John Ashbery turned eighty-eight this week. As a poet, his body of work has earned him copious literary awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for 1975’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. His latest collection, Breezeway, was released earlier this year. In a review for The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson wrote that the poems contained within it are "working alertly within the uncommon genre of poems written in extreme old age, a genre they in turn significantly expand." Hyperallergic recently published his poem "Glove Compartment," which features surreal juxtapositions: memories shifting into cartoonish imagery shifting into something more concrete and oblique: "I’m always surprised at/ how green-tempered you are/ toward other, frog-related chains/ of weeks, or months, or/ whatever you call them." The man also has a penchant for bringing together words that have almost luxurious juxtapositions -- the phrase "lugubrious gondola" in the poem "The Enthusiasts," for instance, is both vivid and something of a joy to say.

Ashbery has a cameo in Nell Zink’s recent novel Mislaid -- the protagonist's estranged husband, a poet teaching at a small Southern college, at one point begins to host visiting writers after a journal he launches puts the college on the literary map. Cue the brief appearances from notable literati of the 1960s, including one from Ashbery: "There were stories. John Ashbery shooting a sleeping whitetail fawn from a distance of three yards."

But besides his writing, and his appearances in the writings of others, Ashbery has also begun expanding the range of his work. In the last decade, he has begun exhibiting his art: presently, at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery, one will find an exhibit of collages made by Ashbery and his fellow multidisciplinary surrealist Guy Maddin. The first such show appeared in 2008; this current one, running through July 31, is Ashbery's fourth. (Chris Randle's meditation on a 2013 Ashbery show also provides some useful historical reference points.) In an article about Ashbery's art that coincided with the 2008 show, Holland Cotter noted that some of the pieces dated back to Ashbery's student years in the 1940s, and that his approach to poetry echoed the more tactile visual art that he's been making over several decades. "He was, in other words, making language-collages based on principles learned from paper collages, which were in his hands, based on techniques learned from films," Cotter wrote at the time.

That sense of constant learning provides some insight into Ashbery's process and his sources of inspiration. In an interview with the New York Times Book Review earlier this year, he was asked about his reading habits. Ashbery cited "younger, experimental poets whom I haven’t read yet, from whom I might learn something." This resonates with a comment that he made in his "The Art of Poetry" interview for The Paris Review. Asked about the nature of his poems as objects, he responded, "I would like it to be what Stevens calls a completely new set of objects. My intention is to present the reader with a pleasant surprise, not an unpleasant one, not a nonsurprise."

One other source of inspiration may well be Ashbery's work as a translator. In 2014, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published his Complete French Translations in two volumes. (One focused on poetry, the other on prose.) In a piece on these two books for Bookforum, Richard Sieburth wrote, "I take this to be a major publishing event." This was expanded on in Adam Fitzgerald’s introduction to his interview with Asbery for BOMB.

"[A] compelling argument can be made -- that the wild diversity and vitality of innovative American poetry operates today, in large part, because of what the translator-poet found in Raymond Roussel, Arthur Rimbaud, Giorgio de Chirico, and Max Jacob."

Some writers of a certain stature remain closed-off about their influences; others, like Ashbery, offer readers more of a glimpse into their process and literary lineage. In the case of Ashbery, that lineage seems to be a constantly-shifting one. Even at this point in his career, his willingness to learn and to offer the reader that element of surprise is refreshing, from many angles.