24 Facts About John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet and art critic.

John Ashbery published more than 20 volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

John Ashbery said he wished his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, not a private dialogue with himself.

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, the son of Helen, a biology teacher, and Chester Frederick John Ashbery, a farmer.

John Ashbery was raised on a farm near Lake Ontario; his brother died when they were children.

John Ashbery wrote his senior thesis on the poetry of W H Auden.

John Ashbery was an editor of the 12 issues of Art and Literature and the New Poetry issue of Harry Mathews' Locus Solus.

John Ashbery had previously written favorable reviews of Warhol's art.

John Ashbery returned to New York near the end of 1965 and was welcomed with a large party at the Factory.

John Ashbery became close friends with poet Gerard Malanga, Warhol's assistant, on whom he had an important influence as a poet.

John Ashbery was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983.

John Ashbery was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, and served for many years as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

John Ashbery served on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.

In 2008 John Ashbery was named the first poet laureate of MtvU, a division of MTV broadcast to US college campuses, with excerpts from his poems featured in 18 promotional spots and the works in their entirety on the broadcaster's website.

John Ashbery was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University in 2010, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.

John Ashbery was a founding member of The Raymond Roussel Society, with Miquel Barcelo, Joan Bofill-Amargos, Michel Butor, Thor Halvorssen and Hermes Salceda.

John Ashbery lived in New York City and Hudson, New York, with his husband, David Kermani.

John Ashbery died of natural causes on September 3,2017, at his home in Hudson, at the age of 90.

John Ashbery published some work in the avant-garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s.

John Ashbery then wrote two collections while in France, the highly controversial The Tennis Court Oath and Rivers and Mountains, before returning to New York to write The Double Dream of Spring, published in 1970.

John Ashbery's works are characterized by a free-flowing, often disjunctive syntax; extensive linguistic play, often infused with considerable humor; and a prosaic, sometimes disarmingly flat or parodic tone.

John Ashbery once said that his goal was "to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about".

John Ashbery returned to something approaching a reconciliation between tradition and innovation with many of the poems in The Double Dream of Spring, though his Three Poems are written in long blocks of prose.

John Ashbery wrote one novel, A Nest of Ninnies, with fellow poet James Schuyler, and in his 20s and 30s penned several plays, three of which have been collected in Three Plays.