Perennial Voyager

John Ashbery at Home

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, August 27, 2007

“Attention, shoppers.”

This may not be the opening gambit most readers expect from a poet who’s won every major award in the pantheon, but John Ashbery often defies expectations: These Kmart-tinged words launch his poem “Wolf Ridge.”

There are few laudatory adjectives that critics haven’t applied to Ashbery’s 26 books of poetry; “dazzling,” “sublime,” and the like become shopworn. His 1975 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won an unprecedented triple crown, garnering the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Prize, and the Pulitzer. This fall will provide a matching trifecta for Ashbery lovers. From September 14 to 16, Bard College will host a celebration honoring the poet’s 80th birthday. In November, Ecco will release Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, and literary magazine Conjunctions (based at Bard) will devote some 150 pages of its 49th issue to Ashbery and his work.

“John has been a contributor and dear friend for almost as long as Conjunctions has been going,” says editor Bradford Morrow. “I’ll never forget the exceptionally moving first lines of the first poem he ever sent me for publication—‘To have been loved once by someone–surely / There is a permanent good in that.’ He’s a colleague at Bard and, to my mind, the most influential, important poet alive. His poetry investigates voice and what can be voiced in its every gesture. It soars, shimmers, and bristles with both street smarts and hieratic wisdom.”

Ashbery divides his time between a Manhattan apartment and a magisterial Victorian home in Hudson. His partner of 37 years, David Kermani, a slight, dark-haired man with a seemingly permanent smile, opens the door to an alternate universe. He ushers his guests through the oak-paneled entryway, past a huge stained-glass window of striking amber and butterscotch hues, and into a formal dining room lined with deeply textured maroon wallpaper. Like the woodwork, beveled mirrors, and tile fireplaces, it’s original to the house. The careful arrangements of porcelain geishas, trompe l’oeil plates, and Little Orphan Annie teacups are pure Ashbery.