1927
The Pronoun
John Ashbery is often called the most influential American poet of his generation. He spent sixty years writing love poetry, but doesn’t tell the reader who he is writing to. He was born on July 28, 1927, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario.
He was teased at school for being a sissy, but eventually made it to Harvard. At Harvard he met Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, and the four of them became the New York School. They helped change what American poetry was allowed to sound like. He spent a decade in France writing art criticism, came back, taught at Brooklyn College and then at Bard for thirty years, and in 1975 published Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year. He was the first living poet the Library of America put into its collection.
Other gay poets of his generation wrote about being gay openly. Frank O’Hara did, and so did Thom Gunn and James Merrill. Ashbery never did. He wrote love poems and left the person in them unnamed, with no gender attached, and he moved between I, you and we so freely that it is often unclear who is speaking or who is being spoken to. Readers have argued about this ever since. Some think it was evasion. Some think it was a way of writing love poetry that any reader could step into. Some think it is what happens to a man who spent his twenties expecting to lose his job if the wrong person found out he was gay.
He lived with David Kermani for forty-seven years and married him. The collages he was making at the end of his life, published alongside his last poems, are openly homoerotic. He died in 2017 at ninety.