R.I.P., John Ashbery

The Associated Press has just reported  that the distinguished poet, translator and critic John Ashbery—who won a trifecta of honors (the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize) for his 1975 poetry collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror—died on Sept. 3 at his home in Hudson, N.Y. He is survived by his husband, David Kermani. Other obituaries appear in the New York Times and The Guardian.

In his obituary, AP reporter Hillel Italie notes that Ashbery's style "ranged from ranging couplets to haiku to blank verse, and his interests were as vast as his gifts for expressing them. He wrote of love, music, movies, the seasons, the city and the country, and he was surely the greatest poet ever to compose a hymn to President Warren Harding."

One of Ashbery's most famous poems, "How to Continue," is an elegy for the sexual revolution among gays in the 1960s and '70s, a party turned tragic by the deadly arrival of AIDS. "In a Wonderful Place," a poem from Ashbery's final collection, offers an artfully ambiguous summing up of the poet's long, distinguished career:

I spent years exhausting my good works
on the public, all for seconds
Time to shut down colored alphabets
flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn. It
draws like a rout. Or a treat.