Meghan O'Rourke on Ashbery,
MTV Poet Laureate

"Notice, too, that Ashbery frequently substitutes an unexpected word for a familiar one—"the bee's hymn," say, rather than "the bee's hum." Ashbery, who cut his teeth on the surrealists and the Dadaist poets—Tristan Tzara, Guillaume Apollinaire—as well as Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, is trying to renovate a language that to him seems exhausted and cliché-riddled."