The Voice of the Poet John Ashbery
- List Price: $17.95
- Binding: Audio Cassette
- Publisher: Random House
- Publish date: 03/01/2001
John Ashbery is America's most acclaimed living poet. "Paradigms of common experience", is Ashbery's label for his own poems: the mind listening for its haphazard memories and unconscious desires while hearing the world's buzzing distractions. An Ashbery poem can sound alternately daffy or romantic, disjunctive or satiric. Its surface may seem enigmatic, but its task remains constant -- to explore how we receive information and make meanings, then how those meanings are transformed: pop culture and high romance go hand in hand. From the start of his career, Ashbery has been among the most innovative poets in the language, and he has kept his work open to both experiment and tradition. Ashbery was born in 1927 on a farm in Sodus, New York, studied at Harvard and Columbia, then lived for some years in Paris, where he was a translator and art critic, before returning to New York. His work has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, all in 1976; in 1985 he won the Bollingen Prize.