John Ashbery

Biography

John Ashbery (1927 – 2017) was the author of more than thirty books of poetry. He was the recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Griffin International Award, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. His collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1976) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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ESSAYS / Summer 1981

The Lonedale Operator

By John Ashbery

The first movie I ever saw was the Walt Disney cartoon, The Three Little Pigs. My grandmother took me to it. It was back in the days when you went “downtown.” There was a second feature, with live actors, called Bring ‘Em Back Alive, a...