The Kelly Writers House Fellows Program - John Ashbery March 25-26, 2002

John Ashbery reading - A digital recording of the March 25, 2002 event where Ashbery read from your name here (2000) and As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001) and answered questions. See the Writers House calendar entry for more about this event. John Ashbery interview/conversation - RealVideo, MP3 - A recording of the March 26, 2002 audiocast of the interview and conversation with John Ashbery, moderated by Al Filreis, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House. See the Writers House calendar entry for more about this event.

"When one goes at ideas directly, with hammer and tongs as it were, ideas tend to elude one in a poem. I think they only come back in when one pretends not to be paying any attention to them, like a cat that will rub against your leg." -John Ashbery Born in Rochester, New York, in 1927, John Ashbery is the author of over twenty books of poetry. In 1984, his book A Wave won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. For Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Some Trees (1956) was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has received a long-list of other rewards, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize, the English Speaking Union Prize, the Feltrinelli Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants, the MLA Common Wealth Award in Literature, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the Frank O'Hara Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He is also a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. "There is a meditative Ashbery, a formalist Ashbery, a comic Ashbery, a late-Romantic Ashbery, a Language poet Ashbery, and so on-even, as Charles Altieri shows us here, a love poet. No poet since Whitman has tapped into so many distinctly American voices and, at the same time, so preserved his utterance against the jangle of influences. Of course, as in an intricate Venn diagram, these Ashberys overlap; form inspires comedy and meditation (as in 'Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape").' -Susan M. Schultz, from the introduction to The Tribe of John Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry Also available: photos showing students and visitors world-wide taking part in this event. Writers House Fellows Program | Writers House Webcast Archive