Poet John Ashbery, surrealist full-grown

NEW YORK — Boys of 9 or 10 often know exactly what they want to be when they grow up. Some want to be firemen, others race-car drivers. John Ashbery recalls that he had his own heroes at that age. "I was living in Rochester back then," says the 77-year-old poet in his Chelsea apartment, wind blowing in hard off the Hudson River. "And I saw all these paintings from the 'Fantastic, Dada, and Surrealism' show at the Museum of Modern Art in Life magazine. I decided then and there I wanted to be a surrealist when I grew up."

Nearly 70 years later, Ashbery has achieved his dream - in poetry, rather than painting, although he gave the latter a try - and he's kept at it long enough for the world to catch up to his tastes. On the publication of his latest volume, Where Shall I Wander, even the poetry-shy New York Times Book Review put him on the cover. In a long, career-spanning essay, reviewer Charles McGrath made the astute observation that "Ashbery has been curating and rearranging this material for so long now . . . that, almost without our noticing, he himself has become part of our mental furniture."

Sitting on a couch, dressed in charcoal slacks, sensible brown shoes, and a navy-blue sweater, the last surviving member of the original New York School of poetry seems dressed to prove McGrath's point. He is not exactly the picture of bohemianism. Then again, he never was. While Harvard classmates Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch stayed in New York and drank at the Cedar Tavern, and the Beats were busy hopping railcars and embracing dissolution, Ashbery moved to Paris on a Fulbright. He wrote about art, worked as a journalist, and moonlighted as a translator. Back in the United States in 1965, he worked as an art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek and served on the editorial board of ARTnews.