"John Ashbery died nearly a week ago. He was born in 1927 and he died this year, our year, 2017. He was perfectly ninety. His birthday was July 28th. In honor of this big one people recorded his long poem 'Flow Chart' and sent it to him, they (we) wrote paragraphs about who he and his work was for them. He received all these encomiums, they made him happy and then he died. John was a Leo. He leaves a partner, David Kermani who he lived with for over 30 years. In his life-time John Ashbery published more than 20 books, the 8th of which, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror in 1976 won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle making him the most celebrated poet of our time. Nobody else got all three. So he was a famous poet for the last forty years of his life and he was a generous one, blurbing books, writing recommendations, and pieces like this, so many, when important peers of his died. Of his generation he was the last man standing, and the great one. He was a sweet and a generous and a private man. ..."
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2008 June: Eileen Myles, 2010 August: Inferno, 2015 February: “A Thrashing, Generous Intelligence”: Eileen Myles’s Inferno chosen for Slate/Whiting Second Novel List, 2015 August: The Women of the Avant-Garde, 2016 April: The Poet Idolized by a New Generation of Feminists
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