News at Eleven: The trick with [John] Ashbery is to relax.

You are not going to get what you expect, nor, in all likelihood, what you want. But what you will get will be beautiful, strange and, above all, unique. Ashbery is stricken by the sheer discreteness of things.

"You shall never have seen it just this way/And that is to be your one reward," he wrote in "The Ecclesiast" and, in "Houseboat Days," "but it is the nature of things to be seen only once."

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: A poet with a gift for the odd and unique

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