John Ashbery

A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University, Ashbery has won every major American award for his poetry, beginning with the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1956, selected by W. H. Auden, for his first collection, Some Trees.

In the late 1950s, the critic John Bernard Myers categorized the common traits of Ashbery's avant-garde poetry, as well as that of Kenneth Koch[?], Frank O'Hara[?], James Schuyler[?], Barbara Guest[?], and others, as constituting a "New York School."

Ashbery's works are characterized by a free-flowing, often disjunctive syntax, extensive linguistic play, often infused with considerable humor, and a prosaic, sometimes disarmingly flat or parodic tone. The play of the human mind is the subject of a great many of his poems.

Among his other collections are:

• The Tennis Court Oath
• Rivers and Mountains
• The Double Dream of Spring
• Three Poems
• The Vermont Notebook
• Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award[?]
• Houseboat Days
• As We Know
• A Wave
• Flow Chart"
• "And the Stars Were Shining
• Hotel Lautreamont[?]
• Girls on the Run

Ashbery currently is Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor at Bard College[?].

See also: Famous gay lesbian and bisexual people.

External links:

• John Ashbery--the Academy of American Poets (http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C04010B)