{"id":114928,"date":"2017-09-03T16:02:33","date_gmt":"2017-09-03T20:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=114928"},"modified":"2017-09-04T17:30:23","modified_gmt":"2017-09-04T21:30:23","slug":"john-ashbery-1927-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/03\/john-ashbery-1927-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"John Ashbery, 1927\u20132017"},"content":{"rendered":"
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John Ashbery. Photo by Lynn Davis.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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We are very sorry to hear of the loss of our admired and beloved contributor John Ashbery.<\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t know what the poet that I am is, very much. I was rather an outsider as a child\u2014I didn\u2019t have many friends. We lived out in the country on a farm. I had a younger brother whom I didn\u2019t get along with\u2014we were always fighting the way kids do\u2014and he died at the age of nine. I felt guilty because I had been so nasty to him, so that was a terrible shock. These are experiences which have been important to me. I don\u2019t know quite how they may have fed into my poetry. My ambition was to be a painter, so I took weekly classes at the art museum in Rochester from the age of about eleven until fifteen or sixteen. I fell deeply in love with a girl who was in the class but who wouldn\u2019t have anything to do with me. So I went to this weekly class knowing that I would see this girl, and somehow this being involved with art may have something to do with my poetry. Also, my grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester, and I lived with them as a small child and went to kindergarten and first grade in the city. I always loved his house; there were lots of kids around, and I missed all this terribly when I went back to live with my parents. Then going back there each week for art class was a returning to things I had thought were lost, and gave me a curious combination of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. \u2014John Ashbery, The Art of Poetry No. 33<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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