Poets & Writers Theater

“My impression is that there is a much bigger audience for poetry than there was when I was young,” says the late poet John Ashbery in this 2011 interview with Belinda Luscombe for TIME Magazine on fame, poverty, art criticism, obscurity, and why he dislikes poetry readings.

“Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It’s sort of the way dreams come to us…” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown revisits a conversation with John Ashbery from 2007 in which he speaks about his life as a poet and reads from his collection Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, 2007). Ashbery died on September 3, 2017 at the age of ninety.

John Ashbery says of his poetry, "You have to wait until you've heard it to have heard it, and to know what it is." Open Road Media has just published seventeen volumes of Ashbery's poetry, now available in e-book format for the first time.