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. Poet John Ashbery wanted to be a surrealist.

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"I was living in Rochester back then," says the 77-year-old poet in his Chelsea apartment, "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.

He's published two books in the past year: "Selected Prose" and a poetry collection, "Where Shall I Wander."

The last surviving member of the original New York School of poetry is not exactly the picture of bohemianism. While Harvard classmates Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch stayed in New York and drank at the Cedar Tavern, Ashbery lived in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship.

He wrote about art, worked as a journalist and moonlighted as a translator. Returning to the United States in 1965, he was an art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek and served on the editorial board of ARTnews.

The steadiness and Apollonian mysteriousness of Ashbery's art has set him apart from his contemporaries, many of whom made their names as "confessional" poets. Ashbery made his by showing nothing.

"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," the volume that won Ashbery the triple crown of publishing (a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award), turns confessionalism into a funhouse mirror, warps out the therapy and distills a discussion about it into art.

"I thought if I could put it all down, that would be one way," Ashbery wrote in 1972. "And the thought came to me that to leave it all out would be a truer way."

"I don't know that I consciously position myself that way," says Ashbery now.

As a onetime journalist and a former workshop instructor, Ashbery has no illusions about the sanctity of an artist in his garret. Comparison, rather than interpretation, as it turns out, is the way to get him to characterize his own work.

"O'Hara was romantically involved in his life and loved to tell about it," he says. "I never found my life that interesting. But I've never thought of myself as being in a cat-and-mouse game with my reader, either. I always just think he or she will enjoy having to dig deeper to get at the meaning.

"If one could paraphrase the meaning of something, it wouldn't be art, would it?"

In recent years, poets and poetry critics have banged the drum loudly about readers lost to other media, like rock music. Ashbery, however, is not worried.

"In the early '60s a critic from Time magazine asked Frank O'Hara out for a drink after work," he says. "The guy asked O'Hara, 'What do you think, is poetry dead?' And Frank said, 'Well, if it was, you wouldn't be buying me this drink, would you?' "

Ashbery has a laugh over that. "The parallel world of poetry is very large and very active," he says. "There are hundreds of small presses putting out good work today."

And somewhere, somehow, a whole new generation of 9-year-old American kids are deciding to be surrealists, too.