John Ashbery, who was one of the most original and enigmatically challenging poets of the late 20th century and hailed as one of its greatest and most influential, died on Sunday at his home in Hudson, N.
Y. He was 90.His husband, David Kermani, confirmed his death.
Mr. Ashbery’s early work was mostly known in avant-garde circles, but his arrival as a major figure in American literature was signaled in 1976, when he became the only writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year, for his collection “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” The title poem of the volume is a 15-page meditation on the painting of the same name by Parmigianino, the Italian Renaissance artist.
“No one now writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgment of time,” the critic Harold Bloom, an early advocate, once wrote. “He is joining the American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens and Hart Crane.”
Mr. Ashbery was originally associated with the New York school of poetry of the 1950s and ’60s, joining Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, John O’Hara and others as they swam in the currents of modernism, surrealism and Abstract Expressionism then coursing through the city, drawing from and befriending artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Jane Freilicher.
But while other eminent poets of his generation became widely known for social activism (Adrienne Rich and Gary Snyder, for example) or forays into fiction (James Dickey) or the details of their own harrowing lives (Sylvia Plath), Mr.
Ashbery was known primarily for one thing: writing poetry.That poetry is by turns playful and elegiac, absurd and exquisite — but more than anything else, it is immediately recognizable. If some poets remind us of the richness of American poetry by blending seamlessly into one of its many traditions, Mr. Ashbery has frequently seemed like a tradition unto himself. It is a cliché to praise a writer by saying no one has ever sounded quite like him, and yet: No one has ever sounded quite like him.
Not that they have not tried. Charles McGrath, the editor of The New York Times Book Review from 1995 to 2004, recalled that a large portion of new poetry titles during his tenure could be (and often were) tossed into a pile labeled “Ashbery impersonations.” And Mr. Ashbery remains far and away the most imitated American poet.
That widespread imitation has served mostly to underscore the distinctive qualities of the original — and those qualities are singular indeed. An Ashbery poem cycles through changes in diction, register and tone with bewildering yet expertly managed speed, happily mixing references and obscuring antecedents in the service of capturing what Mr. Ashbery called “the experience of experience.”
The effect can be puzzling, entrancing or, more frequently, a combination of the two — as if one were simultaneously being addressed by an oracle, a PTA newsletter and a restless sleep talker. The beginning of Mr. Ashbery’s 1974 poem “Grand Galop” is representative of his approach:
All things seem mention of themselves
And the names which stem from them branch out to other referents.
Hugely, spring exists again. The weigela does its dusty thing
In fire-hammered air. And garbage cans are heaved against
The railing as the tulips yawn and crack open and fall apart.
And today is Monday. Today’s lunch is: Spanish omelet, lettuce and tomato salad,
Jell-O, milk and cookies. Tomorrow’s: sloppy joe on bun,
Scalloped corn, stewed tomatoes, rice pudding and milk.
The names we stole don’t remove us:
We have moved on a little ahead of them
And now it is time to wait again.
Stephen Koch, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described Mr. Ashbery’s work 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 droughts of obscurity and languor.”
It is often easier to say what an Ashbery poem feels like than what it is about, and Mr. Ashbery relished that uncertainty.
But if his poetry is rarely argumentative or polemical, this does not mean it avoids the more difficult areas of human experience. Mr. Ashbery was attracted to themes of hesitancy, doubt and uncertainty (John Keats was an early and lingering influence), and he wrote movingly if obliquely on the difficulties of self-perception and the burden of aging. The final section of his 1994 collection “And the Stars Were Shining” has these lines:
I’ve told you before how afraid this makes me,
but I think we can handle it together,
and this is as good a place as any
to unseal my last surprise: you, as you go,
diffident, indifferent, but with the sky for an awning
for as many days as it pleases it to cover you.
That’s what I meant by “get a handle,” and as I say it,
both surface and subtext subside quintessentially
and the dead-letter office dissolves in the blue acquiescence of spring.
The inclusion of the cliché “get a handle” is typical of Mr. Ashbery. He enjoyed mixing elements of everyday speech with self-consciously elevated language, allowing the demotic and the literary to build on each other’s unique energies and occasionally deflate them.
One way to read his poetry, Mr. Ashbery suggested in a 1991 interview, was to think of it as music. “Words in proximity to one another take…
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