John Ashbery was born on July 28, 1927 in Rochester, New York. He was educated at Harvard and Columbia universities and studied in Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship. Initially wishing to be a painter, then a musician, he has had a variety of careers including reference librarian and art critic. In the early 1950s, he was a copywriter with Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill.
His collection of poems, Turandot and other Poems, published in 1953, established his reputation as one of the leading American poets of his generation. Ashbery feels strongly influenced by film and other art forms. The abstract expressionist movement in art had a profound effect on his writing style. Frequently termed a philosophical poet, Ashbery's poems often deal with the mind and the connection of the reader.
Ashbery has published several volumes of poetry, including Houseboat Days and Flow Chart. Highly regarded by critics, he received a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976, all for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. He received the Ambassador Book Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. He also writes under the pseudonym Jonas Berry.
(Bowker Author Biography) A contemporary and fellow classmate of Kenneth Koch at Harvard University, John Ashbery has been one of the most experimental of the New York school of poets. Noted for his mixture of unusual diction and elegant wit, he was influenced by early W. H. Auden, Laura Riding, and Wallace Stevens.
Born in Rochester, New York, in 1927, Ashbery grew up near Lake Ontario. After graduation from Harvard University, he studied at Columbia University, where he obtained his M.A. In 1955 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in France, where he wrote art criticism for the Paris edition of the N.Y. Herald Tribune. Like others in the New York school, Ashbery was closely associated with art and artists and wrote for Art News. His first book, which contained a preface by Auden, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. In 1991 he became Professor of English at Bard College.
Ashbery's plays The Heroes and The Compromise or Queen of the Caribou have both been produced-the former by the Living Theatre and the latter at the Poet's Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is now virtually impossible to overstate Ashbery's influence and the fervor of his partisans. Since the death of Robert Lowell, Ashbery has been the most discussed of all American poets. Although his poetry is imbued with anxiety and uncertainty, Ashbery has become the dominant poet of both the avant-garde and academic criticism-a position not held by a poet since T. S. Eliot in the 1930s and 1940s.
Ashbery has received numerous awards, among them the Bollingen prize (1985) and a MacArthur Fellowship (1985).
(Bowker Author Biography) John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and educated at Harvard and Columbia Universities. He is Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Language and Literature at Bard College and lives in New York City and Hudson, New York.
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