BIRTH | John Ashbery

John Ashbery

July 28, 2020—Today is John Ashbery's birthday. I was privileged to live in the same building in Chelsea, Manhattan for half his life. We shared the management skills of an overqualified young woman who cleaned our apartments. 

He was a generous man, and did a reading an an exhibition of the art of Brigid Marlin. He had just published "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1974) and Brigid was similarly fascinated with convexity and had done several self-portraits of that nature. John Ashbery when I spoke with him was always thoughtful and instructive. 

Here is what Garrison Keillor says about him:

He was born in Rochester, New York (1927), and raised on a farm near Lake Ontario. He worked as an art critic in Paris and New York in the 1950s and '60s, and his poetry has been influenced by abstract expressionist art. It's also often called "difficult." "I'm quite puzzled by my work too, along with a lot of other people," he told Contemporary Authors. "I was always intrigued by it, but at the same time a little apprehensive and sort of embarrassed about annoying the same critics who are always annoyed by my work. I'm kind of sorry that I cause so much grief." He's won nearly every American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a MacArthur "Genius" grant. In 2009, he became the first living poet to be the subject of one of the Library of America's "Collected Poems of ..." series. The Oxonian Review remarked: "It is a fitting honour for a man whose decades-long reign as one of the high priests of the contemporary American poetry scene has always been something of a paradox. Having received nearly every major award for achievement in the humanities, he continues to incite considerable debate as to whether his poems 'mean' anything at all." Ashbery told the London Times: "I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life."