John Ashbery: award-winning poet whose oblique style was vastly influential

The obtuseness of his work attracted some criticism but he wrote that way, he said, because he couldn't help it

Ashbery in 2008: during his career he picked up almost every accolade that a poet might hope to receive (AP)

I first met the American poet John Ashbery wandering towards the exit door of the lobby of BBC Broadcasting House in the autumn of 1991. When he spoke to me – he seemed shy, diffident, friendly – I noticed immediately that he was gat-toothed, which put me in mind of the Wife of Bath, though there the parallel ends.

I was meeting him at the BBC to interview him for The Economist. He had just published Flow Chart, the longest poem of his entire career as a published poet which, from first to last, spanned almost 60 years.

Ashbery was born in 1927, on a farm near Lake Ontario in upstate New York. His early years were spent living with his maternal grandfather, a rather famous professor of physics, in Rochester. That gloomy house’s huge library gave Ashbery a tremendous appetite for books, and he positively devoured Thackeray. Ashbery was a precocious, clever boy – he was the county’s spelling-bee champion, and he remained an enormously fastidious proof reader of his own books from first to last.

At Harvard, he became friends with Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch. These poets formed the nucleus of the so-called New York School of Poets, a grouping which threw off the shackles of the stale academicism of the 1940s. Later he spent a decade in Paris, part-funded by a Fulbright scholarship, where he got involved in the writing of art criticism for the Herald Tribune. That became his on/off occupation for about 25 years.

He was a pleasing puzzle to me on that day in 1991. Nothing quite went as it was meant to. I now see, with the benefit of hindsight, that such an outcome was almost inevitable given the nature of the human being with whom I was dealing. Encounters with John Ashbery would always be oblique and slightly puzzling, whether in person or on the page. And yet few American poets have been quite so widely feted as Ashbery. During his lifetime, he picked up almost every accolade that a poet might hope to receive. And yet a lot of respected critics maintained, from first to last, that he didn’t quite deserve them, that he was, somehow, a kind of imposter for writing in the way that he did.

There was confusion at that first meeting. Ashbery himself looked mildly confused when I greeted him. “Oh hello,” he said. “Hw are you doing? Where are we going?” My understanding was that his publisher, Carcanet Press, had organised a place for us to do the interview, some quiet and sequestered spot close to where I would be meeting him – and that Mr Ashbery would tell me where that was to be. Not a bit of it. He didn’t have a clue. So we hopped into a black cab and went home to Clapham, where I interviewed him around the dining-room table.

He was courteous, mild-mannered and surprisingly diffident. He was both very easy and very difficult to talk to. I was accustomed to interviewing poets in those years, but John Ashbery seemed surprisingly slippery as a conversationalist. Not in a malign or hurtful way. Not in a way that a politician is slippery. Not maliciously devious. Never maddening or truly exasperating. He was too funny to be truly exasperating. He was a master, I soon discovered, of the art of bathos, of knocking the stuffing out of any poker-faced interviewer by giving seemingly unserious answers to serious questions.

This was not exactly a tactic though. What he was saying he genuinely seemed to believe. Here is one question that I put to him that afternoon as my wife brought in tea. “Seamus Heaney recently said to me that poetry rinses the language. What would you say that your poetry does for the language?” “Well, I suppose it gives a kind of blue rinse to the language,” he replied. A little later on, I asked him about the influence of French poetry on his work, and especially the poetry of the Surrealists. He denied that they had had much influence upon him at all, but then he added something interesting. “I once asked that same question of the Belgian neo-Surrealist, Henri Michaux. He said to me that Surrealism had given him ‘la grande permission’. I guess the same could be said of me.” So he kind of admitted to Surrealism’s influence, but only tangentially, and by way of someone else. I liked that phrase, “la grande permission”. To do exactly what the hell you like. To turn American poetry on its head, for example.

Ashbery didn’t like trying to explain his own poetry to other people. He could not have done so had he tried. I once asked him how he would characterise it. “Very strange’,” he said. “People feel about it like they did when they saw the first Picasso of the woman with two heads or four ears or something.”

I once even asked him to explicate one of his own poems, line by line. We very quickly got lost in a maze at the end of a one-way street. The fact that his poems were so difficult to pick apart and so seemingly obtuse meant that some critics accused him of charlatanism. He felt hurt by that. He wrote in the way that he did, he would explain, because of who he was. He just couldn’t seem to help it. He once told me that he didn’t even know whether what he wrote was poetry or not, but other people called it that, and who was he to deny them the right to do so? He wrote to the accompaniment of music written by little-known composers, often later in the day so that he did not run the risk of poetising with an inspirational degree of energy. The length of his line endings were dictated by the length of his typewriter’s carriage. In short, he was a master of humorous paradox.

He divided his time between a magnificent coke merchant’s house in Hudson, Upstate New York, bought for a pittance in 1978, and New York City, where he lived in an apartment in Chelsea. You saw his art collection at its best in that house. Why was there a de Kooning on the wall of the house of a un-rich poet though? Well, one does make friends as an art critic. He never thought of that occupation as an end in itself though. God forbid. He did it, he once said, “to feed the poetry habit”.

John Ashbery, poet, born 28 July 1927, died 3 September 2017