John Ashbery

1927 –
2017
Read poems by this poet

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, on July 28, 1927.

Ashbery was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Breezeway (Ecco, 2015); Quick Question (Ecco, 2012); Planisphere (HarperCollins, 2009); A Worldly Country (Ecco, 2007); Where Shall I Wander (HarperCollins, 2005); Chinese Whispers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); Your Name Here (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); Girls on the Run: A Poem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999); Wakefulness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); Can You Hear, Bird (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); And the Stars Were Shining (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994); Hotel Lautrémont (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); Flow Chart (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); and April Galleons (Penguin, 1987).

During his career, Ashbery received nearly every major American award for poetry. His collection A Wave (Viking, 1984) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award for Poetry; and Some Trees (Yale University Press, 1956) was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series.

Ashbery also published Collected French Translations: Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Collected French Translations: Prose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Other Traditions: the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Harvard University Press, 2000); Reported Sightings (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), a book of art criticism; a collection of plays; a novel, A Nest of Ninnies (Dutton, 1969), with James Schuyler; and edited The Best American Poetry 1988.

Ashbery served as the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003. He was the first English-language poet to win the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poésie (Brussels), and also received the Bollingen Prize, the English Speaking Union Prize, the Feltrinelli Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants, the MLA Common Wealth Award in Literature, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the Frank O’Hara Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988–99, Ashbery was the Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He divided his time between New York City and Hudson, New York.

John Ashbery died on September 3, 2017.