NEW HAVEN, CT—Unbelievably pitiful American poet John Ashbery is seriously harboring the belief that he has any chance in hell at winning this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, sources close to the clearly delusional author confirmed Wednesday. “Ashbery needs to give himself a serious fucking reality check, pronto, if he really thinks his little poems have had even a tenth of the effect on world literature required to make him worthy of a Nobel,” Yale University English professor Charles Xu said of the 86-year-old surrealist poet, adding that Ashbery must be living in a total cuckoo fantasyland if he thinks there is even a remote possibility of him beating out U.R. Ananthamurthy or Alice Munro or even Juan fucking Goytisolo, for Christ’s sake. “Does he understand these things aren’t given out to just anybody? You can’t simply shit out a few reams of verse like Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror and expect to hang with the big boys like Yasunari Kawabata and Octavio Paz. You just can’t.” Xu went on to say that even speculating on possible winners was a waste of time regardless, as Haruki Murakami “pretty much has the whole award sewn up tight as a fucking drum.”