John Ashbery

John Ashbery, born in 1928, American poet, playwright, and novelist, whose book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1976) won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the 1976 National Book Award for poetry. Influenced by surrealism, a 20th-century artistic and literary movement, Ashbery’s poetry is characterized by abstract, unconventional use of imagery and syntax. His verse often focuses on the act of writing and attempts to reveal the internal world of the poet, rejecting conventional realism. To challenge his readers’ preconceptions about poetry, Ashbery uses unexpected juxtapositions of evocative and incongruous imagery.

Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York. He received his B.A. degree in 1949 from Harvard University and his M.A. degree in English literature in 1951 from Columbia University. While at Columbia, Ashbery established close literary friendships with several other poets, including Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. This group—along with artists and musicians of their generation—later became known as the New York School.

In 1955 Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden chose Ashbery’s first collection of poetry, Some Trees (1956), for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The same year, Ashbery received a Fulbright Fellowship and moved to Paris. He stayed in France until 1965, working as an art and literature critic for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune and as a correspondent for the American art magazine Art News. Upon his return to New York City, Ashbery served as the executive editor for Art News until 1972. From 1974 to 1990 he taught English at Brooklyn College and Bard College, both in New York state.

Ashbery’s early works include The Tennis Court Oath (1962), Rivers and Mountains (1966), and Sunrise in Suburbia (1968). His later works include As We Know (1979), Shadow Train (1981), Flow Chart (1991), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Can You Hear, Bird (1995), and Wakefulness (1998). In 1997 the anthology The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry was published. With James Schuyler, Ashbery coauthored the novel A Nest of Ninnies (1969), a parody of suburban American life as seen through the lives of two families. He also published a collection of plays, Three Plays (1978), and his art criticism is collected in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957—1987 (published 1989).