In the course of his career, John Ashbery, left, author of more than 20 books of poetry, three plays, a novel, and several collections of criticism, has received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and many other prestigious prizes and fellowships. On campus during the Juniper Festival this spring, he was interviewed by Rob Casper ’04, publisher of the UMass Amherst poetry journal Jubilat, in Memorial Hall. Ashbery was in fine form, replying to questions with disarming candor, wit, and originality. When asked, for example, how he’d compare life at his place in upstate New York to being in his New York City apartment, he said, “Sometimes it’s easier to write poems in the city…there are more things to do in the country, I can get out and go and buy a pumpkin or something.” The audience burst into laughter. “I enjoy going to New York just to stay home.”

He gave a sense of how he approaches writing when he talked about “bringing out the dreamlike quality of everyday experiences and tidying them up so that they fit in a poem.” And how he thinks, when he replied to another question, “I’m distrustful of my work, and that’s good, we all should be—and bad, because it makes me morose much of the time… It’s wonderful when it doesn’t seem strange; it doesn’t happen often enough.”