John Ashbery, poet, 1927-2017

In 1976 John Ashbery won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year, and I’ll bet you never read one poem by him.

In my opinion, Ashbury is unreadable.  I take that back.  You can read the words–they are written in English–but they make no sense.  

Emily Dickinson once said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

With Ashbery, all you get is a headache. The English poet James Fenton said in a review of Ashbery’s poetry, there were times “when I actually thought I was going to burst into tears of boredom.”  

Ashbery put down protest poetry, saying “Poetry is poetry.  Protest is protest.”  Not so, but I do hold that dreck is dreck.

Ashbery’s poetry is often called “enigmatic.”  That’s another word for “incomprehensible.”