'Writing out of experiences'

 

I writewith experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them. – JohnAshbery
Langdon Hammer, chair of theEnglish Department at Yale, said in 2008 that  "No figure looms so large in Americanpoetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery" and "No American poethas had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound.”  

Born in New York in the summer of 1927, Ashbery (who died in 2017) had 29 volumesof poetry published, earning every major award for the genre’, including a Pulitzer Prizefor Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.   In 2012 he wasinducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.
As poet and criticMelanie Rehak wrote in reviewing one of his books, “…reading an Ashbery poem isalso a little bit like being let loose inside a house of mirrors —things don’talways make sense on the surface, but on some gut level, you know you’re stilllooking at yourself, which is about as much as you can hope for.”
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One key to his success was his effortto write for everyone and make the work as accessible as possible.  “I don’t want my poems to be a privatedialogue with myself," Ashbery said.   "I don’t look onpoetry as closed works.   Ifeel they’re going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off alength to share.”