Jeremy Noel-Tod
“Itried each thing, only some were immortal and free.” These words, which begin John Ashbery’s most celebrated volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), were extensively quoted on social media when the poet died last autumn at the age of 90. It was not an untimely death, but the news still felt like a shiver in the natural order. Regularly described as “America’s greatest living poet,” Ashbery himself seemed to be one of the immortal things, who would defy death with his infinite jest. “Time, you old miscreant!” began a poem published when he was 75, “Slain any brontosauruses lately?”
For all the rakish insouciance of such lines, the deep appeal of Ashbery’s voice was always its I-have-foresuffered-all sagacity. “We see us as we truly behave,” begins his first book, Some Trees (1956), establishing the 29-year-old poet’s bardic willingness to speak for the one and many, like Walt Whitman before him. Venturing further, the reader encounters inexplicably gnomic images, haunted by meaning, such as “In a far recess of summer / Monks are playing soccer.”
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