Cooler but still well above normal this week

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

John Ashbery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet known for his surrealist, confounding works, has died at age 90.

The poet died of natural causes in his Hudson, N.Y., home early Sunday, confirms Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the publicist for a new Ashbery biography.

 won a rare trifecta of the literary world: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. The title poem was a meditation on Parmigianino's 16th century Italian painting of the same name. In 2012, Former President Barack Obama recognized Ashbery with the National Humanities Medal.


From an early age, his tendency to reject poetic conventions evolved under the influences of music, like John Cage, and visual art, particularly that of abstract expressionist painters.

, "If the verse is challenging, that was in part Mr. Ashbery's aim — to compel readers to rethink their presumptions about poetry, just as the Abstract Expressionists asked viewers to discard their preconceptions about painting."
"My ambition was to be a painter," Ashbery 

 of the Paris Review. He took painting classes in his preteen years, but "found that poetry was easier than painting." Meanwhile, he began consuming modern poetry.


He cut his teeth on a Louis Untermeyer anthology, he tells Stitt. In the way many critics found Ashbery's poetry indecipherable, "I didn't understand much of it at first ... I guess it was just a desire to emulate that started me writing poetry."

While his enigmatic poems confounded literary critics and peers, his experimental style reinvented literature for a generation of writers.


Ashbery's first book puzzled admired poet W.H. Auden. (

 Auden "one of the writers who most formed my language as a poet.") As 

, when Auden selected Ashbery as the Yale Younger Poets Prize winner for 

(1956), he later "confessed that he had not understood a word of it."


In fact, Ashbery joked to The Associated Press in 2008 that, were he to verbify his last name, it would mean "to confuse the hell out of people."

 "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."
He described poetry as a "marginal occupation" within society, 

 host Scott Simon. Critics have told him they've found his work inaccessible to a mainstream audience, he said, but his themes regarding the human experience, such as doubt and uncertainty, address many.
"I wish that they were as accessible to as many people as possible," he told Simon. "They are not, I wouldn't say, private. What they are is about the privacy of all of us and the difficulty of our own thinking and coming to conclusions. And in that way they are, I think, accessible if anybody cares to access them."  Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


A previous version of this story mixed up the attribution on a quote. It was John Ashbery, not W.H. Auden, talking about the writers who had formed his language as a poet.

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Emma Bowman

Author

Although his enigmatic poems confounded literary critics and peers who heaped praise on him, his abstract, modernist style reinvented literature for a generation of writers.

John Ashbery, celebrated and experimental poet of the 20th century, dies at 90

Go Deeper.

Like this?

News you can use in your inbox