New York Poets/Poet bios

New York Poets Biographies
John Ashbery

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-has been “recognized as a worthy successor to the romantics”

-as a “protolanguage poet”

-“produces memorable representations”

- style goes off idea that the current world is “so strange, absurd and heavily sedimented with mediaspeak and characterized by ‘hyperreal’” so that the poet cannot represent “consistent or coherent accounts of subjectivity and individual experience”

-According to Ashbery his poetry presents the reader with “an open field of narrative possibilities”

-after living in Paris for ten years he “cast a cold eye on the neosymbolism of his American contemporaries, their mania for what he called ‘over-interpretation’”

-“language on the point of revealing its secret without ever actually doing so”

-“connections are as likely to be phonemic or graphemic as referential”

Also known as Jonas Berry, John Ahsbery was born in Rochester, New York on July 28, 1927,  as the son of a farmer and biology teacher. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1949 from Harvard University and his masters in 1951 from Columbia University. He was chancellor from 1988-89 of the Academy of American Poets and is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He’s worked as a writer, critic and editor.

The Poet's View-- John Asbery 

John Asbery Reading 

Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2008. From Literature Resource Center. Contemporary Poets. Gale, 2001. From Literature Resource Center.

Barbara Guest

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-met Frank O’Hara in early 1950’s

-later group joined by Kenneth Koch and John Asbery

-writing a lot like Ashbery’s (influenced by drama and art

-keeps poetry highly personal without “revealing much directly about her life”

-“passion for travel”

-“poetry tends to be urbane, cosmopolitan, and refined; also suggest the psychological dislocations and restless imagination of the perpetual traveler”

-“first book The Location of Things (1960), focuses primarily on spatial metaphors. In a sense, it deals with distances—physical, aesthetic, person—that each individual must somehow confront.”

Guest was born September 6, 1920 in Wilmington, North Carolina. She married Lord Stephen Haden-Guest in 1949 and divorced him in 1954. She got remarried to Trumbull Higgins a professor of military history in August of 1954. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles and received her bachelors in 1945 from the University of California, Berkeley. She passed away on February 17, 2006 from complications from a series of strokes.

Tribute of Barbara Guest Readings After Her Stroke 

Anthony Manousous American Poets Since World War II. Ed. Donald J. Greiner. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 5. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. From Literature Resource Center. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2006. From Literature Resource Center.

Kenneth Koch

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-“associated with abstract impressionists”

-“brought verbal constructs to the principles of abstract expressionism” ; “used words abstractly and evocatively”

- Koch eventually “elevated his lyric view to another level” that was “better organized and more simplified than his earlier view”

Kenneth Koch (pronounced Coke) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on the 27th of February 1925. He attended Harvard University and Columbia University where he received his M.A. in 1953. He served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946 and married Mary Janice Elwood in 1955 and had one daughter. He married Karen Culler in 1994. He worked as a lecturer and assistant professor. Koch died of leukemia on July 6, 2002 at 77 years old.

Koch reads To Psychoanalysis 

Contemporary Poets. Gale, 2001. From Literature Resource Center.

Frank O'Hara

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-"prolific, unique voice in poetry from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s"

-"influenced by the artists of his time, many of whom are mentioned in his work, he also found inspiration in surrealism and dadaism, in music and film, and in the poetry of Williampersonal not confessional -- talked/wrote about daily life : e.g. traffic jams etc.

Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore on June 27, 1926. He was a poet, playwright and art critic and worked at the Museum of Modern Art as a staff member from 1952 to 1953. O’Hara died on July 25, 1966 “after being struck by a dune-buggy taxicab on Fire Island”.

Frank O'Hara Reads: Having a Coke with You 

Jim Elledge Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature. George B. Perkins, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. p801. From Literature Resource Center.