I am reading

 I am reading a biography of Ashbery, covering only the early years, titled The Songs We Know Best (Karin Roffman). It is quite delightful, and there is a story of how Ashbery learned the word vestibule as a child. This reminded me of how I learned the word recondite, which I found in an Ashbery poem.  Ashbery as a child once formulated the sentence "I regret these stairs" and then found it strange, the slight offness of the word regret in this context. This is a key to Ashbery's entire poetry, the use of words in that off-kilter way. His vocabulary is impressive in size, but the key is in the particular tone he achieves, not in the use of a large number of words in and of itself. David William Foster uses a lot of words, but in some sense to show off the words themselves.