John Ashbery

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John Ashbery

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition | 2008 | The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright 2008 Columbia University Press. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

John Ashbery 1927-, American poet, b. Rochester, N.Y., grad. Harvard (B.A., 1949), Columbia (M.A., 1951). Ashbery is among the most acclaimed of contemporary American poets. During the 1960s and 70s he was one of the so-called New York School of Poets, which also included Frank O'Hara , Kenneth Koch , and James Schuyler. Influenced early in his career by the method and music of John Cage , Ashbery has called his writing technique "managed chance." His poems are experimental in style and syntax, strongly visual, and narrative, but typically complex and somewhat obscure. His collections include Some Trees (1956), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, his most celebrated work (1975; Pulitzer Prize), Shadow Train (1981), A Wave (1984), April Galleons (1987), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Chinese Whispers (2002), Where Shall I Wander (2005), and Notes from the Air (2008). He has also written two book-length poems, Flow Chart (1991) and Girls on the Run (1999); three plays, The Compromise (1960), The Heroes (1960), and The Philosopher (1964); and coauthored a novel, A Nest of Ninnies (1969). Ashbery is also an art critic and edited the quarterly Art and Literature. Many of his art reviews and essays were collected in Reported Sightings (1989).

Bibliography: See his Selected Prose (2005); studies by D. Shapiro (1979), D. Lehman, ed. (1980) and as author (1999), H. Bloom, ed. (1985 and 2004), J. Shoptaw (1994), S. M. Schultz, ed. (1995), D. Herd (2000), G. Ward (2d ed. 2001), K. Bartczak (2006), A. DuBois (2006), and J. E. Vincent (2007).

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Ashbery, John

The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature | 2003 | | © The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature 2003, originally published by Oxford University Press 2003. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

Ashbery, John (1927– ), American poet, born in New York. He graduated from Harvard in 1949, by which time he had already composed the title poem of his first volume, Song Trees, which was published in the Yale Younger Poets series edited by Auden in 1956. Ashbery spent most of the following decade in Paris, where his work grew more experimental and disjunctive. His second and most radical collection, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), became an important influence on the development of ‘Language Poetry’. Ashbery achieved canonical status with his sixth volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). His recent Selected Poems were published in the UK in 2002. He was the first of the so-called ‘New York School’—which included Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler—to achieve wide recognition. His poetry is characterized by its openness to the vagaries of consciousness, its wry, beguiling lyricism, and its innovative use of forms such as the pantoum and the sestina. H. Bloom has frequently declared Ashbery to be the most significant poet since W. Stevens.

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MARGARET DRABBLE and JENNY STRINGER. "Ashbery, John." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. 2003. Encyclopedia.com. 29 Nov. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

MARGARET DRABBLE and JENNY STRINGER. "Ashbery, John." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. 2003. Encyclopedia.com. (November 29, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O54-AshberyJohn.html

MARGARET DRABBLE and JENNY STRINGER. "Ashbery, John." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. 2003. Retrieved November 29, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O54-AshberyJohn.html

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Ashbery, John (Lawrence)

The Oxford Companion to American Literature | 1995 | | © The Oxford Companion to American Literature 1995, originally published by Oxford University Press 1995. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

Ashbery, John [Lawrence] (1927–), poet born in Rochester, N.Y., after an A.B. from Harvard and graduate study of French literature at Columbia and New York University became an art and literary critic in France. His first poems, Turandot (1953) and Some Trees (1956),the latter in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, appeared before his expatriation. The later works have been influenced by French surrealism and relate to the abstractions of New York action painters, including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. They are melodious, dreamlike, and ever‐shifting meditations that do not order the exterior world but in solipsistic fashion present the poet's personal associations and sensory responses to it. Opposed to conventional logic, realism, and the idea of a usable past, the poetry cannot be explicated in a traditional way. Ashbery's evocative images and musicality make fragments sensually beautiful, but the entirety of a work is opaque, lacking sequential development in syntax or theme. He has published more than twenty collections, including The Poems (1960); The Tennis Court Oath (1962); Rivers and Mountains (1966); Selected Poems (1967); Three Madrigals (1968); Sunrise in Suburbia (1968); 77, Fragment (1969); The Double Dream of Spring (1970); Three Poems (1972); Self‐Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975, National Book Award, Nation‐al Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize); Houseboat Days (1977); As We Know (1979); Shadow Train (1981); A Wave (1984); April Galleons (1987); Flow Chart (1991), a 216‐page poem displaying Ashbery making the stuff of his poetry from the midst of the daily minutiae of television watching, telephone calls, and other common interruptions; and Hotel Lautréamont (1993), a meditative series of lyrics. Recent collections include Chinese Whispers (2002) and 100 Muliple-Choice Questions (2002). He has also published a novel (written with James Schuyler), A Nest of Ninnies (1969), a parody of modern U.S. life as seen through the experiences of two vacuous suburban families; and has written two one‐act plays, The Heroes (1952), a light‐hearted presentation of classical mythology in modern times, and The Philosopher (1962), a travesty of conventional detective story drama, and a three‐act play, The Compromise (1956). As a frequent analyst of art, he was one of two critics to write a book on Fairfield Porter (1982). Other Traditions (2001) collects his Charles Eliot Norton lectures on six writers who have been inspirational to him.

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James D. Hart and and Phillip W. Leininger. "Ashbery, John (Lawrence)." The Oxford Companion to American Literature. Oxford University Press. 1995. Encyclopedia.com. 29 Nov. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

James D. Hart and and Phillip W. Leininger. "Ashbery, John (Lawrence)." The Oxford Companion to American Literature. Oxford University Press. 1995. Encyclopedia.com. (November 29, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O123-AshberyJohnLawrence.html

James D. Hart and and Phillip W. Leininger. "Ashbery, John (Lawrence)." The Oxford Companion to American Literature. Oxford University Press. 1995. Retrieved November 29, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O123-AshberyJohnLawrence.html

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Free newspaper and magazine articles

Free Article John Ashbery Other Traditions.(Review)
Magazine article from: New Criterion; 2/1/2001
Free Article The great American desert.(John Ashbery's poetry analysis)
Magazine article from: New Criterion; 6/1/2005
Free Article The word made image.(collaboration of John Ashbery and painter Jane Hammond)
Magazine article from: Art in America; 5/1/1995

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Magazine article from: Twentieth Century Literature; 12/22/2008; ; 700+ words ; John Ashbery's poetry is conversational...1) While such an other in Ashbery s work never has a proper name...other poet, except Holderlin or John Clare, so persistently appears in Ashbery's work in such a way that one...
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Newspaper article from: Albany Times Union (Albany, NY); 4/13/1997; 700+ words ; ...Timothy Cahill - FACTS:Poet to read John Ashbery will read his poems and discuss...and open to the public. - - Poet John Ashbery met Fairfield Porter in 1952 just...surprised when I came to it.'' John Ashbery will read his poems and discuss...
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Newspaper article from: Albany Times Union (Albany, NY); 1/21/2001; 700+ words ; ...Byline: MICHAEL LOPEZ Staff writer John Ashbery, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet...reviled as impenetrable by others, Ashbery can conjure a moment of bleak despair...the small things on earth.'' Ashbery, fascinated by time and how we...
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