Poet John Ashbery died at the age of 90. Born in Rochester, in the state of New York in 1927, he has more than twenty collections of poetry to his credit and is considered, even by Harold Bloom among others, the most famous and important living American poet. Exponent of the “New York School”, together with authors such as Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara, he made his debut in 1956 with the collection Some Trees (Certi Alberi). Since then he has published with a frequency and consistency that are unmatched in recent history, certainly not in American history.
In the 1976 he won the Pulitzer Prize with "Self-Portrait of a Convex Mirror".
In an interview with Meghan O'Rourke, Slate magazine, in John Nichols, John Ashbery claims to have always sought a kind of poetry that is as challenging as possible, a poem "of which the critic can not speak", which escapes an attempt at concluding interpretation, which forces you to set aside all the certainties, to leave the reader always out of balance, dispassionate and ecstatic. Ashbery's poem is an always open and ever-exciting challenge; opens questions that he does not seem willing to answer, brings to light fears never ensnared and joys never consumed, leaves behind empty spaces, tattered notes, unresolved issues. Yet, in the end, it always seems that everything is back, that every text is a perfect universe in its imperfection, it seems that its own possibility of existence lies on the alternation between darkness and light flashes, between sense and not sense.
Much of John Ashbery's fortune depends precisely on his ability to astonish, his ability to renew himself indefinitely without ever losing his liminary traits to the essential elements of his style. Joseph Harrison in the introduction to Sossella's anthology finds in this characteristic the extraordinaryity of Ashbery's work; because to be extraordinary is not the fact of achieving cutting-edge results, but the fact of being at the forefront for more than fifty years. The fact of being constantly "different", without really changing.
John Ashbery was among the Nobel Prize nominees for literature.