There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army. - John Ashbery

About John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927- September 3, 2017) was an award-winning American poet and a prominent art critic. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, he published 26 volumes of poetry spanning 60 years and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer in 1976 and the Bollingen and Lenore Marshall prizes in 1984 for the collections Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and A Wave, respectively. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983, taught at Bard as the Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature from 1990 until his retirement in 2008, and remains the only writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year (1976). Selected as the poet laureate of New York State from 2001-03, he was further honored by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2011 with the National Humanities Medal. His art criticism has been collected in the 1989 volume Reported Sightings, Art Chronicles 1957-1987, edited by the poet David Bergman.

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