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Biography John Ashbery
John Ashbery (born July 28, 1927) is an American poet. He has won nearly every major American award for poetry and is recognized as one of America's most important, though still controversial, poets. In an article on Elizabeth Bishop in his Selected Prose, he characterizes himself as having been described as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism."
"No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery", Langdon Hammer, chairman of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008. American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound". Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, the "last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible"
Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, and raised on a farm near Lake Ontario; his brother died when they were children. Ashbery was educated at Deerfield Academy. At Deerfield, an all-boys school, Ashbery read such poets as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Wallace Stevens, and began writing poetry. One of his poems was published in Poetry magazine, although under the name of a classmate who had submitted it without Ashbery's knowledge or permission. He also published a handful of poems, including a sonnet about his frustrated love for a fellow student, and a piece of short fiction in the school newspaper, the Deerfield Scroll. His first ambition was to be a painter. From the age of eleven until fifteen he took weekly classes at the art museum in Rochester.
Ashbery graduated in 1949 with an A.B., cum laude, from Harvard College, where he was a member of the Harvard Advocate, the university's literary magazine, and the Signet Society. He wrote his senior thesis on the poetry of W. H. Auden. At Harvard he befriended fellow writers Kenneth Koch, Barbara Epstein, V. R. Lang, Frank O'Hara and Edward Gorey, and was a classmate of Robert Creeley, Robert Bly and Peter Davison. Ashbery went on to study briefly at New York University, and received an M.A. from Columbia in 1951.
From the mid-1950s, when he received a Fulbright Fellowship, through 1965, he lived in France. He served as the art editor for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune, while also translating potboilers and contemporary French literature. During this period he lived with the French poet Pierre Martory. After returning to the United States, he continued his career as an art critic, for New York and Newsweek magazines, while also serving on the editorial board of ARTNews until 1972. Several years later, he began a stint as an editor at Partisan Review, serving from 1976 to 1980.
Turandot and Other Poems (1953)
Some Trees (1956), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize that year
The Tennis Court Oath (1962)
Rivers and Mountains (1966)
The Double Dream of Spring (1970)
Three Poems (1972)
Vermont Notebook (1975)
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award
Houseboat Days (1977)
As We Know (1979)
Shadow Train (1981)
A Wave (1984), awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize by Yale University
April Galleons (1987)
The Ice Storm (1987)
Flow Chart (1991)
Hotel Lautréamont (1992)
And the Stars Were Shining (1994)
Can You Hear, Bird? (1995)
The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry (Ecco) collection of the poet's work from 1956 to 1972; a New York Times "notable book of the year" (1998)
Wakefulness (1998)
Girls on the Run (1999), a book-length poem inspired by the work of artist/novelist Henry Darger
Your Name Here (2000)
100 Multiple-Choice Questions (2000)
Other Traditions (2000) Harvard University Press
As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001)
Chinese Whispers (2002)
Selected Prose 1953-2003 (2005)
Where Shall I Wander (2005)
A Worldly Country (2007)
Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007) (winner of the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
Martory, Pierre The Landscapist Ashbery (Tr.) Carcanet Press (2008)
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