John Ashbery, widely considered one of the greatest American poets of the last century, died in his home in Hudson, New York, on Sunday, just weeks after his ninetieth birthday. Born in Rochester in 1927, Ashbery published more than twenty collections of poetry as well as a variety of prose works and translations. His book “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” from 1975, received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2011, he received a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.
Ashbery’s poems appeared in The New Yorker throughout the second half of his life. In its November 18, 1972, issue, the magazine published “Voyage in the Blue,” the first of some eighty poems that Ashbery would eventually contribute to The New Yorker. A complete archive of Ashbery’s work in The New Yorker—including, in addition to his own poems, a translation of Rimbaud and an essay on Delmore Schwartz—hints at the range of registers and approaches that he explored over the course of his career, showcasing his wry humor and cosmopolitan sensibility, and displaying the unexpected twists and leaps of logic and imagery that characterize his poetry.
In 2005, the magazine published a Profile of Ashbery, by Larissa MacFarquhar, alongside three of his poems. As a reader, MacFarquhar writes, Ashbery was interested in the sound of a poem—but not literal sound; rather, he was concerned with “something like the sound produced by meaning, which lets you know that there’s meaning there even though you don’t know what it is yet.” Ten years later, in a review of Ashbery’s collection “Breezeway,” Dan Chiasson wrote, “More than ever, his style is a net for the weirdest linguistic flotsam.” He added, “Ashbery’s style prizes such mistakes and misapprehensions, as though looking for the word on the tip of the tongue.”
The last poem that John Ashbery published in The New Yorker during his lifetime was “Just So You’ll Know,” in the February 13 & 20, 2017, issue. On the New Yorker Poetry Podcast, in 2014, Ashbery discussed, with Paul Muldoon, his poem “Gravy for the Prisoners,” which had appeared in the magazine the previous year. In 2015, episodes of the podcast featured Michael Robbins discussing Ashbery’s poem “Myrtle,” from 1993, and Meghan O’Rourke on “Tapestry.” The latter poem was published in the magazine in 1979. It ends:
