Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

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

Today, it's my terrific honor to be talking to John Ashbury.

We're here in New York City.

The occasion is the publication of his new book,

Plano Sphere. It's published by Echo. John Ashbury is, of course, the author of many books of poetry. The first volume of his collected poems recently came out from Library of America. Those are the poems from 1956 to 1987. Notes from the Air, which is a collection of his selected later poems. John is one of my favorite guests because it's easy to say he's one of my two or three very favorite living poets.

To me, John Ashbury has been an education in every way in what poetry can do.

First of all, John, what is a planet sphere?

It's a flat rendering of a hemisphere shape,

such as, well, a map of the globe, which one half of our terrestrial globe, for instance.

It's mentioned in a poem by Andrew Marvel, which I've always kind of, it's always been part of my consciousness.

Something about our love should be compressed into a planisphere.

I don't remember what the rest of it is, but a poem is really a flat rendering of feelings or experiences.

I mean, that might be one reason for justifying it.

I also just like the sound of the word.

When words appear in your poems and reappear,

I noticed, for instance, in this book,

one poem mentions sticker shock, and then a later one has sticker shock as a title.

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