April Bernard Reads John Ashbery

January 28, 2026·42 min·2 clips

April Bernard describes her whole book as a tightrope act — trying to write Shelley's 'I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed' in a contemporary idiom without embarrassing herself.

April Bernard starts with a real fondness for Ashbery's difficulty. Kevin Young sets up the conversation around A Worldly Country and asks what caught her when she went through the archive. Part of the answer is the difficulty itself. Bernard likes that the poem will not settle into a neat explanation. The title does a lot of the work. Young hears worldly in two ways: as practical wisdom, even street smarts, and as a Calvinist warning about the world as temptation. Bernard takes that tension and makes it more personal. To her, Ashbery's worldliness feels less like moral judgment than like the strain of an introvert who has to keep noticing everything outside. The poem wants calm, but calm keeps getting interrupted. Bernard describes Ashbery as a poet looking again and again for peace, while the world around the poem feels chaotic and disgraceful. Young tests the idea against a line about peace subduing something. Bernard does not hear settled inner calm there. She hears an imagined outer hush, almost everyone quieting down and falling asleep. It is funny, dryly so, and also a little sad because the sleep cannot really happen. Wordsworth comes in by association, with Young's echo of the world being too much with us. The 2005 date gives the conversation another angle, as Young asks whether later Ashbery differs from the early poems he loved, including Some Trees. Bernard does not flatten him into one style. What comes through is a later Ashbery poem whose surface keeps shifting while its wish for stillness stays recognizable.

As heard by us

April Bernard makes Ashbery's difficulty feel emotionally legible without sanding down its strangeness.

April Bernard and Kevin Young approach John Ashbery's "A Worldly Country" through the strange pleasure of a poem that resists paraphrase while seeming clear from the inside.

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Ashbery, slowed to the speed of a careful reader.

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