John Ashbery (1927–2017)

John Ashbery died on Sunday, September 3, 2017, at his home in Hudson, New York, at the age of 90. He is survived by his long-time partner and husband, David Kerman.

Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor Emeritus of Languages and Literature, taught at Bard from 1990 until his retirement in 2008. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in 1976, when he became the only writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1985. He received the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry in 1992, and in 1993 he was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Letters by the French government. He received the National Book Foundation’s 2011 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2012 President Barack Obama presented him with the National Humanities Medal.

REMEMBRANCES

Ann Lauterbach, Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature & Co-chair, Writing, MFA, Bard College

And then you sail past in your effortless bravado, the sky
a blue wind of ease, wings outstretched on a continuous
whim, as if there were no time, and there isn’t,
but the rest of us pause, watching as you go, you go by.

He was a person of rare traits, or rather rare in combination: kindness, humor, curiosity, and a knowing brilliance, always offered as the mild gift of the moment, without competition or self-regard. He loved being here and was able somehow to translate his love of being here into language, directly, so that when you read his work you are reading being alive. He managed to escape the destructive and reductive aspects of the analytical, as well as the ever-increasing sense that one's identity is of signal importance. I don't think he was interested in his identity as a person (I once heard him remark, “I am John. Ashbery writes the poems”) although he was hugely interested in his identity as a poet, and entirely interested in others, other persons; the human experience, wherever and however manifested. He had meticulous taste, if taste is a form of discernment, and discernment a kind of care and humility toward the world, its material stuff as well as its arbitrary weathers. He was drawn to the local and to the minor, the huge field of forgotten or overlooked or insignificant details of daily life, which he was able to transcribe, without relying on either mirrors or windows, but on the capaciousness of his restless, inquisitive, integrating imagination. He seemed to have an infinite resource of words and a flexible, if sometimes dissonant, syntax into which to put them. His poems are always in the service of making new relations, so that meanings arise without the insistent correlate of understanding but, instead, offer to his readers a new way to find sense in an apprehension or awareness of the variety of this world, and the capacity of language to provide ways of perceiving and, somehow, renovating it. I think, for John, the world and language were close to synonyms. He eschewed high seriousness, finding a tonal range that made life's acute energies, its sorrows and joys, into a kind of diffuse habitat, generous and inclusive.

I loved him very much and will miss him deeply. We met, in London, in the early 1970s, when I invited him there to read in a series I had curated on contemporary poetry for the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He read in a number of venues, first at the American Embassy, introduced by the English poet Lee Harwood. I took him to Carnaby Street where he bought a velvet jacket. (Years later, he gave me a velvet coat with a fur shawl, from the twenties, he had found in a thrift shop.) One night, at the Ritz Hotel, where he was staying, he read to a few of us from the recently completed manuscript for Three Poems, the poem in prose called “The New Spirit”. It was, for me, a great advent.

Post Date: 09-03-2017