Brilliant, irreverent, indefinable: my poetry class with John Ashbery

I first met the famous poet, who died on Sunday, at Bard College in the late 90s. He taught me poetry can be anything, and that there is great freedom in that

• Poet John Ashbery dies age 90
  

Enigmatic, confounding, genius, funny, unnerving, stunning, gay, mysterious. Poet John Ashbery died this weekend and the descriptions of him and his work are as varied as poetry itself. Reading through these diverse adjectives, I’m left thinking how beautiful it is to not be defined and yet to be so profoundly revered. For Ashbery, poetry is not about definitions or pronouns or intentions or genres. It’s not about telling a story that has a proper conclusion. It’s about what it is to experience – experience anything. His work says you don’t need to decipher the words, just experience them. Is there anything more valuable than that?

Related: John Ashbery obituary

That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,

but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.

No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know

exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could

I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone

with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel

We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater

had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards