John Ashbery: 1927-2017

[Bouvre]

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/arts/john-ashbery-dead-prize-winning-poet.html

 

The critic Harold Bloom once said of Mr. Ashbery: “No one now writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgment of time. He is joining the American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens and Hart Crane.”

 

Mr. Ashbery was one of the most honored poets of his generation. He was the first to win that triple crown of literary prizes — the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award — doing so in one year, 1976, for “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a book-length meditation inspired by a painting of the same title by the late-Renaissance artist Parmigianino.

 

At one point he sees a planetary reflection in the painting’s calm composition, writing,

 

The whole is stable within

Instability, a globe like ours, resting

On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball

Secure on its jet of water.

 

Mr. Ashbery’s poetry could read like an extended murmur, rich in associations and majestic in emotional resonances though difficult to decipher. After Mr. Ashbery’s first book, “Some Trees” (1956), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the competition’s judge, W.H. Auden, confessed that he had not understood a word of it.

 

The poet Stephen Koch described Mr. Ashbery’s poetry as “a hushed, simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent whisper with a weird pulsating rhythm that fluctuates like a wave between peaks of sharp clarity and watery troughs of obscurity and languor.”

 

It is conversational in tone, full of jump cuts and shrugs at literary conventions; modifiers sometimes seem deliberately misplaced. His lines can carry what appear to be random thoughts, or what Wallace Stevens once called “the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind.”

 

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.