A Guided Tour by Eric Lorberer, The Ashbery Bridge: Poetry and Public Space

The Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge as seen from the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photograph by Kelly Everding.

One of John Ashbery's finest poems is strung across a bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota: commissioned by architect and sculptor Siah Armajani, this untitled poem works with an arresting visual design to create a piece of art that dramatically inserts poetry into the public sphere. In this talk, poet/critic Eric Lorberer offers a "guided tour" of the bridge with numerous accompanying visuals, elucidating not only how the poem functions as a piece of public art, but also examining how this work fits into and informs Ashbery's poetics.

Eric Lorberer holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and has published poems in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Sentence, and Volt. He edits the acclaimed quarterly Rain Taxi Review of Books and is the director of the Twin Cities Book Festival (held annually in Minneapolis in the shadow of the Ashbery bridge) and the Rain Taxi Reading Series.