Post-modern master, US poet Ashbery dies at 90

WASHINGTON: Pulitzer-prize winning poet John Ashbery — a post-modern American trailblazer — died aged 90 in Hudson, New York, his family told US media Sunday.

The experimental vanguardist was sometimes accused of writing poems that were at times less than accessible to a wider audience.

"Well, I'm told that they're not," he said in a 2005 interview with NPR. "What they are is about the privacy of all of us, and the difficulty of our own thinking," he said. Yet "they are, I think, accessible if anyone cares to access them."

His twists in register or tone routinely were so swift as to leave heads spinning. Yet they left many pleasantly disconcerted.

Ashbery — who said he felt influenced by John Yeats — studied at Columbia University. The Rochester, New York native loved to mix everyday language and thoughts with elevated language.

His 1975 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" made history when he became the lone writer to earn three major accolades the same year for the same work: the Pulitzer in addition to a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2012, Ashbery received the National Humanities Medal from the then-president Barack Obama.

COVER IMAGE: This photo — taken on February 13, 2012 — shows US President Barack Obama presenting the 2011 National Arts and Humanities Medal to poet John Ashbery during a ceremony in White House's East Room, Washington, DC. AFP/Jewel Samad/Files