Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet John Ashbery '49 Named 2009 Harvard Arts Medalist

Kicking off the ARTS FIRST festivities, John Ashbery ’49—Pulitzer Prize- winning poet—will receive the 2009 Harvard Arts Medal on Thursday, April 30. President Drew Gilpin Faust will present the medal as part of an event hosted by the Learning from Performers Program at 5 pm in the New College Theatre. Preceding the ceremony,moderator John Lithgow ‘67 will conduct a conversation with Ashbery.

Ashbery will be the 15th distinguished Harvard or Radcliffe alumnus or faculty member to receive this accolade for excellence in the arts and contributions to education and the public good through the arts. Past medalists have included saxophonist Joshua Redman ’91, composer John Adams ’69, MA ’72, cellist Yo-Yo Ma ’76, filmmaker Mira Nair ’79, and director Peter Sellars ’80.
Born in 1927 in western New York, John Ashbery began his artistic explorations with painting until he shifted to poetry at age 15. As an English concentrator at Harvard (1945-1949), Ashbery studied alongside students Robert Creeley, John Hawkes, and Frank O’Hara. With the help of Professor Kenneth Koch, the young poet joined the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate. While at Harvard, Ashbery attended poetry readings by Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden, upon whose poetry he based his senior thesis. Early critical acclaim for his work came soon after leaving Harvard. In 1956, Auden selected Ashbery’s book Some Trees, which included several works originally published in the Advocate, as winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition.
Like other American poets such as William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein, Ashbery has been strongly influenced by visual art. The abstract expressionist movement in modern painting, stressing nonrepresentational methods of picturing reality, is an especially important presence in his work. In his early poem “The Painter,” Ashbery connects the artistic subject of a painting with human subjectivity, and enacts the elusive nature of both:

Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white.

Ultimately, this deep comprehension of the connections between visual and literary art has enabled him to create many respected works of art criticism, as well as various plays, novels, and poems influenced by visual media.

Increasing critical recognition in the 1970s transformed Ashbery from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America’s most important (though at times controversial) poets. After the publication of Three Poems (1973), Ashbery in 1975 won all three major American poetry prizes (the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award) for his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The collection’s title poem is considered to be one of the masterpieces of late-20th-century American poetic literature.

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.

Poet and Adams House Allston Burr Resident Dean Sharon Howell commented, “A poet such as Robert Frost has a certain vocal character. But with the kind of modulations in Ashbery’s voices, he seems to be speaking and listening from a larger world than just that of ’the poet‘ . . . It is difficult to choose just one poem that epitomizes his voice.”

Beyond winning the Pulitzer Prize, Ashbery has received awards from institutions including the Academy of
American Poets, the Fulbright Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. Today, at the age of 81, he is among the most prolific writers of his generation, consistently publishing works in nearly every literary genre including, most recently, Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007).

For more information on the Harvard Arts Medal, ARTS FIRST, and related events, go to the Office for the Arts website at www.fas.harvard.edu/ofa or call
617.495.8676.

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