“Truth doesn’t satisfy.”

America’s pre-eminent poet, John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York. Controversial, self-absorbed — French in envious ways — Ashbery “rejects the theatrics of the long lament because being-in-time is bearable.”

He defies description — “even the rules and logic of Surrealism.”

“I live with this paradox: I am an important poet, but nobody understands me. My poems mean what they say, but there is no message — nothing I want to tell the world, except what I am thinking when I am writing.”

From the mid-1950s Ashbery lived in France for nearly two decades — translating French murder mysteries, editing magazine Art and Literature, and serving as an art editor and art critic — a career he recycled upon his return to New York. In 1975 he received the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

“I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free. Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight filters down, a little at a time, waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken, as the sun yellows the green of the maple tree.”

Ashbery’s work includes: Some Trees, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Houseboat Days, A Wave, Hotel Lautréamont, Chinese Whispers, Where Shall I Wander, Planisphere, and Collected Poems published by Library of America — as well as translations of Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, Raymond Roussel, Pierre Martoy, and Rimbaud’s Illuminations.

John Ashbery died at age 90 in New York, where he lived.