“We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of / isolated instants / So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.”
TRQ: John Ashbery, Born July 28, 1927
American poet, critic and Pulitzer Prize winner John Ashbery was born on July 28, 1927 in Rochester, New York. Ridiculed as a boy for being feminine and bookish, Ashbery had a difficult childhood. When he was 12 years old, his younger brother Richard died from leukaemia at the age of 10. When he attended the all-boys Deerfield Academy, Ashbery was called out for being gay. Interested in poetry and art, he read W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and took painting lessons. Poems by a young Ashbery were published in Poetry magazine and the Deerfield Scroll, the school newspaper.
Ashbery went on to attend Harvard University, where he continued to study poetry and met the poets Kenneth Koch, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Epstein and Robert Creeley. He graduated from Harvard in 1949, and went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1951. Ashbery came to be associated with the “New York Poets” which also included O’Hara and Koch. Ashbery lived much of his life in the closet for fear that the homophobic McCarthy era would end his career.
Though Ashbery worked as a copywriter in New York for a few years, he received the Fulbright Fellowship and moved to Paris in 1955. There he wrote for the New York Herald-Tribune and ARTNews. Ashbery also published Some Trees (1956), an easily- digested collection of his poems. Auden wrote the preface, and O’Hara gave Ashbery’s book praise. Then, in 1962 he published The Tennis Court Oath, which was so complex that critics like John Simon dismissed the work as being without “sensibility, sensuality or sentences.”
The harsh critical response to his book shook his confidence. As Ashbery once explained, “I actually went through a period after The Tennis Court Oath wondering whether I was really going to go on writing poetry, since nobody seemed interested in it.” However, his perspective soon shifted. “And then I must have said to myself, ‘Well, this is what I enjoy. I might as well go on doing it, since I’m not going to get the same pleasure anywhere else.’”
In his art criticism, Ashbery had reviewed the work of Andy Warhol positively, and met the pop artist in 1963 at a poetry reading in New York. He went on to review Warhol’s Flowers exhibition in Paris that year, and when Ashbery relocated back to New York in 1965, Warhol’s Factory hosted a party.
Ashbery would serve as an editor of ARTNews in New York until 1972. At Brooklyn College he started teaching poetry and creative writing. In 1966, he published Rivers and Mountains, which was critically well-received and nominated for a National Book Award.
In 1970 Ashbery met David Kermani, who would become his husband and partner for the next thirty-five years.
In 1976, ten years after Ashbery published Rivers and Mountains, his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror collection won the American book world’s triple crown: the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His work had evolved to writing about anything from love to pop culture entertainment, in a style diverse enough to include experiments with couplets and haiku. Ashbery would publish more than thirty books of poetry, essays, translations and a novel. As the gay community was hit by the AIDS epidemic, Ashbery wrote of “a gale [that] came and said/it is time to take all of you away.”
Through the years, Ashbery would receive a MacArthur Foundation grant, the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry, and the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poésie in Brussels. He was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, and awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Fulbright Foundation. President Barack Obama awarded Ashbery the National Humanities Medal in 2012. MTV also named him the first poet laureate of MtvU.
Ashbery died on September 3, 2017 at the age of 90, in his home in Hudson, New York. Kermani let it be known that his husband had died from natural causes.
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