John Ashbery - Poetry 2003 - Key West Literary Seminar

Scheduled Poets
Kim Addonizio
John Ashbery
Lucille Clifton
Billy Collins
Robert Creeley
Martín Espada
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Carolyn Forché
Forrest Gander
Dan Gerber
Jane Hirshfield
Carolyn Kizer
Dorianne Laux
Semezdin Mehmedinović
Sharon Olds
Charles Simic
James Tate
Quincy Troupe
Derek Walcott
Richard Wilbur
C. D. Wright

2003 Seminar Main Page
2003 Registration
2003 Workshops
2003 Schedule
2003 Lodging
Give us your input

Literary Seminar Home Page

TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL
Key West Literary Seminar

the beautiful changes
poetry 2003

John Ashbery
Read John Ashbery's The Problem of Anxiety

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He is the author of twenty books of poetry, including Your Name Here (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000); Girls on the Run: A Poem (1999); Wakefulness (1998); Can You Hear, Bird (1995); And the Stars Were Shining (1994); Hotel Lautrémont (1992); Flow Chart (1991); April Galleons (1987); A Wave (1984), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published Other Traditions: the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (2000); Reported Sightings (1989), a book of art criticism; a collection of plays; and a novel, A Nest of Ninnies (1969), with James Schuyler; and edited The Best American Poetry 1988.

Ashbery was the first English-language poet to win the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poésie (Brussels), and has also received the 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 a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He divides his time between New York City and Hudson, New York.

The Problem of Anxiety

Fifty years have passed
since I started living in those dark towns
I was telling you about.
Well, not much has changed. I still can't figure out
how to get from the post office to the swings in the park.
Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction,
and my hair is the color of dandelion fuzz.

Suppose this poem were about you--would you
put in the things I've carefully left out:
descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily
people behave toward each other? Naw, that's
all in some book it seems. For you
I've saved the descriptions of finger sandwiches,
and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement
from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.

© John Ashbery (1997)

close