Description: The third installment of our exclusive The Voice of the Poet series, comprised of rare archival recordings -- some never before released -- featuring Randall Jarrell; an anthology of women poets: H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein; as well as current recordings by contemporary poet John Ashbery. Each audio production is accompanied by a book containing the text of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.

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.

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