Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good news in the bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I am hosting a very, very special show.

The poet who, during his lifetime,

was the greatest influence,

positive and negative on American poetry,

that poet was John Ashbury.

He left behind some work that was most of it the work he was involved with at the time of his death.

People thought that John Ashbury in his final years was writing only short poems.

This book, which is called Parallel Movement of the Hands, is composed of five unfinished longer works. It's edited by Emily Skillings, a poet who is one of my

two guests today, and she is joined by John Yao, also a poet and an

editor, and both of them brilliant about the work of John Ashbury. John Yao was a student of John

Ashbery all the way back at the time Ashbury was teaching at

Brooklyn College, and after being one of his foremost students, he became a best friend.

So all of us, myself included, are people who have been taught, influenced by John Ashbury.

I have to confide in you that any book John Ashbury mentioned, whether that was Raymond Roussel,

Henry Green, Ivy Compton Burnett, many, many others,

because John was a conversationalist and he'd dropped the names of the books he'd like,

...