John Ashbery Reads “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

Poet John Ash­bery has passed away, at the age of 90. About the poet, Harold Bloom once said. “No one now writ­ing poems in the Eng­lish lan­guage is like­li­er than Ash­bery to sur­vive the severe judg­ment of time. He is join­ing the Amer­i­can sequence that includes Whit­man, Dick­in­son, Stevens and Hart Crane.” In 1976, Ash­bery won the Pulitzer Prize for his col­lec­tion, Self-Por­trait in a Con­vex Mir­ror. Above, you can hear him read the title poem, his mas­ter­piece. The Guardian calls “Self-Por­trait in a Con­vex Mir­ror,” a dense­ly writ­ten epic about art, time and con­scious­ness that was inspired by the 16th cen­tu­ry Ital­ian paint­ing of the same name.” The text of the poem appears on the Poet­ry Foun­da­tion web­site.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

8 Glo­ri­ous Hours of Dylan Thomas Read­ing Poetry–His Own & Oth­ers’

Hear Pat­ti Smith Read the Poet­ry that Would Become Hors­es: A Read­ing of 14 Poems at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, 1975

Hear Jorge Luis Borges Read 30 of His Poems (in the Orig­i­nal Span­ish)