: A Poem (Carcanet, 1999); Wakefulness (1998); Can You Hear, Bird (1995); And the Stars Were Shining (1994); Hotel Lautréamont (1992); Flow Chart (1991); April Galleons (1987); A Wave (1984), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also written Reported Sightings (1989), a book of art criticism; a collection of plays, and a novel, A Nest of Ninnies (1969), with James Schuyler. Ashbery was the first English-language poet to win the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poésie (Brussels), and has also received the Bollingen Prize, the English Speaking Union Prize, the Feltrinelli Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants, the MLA Common Wealth Award in Literature, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the Frank O\'Hara Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He divides his time between New York City and Hudson, New York. Ashbery was the first of two sons of Helen (Lawrence) Ashbery, who had been a biology teacher before her marriage, and Chester Frederick Ashbery, a fruit farmer at Sodus near Lake Ontario. A solitary child, especially after the death of his younger brother at the age of nine, John Ashbery divided his time among Sodus, where he spent his summers working in the orchards until he was twenty; Rochester, where his grandfather, Henry Lawrence, was chairman of the University of Rochester\'s physics department; and Pultneyville, the town to which his grandfather retired. \'He was a very cultured sort of Victorian gentleman who knew Latin and read all the classics,\' Ashbery told Anna Quindlen in a New York Post interview (February 7, 1976). \'I resemble him and I took after him.\'The boy\'s intellectual precocity was recognized early. Scoring highest in a current events contest, he won an anthology of poetry that led him to the discovery that rhyme is not essential to verse. Before he was sixteen he was a winner of a contest in Rochester that made him one of \'The Quiz Kids,\' the popular radio program of the 1940\'s that starred gifted children. A Sodus neighbor furthered his education by providing him with a scholarship to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts for his last two years of high school. He then entered Harvard College, where, as a freshman, he was encouraged by Theodore Spencer, the literary critic and teacher, and was named class poet. When a junior, Ashbery joined the editorial board of the university\'s undergraduate literary magazine, the Harvard Advocate, a position that led to close friendships with two of the future \'New York\' poets, <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=3092&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Kenneth Koch</a> and <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=3141&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Frank O\'Hara</a>. Although he had been writing poems since the age of eight, Ashbery at first wanted to be a painter and at eighteen his interests concentrated on music. Nevertheless, his B.A. degree from Harvard College in 1949 was in English, and his honors thesis concerned <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=2563&area=authors&fromQueryType=">W. H. Auden</a>, whose influence was evident in the poems he began publishing in the late 1940\'s.After graduating from Harvard, Ashbery attended Columbia University, where he studied contemporary literature. He obtained his M.A. degree in English, in 1951, after submitting a thesis on <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=2707&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Henry Green</a>, the contemporary British novelist whose impersonal, witty, almost plotless fiction perhaps later served as a model for Ashbery\'s only novel, A Nest of Ninnies (Dutton, 1969). The result of a collaboration with the poet <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=3174&area=authors&fromQueryType=">James Schuyler</a>, the comedy was described by the New Yorker (May 24, 1969) as \'the saga of a suburban social circle whose deeds consist mainly of eating, traveling, and idle conversation.\' The work supports one critic\'s statement in the Nation (December 12, 1966) that Ashbery is among that group of artists \'who never quite seem fully serious about their plainly serious art.\'Characteristically, Ashbery\'s novel revealed nothing of his personal life. In a period notable for its confessional poets, few poets are less confessional than John Ashbery. It was therefore an unusual surrender of privacy when he reviewed his past life for poet-critic <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=5605&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Richard Kostelanetz</a> in a long New York Times article (May 23, 1976). \'In the early 50\'s,\' Ashbery said, \'I went through a period of intense depression and doubt. I couldn\'t write for a couple of years.\' Although not an \'intensely political person,\' he went on, his personal \'nadir\' coincided with America\'s descent into the slough of McCarthyism and the Korean War.For five years, from 1951 to 1955, Ashbery worked as a copywriter for Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill, confining his poetry writing to weekends. In 1952 he shared the YMHA Discovery Prize with two other young poets, and in 1953 had his first volume published by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, in New York City. Entitled Turandot and Other Poems, the book received little critical attention until 1956, when all but two of its poems were published in Some Trees, Ashbery\'s first full-length collection. Turandot and Other Poems signalled Ashbery\'s early and continued interest in poetic drama. The work that gave the book its title was a little play in three scenes plus a sestina which, according to <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=1098&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Richard Howard</a>\'s essay on Ashbery in Alone With America (1969), suggests the \'embarrassment of riches\' so often encountered in the poet\'s work.In an odd coincidence, <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=2563&area=authors&fromQueryType=">W. H. Auden</a>, Ashbery\'s honors thesis subject, was sole judge in the 1955 selection of Some Trees as winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition. <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=2563&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Auden</a>\'s non-committal introduction to the Yale University Press edition in 1956 associated Ashbery with those modern poets who discovered that in dreams and daydreams \'the imaginative life of the human individual stubbornly continues to live by the old magical notions.\' Although reviewers of Some Trees acknowledged Ashbery\'s virtues, they were variously put off by his apparent impenetrability. Chiding him for manufacturing \'calculated oddities,\' <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=3718&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Donald Hall</a> in the Saturday Review (June 16, 1956) nevertheless praised the poet\'s \'fine ear and an honest eccentricity of diction which, used properly, excites the attention and speaks with an oblique precision.\' Like <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=2012&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Wallace Stevens</a>, whose influence <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=654&area=authors&fromQueryType=">James Dickey</a> and others discerned in Some Trees, Ashbery began with poetry that was, as <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=5605&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Kostelanetz</a> described it, \'rather exquisite in surface, intricate in form, baffling in statement, indefinite in perspective, and disconnected as a reading experience.\' At first Ashbery worked deliberately towards a poetry as singular as the serial music of <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=3477&area=authors&fromQueryType=">John Cage</a> or the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Yet Some Trees also showed him to be aware of conventions and complicated literary forms, striving towards a goal that <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=1098&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Richard Howard</a> says has persisted throughout his poetry--to locate an elusive order of existence just beyond reach.Almost six years separated Some Trees from the next major volume of Ashbery\'s poems, The Tennis Court Oath (1962). Meanwhile, in 1955 he won a Fulbright fellowship to France, to translate and edit an anthology of contemporary French poetry. He was based for the first year at the University of Montpellier, but later transferred to Paris when his Fulbright was renewed for a second year. Ashbery taught American studies at Rennes and published three substantial articles on <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=8754&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Raymond Roussel</a>, the idiosyncratic modern French novelist and dramatist whose innovations in fiction and writing methods have been widely influential, and whose interest in the power of linguistic or lexical association to generate description and narrative has been central to Ashbery\'s poetic method. In 1957 he began to contribute art criticism to Art News magazine, which also served as a forum for <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=3141&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Frank O\'Hara</a>, Barbara Guest, and other \'New York\' poets. That same year he returned to the United States to work briefly towards a doctorate at New York University. In 1958 he again went to Paris, where he was to remain for ten years.On the staff of Art News and as a writer for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune, for which he began writing art criticism in 1960, Ashbery found an outlet for his long-standing interest in contemporary painting. \'American painting,\' he has said, \'seemed the most exciting art around. American poetry was very traditional at that time, and there was no modern poetry in the sense that there was modern painting. So one got one\'s inspiration from watching the experiments\' in the other arts. By using words abstractly, as painters used paint, he hoped to \'give meaning free play and the fullest possible range.\' Some critics have encountered in Ashbery\'s poetry a painter\'s visual sense, as if he were executing still lives in language, and many of his titles, like \'The Painter\' and \'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,\' refer directly to the art world. While living in France, Ashbery wrote for the New Republic and Art International, and was published in the influential French journal, Tel Quel. He edited Locus Solus magazine from 1960 to 1962 and Art and Literature from 1963 to 1966. A selection of Ashbery\'s art criticism has been published under the title of Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987.In the 1960\'s Ashbery published two major volumes of poetry: The Tennis Court Oath (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1962) and Rivers and Mountains (Holt, 1966). Assessing them for Commentary (October 1975), John Romano saw in them \'the freest possible imagination; detached, nervelessly hallucinating in lurid colors...their obscurity perhaps insuperable.\' Most critics, however, shared the opinion of Steven Koch, whose review of Rivers and Mountains in Nation (December 12, 1966) hailed that volume as a vindicating recovery from the \'progressively disintegrating poetic\' of The Tennis Court Oath, in which the influence of collage and action painting seemed to culminate in such seemingly undecipherable poems as \'Leaving the Atocha Station\' and \'Europe.\' The Tennis Court Oath has remained problematic for many of Ashbery\'s critics: <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=5187&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Harold Bloom</a> called it \'a fearful disaster\'. Yet in its capacity to thwart readerly expectation it continues to exert fascination. In 1966 Rivers and Mountains became a nominee for the National Book Award.The decade 1956-66 saw a steady rise in Ashbery\'s reputation, one by-product of which he himself witnessed when, after long neglect, he returned briefly from France in 1963 and gave a reading at the Living Theatre in New York City to a packed house. In the fall of 1965 he settled in New York City, where he became executive editor of Art News. By then his association, as their foremost representative, with the \'New York Poets\' was taken for granted. In 1969 John Bernard Meyers, the director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, edited an anthology, The Poets of the New York School (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press), in which he pointed out the influences of Surrealism and abstract art on such of its members as Ashbery, Barbara Guest, <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=3092&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Kenneth Koch</a>, <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=3141&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Frank O\'Hara</a>, and <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=3174&area=authors&fromQueryType=">James Schuyler</a>, all of whom were involved in art, poetry, fiction, drama, and publishing.Of Ashbery\'s The Double Dream of Spring (Dutton, 1970) <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=3071&area=authors&fromQueryType=">John Hollander</a> wrote in Harper\'s (April 1970): \'This magnificent book by one of America\'s finest poets is an emergence into the light of a new clarity and beauty, as if from a longish, winding tunnel.\' Not all reviewers agreed that Ashbery had arrived at clarity. John W. Hughes, for example, complained in the Saturday Review (August 8, 1970) that Ashbery, \'the Doris Day of modernist poetry,\' was still playing \'nasty Symbolist-Imagist tricks on his audience while maintaining a facade of earnest innocuousness.\' In general, however, critics agreed with Karl Malkoff, who observed in his Crowell\'s Handbook of Contemporary Poetry (1973): \'There is more abstraction, more discursive statements than a reader can take hold of.\' Ashbery had not become an \'easy\' poet, he added, but in leaning \'more and more to quasi-meditative poems,\' he had made his work more accessible.Three Poems (Viking, 1972), which Ashbery has called his favorite book, appears on the page as expository prose. The poet has explained that he wrote in prose because his impulse was not to repeat himself. Ashbery\'s \'marvelous ravel of stunning sentences,\' as one reviewer described it, seems to have been created by a principle of inclusion rather than the earlier one of elision. <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=1098&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Richard Howard</a> in

oetry (August 8, 1970) has interpreted the three poems as a sequential trilogy: the first, \'The New Spirit,\' about fifty pages long, \'is said by the poet to record a spiritual awakening to earthly things\'; the second, \'The System,\' about the same length, is \'a love story with cosmological overtones\'; the third, \'The Recital,\' is \'a much briefer embroidery on the poet\'s relation to his victories in love and spiritual awakening.\'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975) won the National Book Critics Circle prize, the National Book Award for poetry, and the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. One of its passages indicated that Ashbery was conscious of its obscurities: <ul>I know that I braid too much my own Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me. They are private and always will be. Where then are the private turns of event Destined to boom later like golden chimes Released over a city from a highest tower?</ul>According to <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=1098&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Richard Howard</a>, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror contains precisely those \'private turns of events.\' They create, he went on, \'among the finest things American poetry has to show, and certainly the finest things Ashbery has yet shown.\' Although a few reviewers still found Ashbery\'s work impersonal, unshapely, or incoherent, most agreed that Self-Portrait encompassed the qualities that <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=5605&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Kostelanetz</a> inventoried in his article: \'an extraordinary feeling for language tone and rhythm, a powerful memory for his experience of art, an imagination that is more auditory than visual, an apparently limitless capacity for astonishingly fresh verbal combinations.\'Throughout his career Ashbery has continued the interest in poetic drama that was prefigured by Turandot. In 1952 his one-act play The Heroes was produced off-Broadway by the Living Theatre and again, in 1953, by the Artists\' Theater. Eventually published by Grove Press in Artists\' Theater (1960), the play is an incongruous mix of the ancient and modern and deals with Trojan War heroes in an unspecified setting. When he reviewed the second production of The Heroes for Commonweal (June 26, 1953), Richard Hayes called it \'a winner all the way.\' \'A brilliant little charade on classical themes,\' Hayes wrote, \'it bristles throughout with the echoes of mythology, holding all in the allusive net of mocking and irreverent sensibility, cultivated without pedantry, witty but never vulgar.\' Another of Ashbery\'s plays, The Compromise, in three acts, was produced in 1955 with the subtitle Queen of the Caribou by the Poets Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was published in The Hasty Papers (1960). In 1964 Ashbery published a one-act drama, The Philosopher, in Art and Literature magazine.Among contemporary poets, John Ashbery is at once the most consistent and the most various. He writes to music. \'I\'ve always felt myself to be a rather frustrated composer who was trying to do with words what musicians are able to do with notes. The importance of meaning that\'s beyond expression in words is what I\'ve always been attracted to.\' As his output has steadily increased, and especially with recent books such as Flow Chart, Hotel Lautréamont and Wakefulness, his stature has been increasingly widely recognised. He continues to draw his poetic material from sources of all kinds: \'Come On, Dear,\' the title of one poem in Wakefulness was an overheard remark from an old lady to her dog in a New York Street; and he frequently draws on and incorporates printed material of all kinds. In Statutes of Liberty: the New York School of Poets (Macmillan, 1993), Geoff Ward identifies Ashbery\'s \'indefatigable appetite for play\' as the aspect of his work that most irritated \'critics of a moral bent\', and warns against the distortions of reading involved in the kind of approach <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=5187&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Harold Bloom</a> brings to his work. Marjorie Perloff (in an essay in Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery, Cornell University Press, 1980) reminds us of the prime importance of dream as a way of knowing in Ashbery\'s work, and points out the importance of <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=3192&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Gertrude Stein</a>\'s influence, of whose writing in Tender Buttons Ashbery remarked that \'the poem is a hymn to possibility\'. One early introduction to Ashbery\'s work is David Shapiro\'s John Ashbery: an introduction to the poetry (Columbia University Press, 1979), and the early writings are fully described in John Ashbery: a comprehensive bibliography including his art criticism, and with selected notes from unpublished materials by David K. Kermani (New York: Garland, 1976), with a foreword by John Ashbery. More recently, John Shoptaw\'s On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery\'s Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1994) surveys more of the work. A fine collection of contemporary critical responses will be found in The Tribe of John Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Susan M. Schultz (1999).As early as December 1966 the critic Howard Wamsley predicted in

oetry magazine that Ashbery might \'dominate the last third of the century as <a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFullrec.do?forward=author&id=2935&area=authors&fromQueryType=">Yeats</a> [...] dominated the first,\' and his twenty or so books now constitute a monument to that claim. In a recent poem he wrote that \'There is still something I\'d like to explain, / yet can\'t be sure I\'m ready yet.\' (\'Hierarchy of the Unexpected\', London Review of Books, 1999), lines which sum up the elusive character of his poetry, and the certainty that he will continue to attract critical commentary in the years to come.<a href="http://lion.chadwyck.com/infoCentre/biography.jsp">IP</a>, 2000 <hr/><center>Adapted from data developed by the H.W. Wilson Company, Inc. New material © Bell and Howell Information and Learning 2000</center>