"Commencement address and poems read by author [pt.1]. Author reads from his selected poems [pt.2]."
""John Ashbery is America's most acclaimed living poet, and his work has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, all in 1976. "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.""@en
"In her introduction Rebekah Presson says that John Ashbery set out to be a painter but became a poet who uses words abstractly as an abstract painter uses paint. Then, John Ashbery reads from his book Selected poems a number of poems including Soonest mended, Whatever it is, wherever you go, and The songs we know best."@en
""America's most acclaimed living poet ... 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 ... 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"--Container."
"John Ashbery reads selections from his poetry."@en