Shall we be really gone? The passing of John Ashbery

at Great Spruce Head Island
Just last Friday I was thinking: We won’t have John Ashbery with us too much longer. Then came the news . . .


I cannot describe how this feels. I can count now on one hand the number of poets that might be described as belonging to the New York School or even the Second Generation that are still with us. John Ashbery’s passing closes a circle. All this as I’m reading and re-reading James Schuyler’s diary, letters—many citations and addressed to John Ashbery. This summer I spent a week at Great Spruce Head Island and visited the tennis courts where he played, walked the path from the boat house to the big house that he must have trod, swam the coves he most likely swam in—during a vital and sunny part of his life.

As I Googled him last Friday and stared into images of a very old Ashbery I was reminded of that young man who drove with Jane Freilicher to Mexico, who won a Fullbright and went to France, who wrote impregnable poetry. Not many of us walked in his footprints.

Summer has ended.

Yet he was nothing like the New York School. He was a universe unto himself. School is a misnomer—he was part of a class, a group of mates that hung together. In James’s diary there is a to and fro, a going back and forth on the Long Island railroad between Manhattan and Southampton. Car rides with a Nest of Ninnies. Weekends in Vermont. John Ashbery outlived them all=Frank O’Hara, James, Jane, Fairfield, Kenneth. He was always there to give a tribute, to say a few words. Now that voice is silenced.

How many people came and stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you
Like light behind windblown fog and sand,
Filtered or influenced by it, until no part
Remains that is surely you.
-- “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (thanks to Andrew Epstein blog Locus Solus for pointing me to these lines)

Ashbery was our connection to one of the most thrilling times in American poetry. I don’t want to say the last connection (thank you Ron Padgett) but we are winding down.


Ashes to ashes.
Jane Freilicher and John Ashbery in Mexico, 1955. Photographer unknown.

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