John Ashbery

John Ashbery (1927-2017) began publishing poetry in The New Yorker in 1972. He was the author of more than twenty collections of poetry, among them “Quick Question”; “Planisphere”; “Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems,” which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize; “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and “Some Trees,” which was selected by W. H. Auden in 1955 for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. In 1989-90, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. A two-volume set of his collected translations from the French was published recently. He served as the executive editor of ARTnews and was an art critic for New York and Newsweek; he exhibited his own work at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (receiving its Gold Medal for Poetry in 1997) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards and honors, among them two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House in 2012.