Marcel Duchamp said that you’re not famous unless taxi drivers recognize you. Once, back in the 1970s, John Ashbery was recognized by a hippie cab driver in Greenwich Village. “Hello, John!” the man called out with a mocking lilt to his voice, before speeding off. Mr. Ashbery said no other cab driver has recognized him since.

Not that he minds. The biggest surprise of his life, he said, is having found as many readers as he has. (His new book, “Where Shall I Wander,” has an initial print run of more than 9,000 copies, which is a lot in the poetry world.) He has always been a difficult poet, and even his most ardent admirers throw up their hands over some of his work. But few have ever doubted his talent, and against all odds, he has become relatively popular.

Interviewed on a cold day at his apartment in Chelsea, Mr. Ashbery was polite, soft-spoken, and gently evasive. “I’m sorry about this ‘Wuthering Heights’ situation,” he joked as the wind whistled noisily outside his ninth story living-room window. Now 78, he walks with a limp but still has the enormous blue eyes, alternately dreamy and startled, of a young boy trying to make sense of the world. His voice, flat and just slightly nasal, is that of a much younger man. He has lived in the building since 1972, and moved into his current apartment in 1984. A small room off the kitchen serves as his study, and he writes on a large black office-model manual Royal typewriter made in 1949.

The typewriter may be solid, old-fashioned, and virtually indestructible, but the poems that emerge from it are as slippery as eels, a running definition of the word “postmodern.” Lines of transparent beauty are succeeded by reams of dumbfounding gibberish. Certain poems in “Where Shall I Wander,” (Ecco, 81 pages, $22.95) start with an insolent, yet winning casualness:

We used to call it the boob tube,
but I guess they don’t use tubes anymore.
Whatever, it serves a small purpose after waking
and before falling asleep.

Others have you scratching your head from the word go: “Attention, shoppers. From within the inverted / commas of a strambatto, seditious whispering.”

Neither case is near the quality of his best work. Mr. Ashbery has grown more prolific as he has aged, and he writes most of the shorter poems in one sitting. While too much can be made of perfectionists like Elizabeth Bishop or Philip Larkin, who would slave over a single poem for years, one sitting does seem awfully brief, even for someone this talented.

Robert Kelly, a poet who teaches (as Mr. Ashbery does) at Bard College, disagrees. “As wonderful as the early stuff was, I feel that in the past 10 years his work has taken such a huge leap in its humanity, in its simplicity, in its fun, in its way of being poetry for everyone,” he said. He characterized the poet’s persona as that of “your wise old uncle who has had one martini too many, just blathering on, but a minute later you realize the blather is profound and beautifully formed.”

Mr. Ashbery was officially recognized as a writer of exceptional gifts when W.H. Auden selected his debut volume, “Some Trees,” for the Yale Younger Poet Series in 1956. Auden is one of Mr. Ashbery’s favorite poets; he admires Auden’s “wonderful way of personifying abstract ideas, making everything not only concrete, but very vivid.” As an example, he cited some lines Auden wrote at the end of the 1930s, when the world was sliding into war: “Abruptly mounting her ramshackle wheel / Fortune has peddled furiously away.”

By the time he received the award, Mr. Ashbery, who was born on a farm in upstate New York, had moved to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. He stayed there until 1965, writing twice a week about art for the International Herald Tribune. When he wasn’t filing his newspaper column or translating French detective novels under the sly pseudonym “Jonas Bery,” he was writing the poems that would go into his most notoriously obscure book, “The Tennis Court Oath,” published in 1962.

The critic John Simon called this “garbage,” and even his most stalwart supporter, Harold Bloom, whose lavish blurbs festoon almost everything Mr. Ashbery writes, expressed revulsion. In fact, the book has proved to be one of his most influential. It inspired the “Language” school of poets, whose works are even more opaque than their model.

If there are themes, or preoccupations, in his poetry, Mr. Ashbery said he is not aware of them, except perhaps in retrospect, but even then he seemed doubtful. He does not know what his poems are about. “I accept that everybody reading any poem is going to make it their own, through their own references and experiences,” he said, “and I write with that understanding in mind, trying to make it both general and specific at the same time. How I go about doing that I couldn’t tell you.”

He willingly conceded, however, that his work is sometimes funny. “I am a funny guy, and it gets into my poetry.” Asked to name some of his favorite comedians, he mentioned Jack Benny and Laurel and Hardy, whose films he discovered in France. When he gives readings, he is often disappointed that audiences don’t react to the humor. He loves comic deflation. “You have slept in the sun longer than the Sphinx,” he once wrote, “and are none the wiser for it.”

Humor was a major component of the so-called “New York School,” a group of poets in which Mr. Ashbery was included along with Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. A shared love of art, particularly Abstract Expressionism, and an aversion to the work of Robert Lowell – the dominant poetic strain of the day – drew them together. Unlike Lowell, Mr. Ashbery has never been “confessional,” nor has he allowed “current events” or political passions to enter his writing. In “The Skaters,” published in 1966, he wrote skeptically about the media. “Yet it is all offered as today’s news, as if we somehow had a right to it, as though it were a part of our lives / That we’d be silly to refuse. Here, have another – ‘Crime or revolution? Take your pick.'”

In fact, Mr. Ashbery said he is a “news junkie” who avidly follows the events of the day. In that case, I asked, what did he mean by these lines in his latest book: “Today’s news – / But is there such a thing as news, / or even oral history?”

“Gee, I don’t really know,” he said, blinking his eyes and looking genuinely puzzled, as if the words had been written by someone else. “Maybe it’s just that I’m jaded by having absorbed too much of it, so it seems like it couldn’t really exist.”

Though he found 1950s America oppressive, Mr. Ashbery was more partial to the country he returned to in 1965. “America always seemed like a foreign country to me, and still does,” he said, adding that so does every other country. But he noted that “living abroad focuses you on where you’re from,” and he came to appreciate his Americanness more keenly in Paris.

Fame came in 1975 when his book “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” won every major award for poetry. The title poem, a lengthy meditation on a painting by the Renaissance artist Parmigianino, is still one of his most popular. And though he wrote it in a different apartment in the same building, it’s easy to imagine, as the wind hurls itself against the windowpanes, the younger Ashbery in this very room, writing of

the turning seasons and the thoughts
That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds
Like the last stubborn leaves ripped
From wet branches …
I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, paper, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.

In the 30 years since he wrote those words, Mr. Ashbery has published 16 more volumes of poetry and won bushels of prizes, including France’s Legion d’Honneur and a MacArthur “genius” award. He has been the art critic for New York and Newsweek, taught creative writing at Brooklyn College, and is currently the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, where he teaches on a part-time basis. Despite the accolades, the dozens of books and learned essays devoted to his work, Mr. Ashbery refuses to mount a soapbox or sketch any grand gestures. He has stayed true to his mildly bemused outlook on life. Leaving, I think of his poem, “My Erotic Double,” published in 1979, simultaneously visionary and amiable, goofy and naturalistic, like the transcript of a telephone conversation in a Surrealist heaven:

We are afloat
On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,
Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight
That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams
As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.

I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.
Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.
Thank you. You are too.

Mr. Bernhard is the East Coast correspondent for LA Weekly.