Ashbery, John (1927-2017), was an influential American poet. His poems are admired for their blending of humor and seriousness, their experimental freedom, and their quirky, unpredictable use of language. Beneath their playful surfaces, Ashbery’s poems explore many serious themes, including the nature of time and the difficulty of achieving true knowledge.
Ashbery said that his poems attempt to capture the wandering movements of the mind as it drifts from one idea or image to another. This can make his work difficult to follow. Some of Ashbery’s poems seem almost random in their relationships. He enjoyed mixing unlikely elements, including figures from pop culture. For example, he used such cartoon characters as Popeye and Daffy Duck. Ashbery’s poems also refer to classical works of art and literature. One of his most famous poems, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” is an extended meditation on a painting by the Italian Renaissance master Parmigianino. It is the title poem in a collection that won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Ashbery was born on July 28, 1927, in Rochester, New York. The best introduction to his work is two volumes of collected poems published by the Library of America—Collected Poems 1956-1987, published in 2008, and Collected Poems 1991-2000, published in 2017. Later poems were collected in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007), Planisphere (2009), Quick Question (2012), Breezeway (2015), and Commotion of the Birds (2016). His literary and art criticism has been collected in Reported Sightings (1991) and Selected Prose (2004). Ashbery’s translation of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations was published in 2011. Ashbery died on Sept. 3, 2017.
See also Postmodernism.
