Words At Large

(Photo credit: Lynn Davis) This week’s podcast features recordings from the Griffin Poetry Prize event. Along with the awards presentations and acceptance speeches from the gala in Toronto in early June, there’s also a new interview with John Ashbery, who won the international poetry prize.

Ashbery won for his collection Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (HarperCollins). The poet hand-picked the poems from books published in the past 20 years. CBC Radio Two host André Alexis interviewed Ashbery just before the Griffin event, for his program Skylarking.

Born on July 27, 1927 in New York, Ashbery studied at Harvard and Columbia universities, and lived in France as a Fulbright scholar in 1955. Since then, he has lived in New York City and published more than 20 books of poetry, along the way winning many major poetry awards.

Ashbery’s early book, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Penguin), was the first ever to win the big three American awards in the same year: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Ashbery was New York State’s Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003, and an official John Ashbery Day was declared there on April 7, 2006. Not bad for a poet, who, as you’ll hear in his acceptance speech for the Griffin Prize, doesn’t much like to be noticed.

There’s also a special treat in the podcast, a reading of a short poem written especially for Canada by Korean poet Ko Un, who won this year’s Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award.

Listen to the Words at Large podcast here:

[runs 35:18]

Read the poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”.

For more on John Ashbery, click here.