As We Know
Poems
John Ashbery
Contents
Publisher’s Note
Litany
Sleeping in the Corners of Our Lives
Silhouette
Many Wagons Ago
As We Know
Figures in a Landscape
Statuary
Otherwise
Five Pedantic Pieces
Flowering Death
Haunted Landscape
My Erotic Double
I Might Have Seen It
The Hills and Shadows of a New Adventure
Knocking Around
Not Only / But Also
Train Rising Out of the Sea
Late Echo
And I’d Love You To Be in It
Tapestry
The Preludes
A Box and Its Contents
The Cathedral Is
I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well
Out Over the Bay the Rattle of Firecrackers
We Were on the Terrace Drinking Gin and Tonics
Fallen Tree
The Picnic Grounds
A Sparkler
The Wine
A Love Poem
There’s No Difference
Distant Relatives
Histoire Universelle
Hittite Lullaby
In a Boat
Variations on an Original Theme
Homesickness
This Configuration
Metamorphosis
Their Day
A Tone Poem
The Other Cindy
No, But I Seen One You Know You Don’t Own
The Shower
Landscapeople
The Sun
The Plural of “Jack-in-the-Box”
About the Author
Publisher’s Note
Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.
But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, “Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page.” Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?
In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.
But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.
Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s “Disclaimer” as it appears in two different type sizes.
Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of “Disclaimer,” you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading “Disclaimer” on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead” is a complete line, while the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn” is not.
Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.
Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.
Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.
I
LITANY
Author’s Note: “Litany” consists of two independent monologues meant to be experienced simultaneously. In traditional print format, the two monologues are presented side by side on facing pages, allowing the reader to experience their simultaneity, but this arrangement is not possible with the current generation of ebook devices. To download a PDF of “Litany” as it was originally meant to be laid out on the page, please visit www.openroadmedia.com/john-ashbery/litany. To listen to a 1980 recording of John Ashbery and Ann Lauterbach reading the poem’s two monologues simultaneously, visit the PennSound website at writing.upenn
.edu/pennsound/x/Ashbery.php.
I
For someone like me
The simple things
Like having toast or
Going to church are
Kept in one place.
Like having wine and cheese.
The parents of the town
Pissing elegantly escape knowledge
Once and for all. The
Snapdragons consumed in a wind
Of fire and rage far over
The streets as they end.
The casual purring of a donkey
Rouses me from my accounts:
What given, what gifts. The air
He spat on the flowers.
Also for someone
Like me the time flows round again
With things I did in it.
I wish to keep my differences
And to retain my kinship
To the rest. That is why
I raise these flowers all around.
They do not stand for flowers or
Anything pretty they are
Code names for the silence.
And just as it
Always keeps getting sorted out
And there is still the same amount to do
I wish to remain happily among these islands
Of rabbit-eared leaved plants
And sand and lava rock
That is so little tedious.
My way shall run from there
And not mind the pain
Of getting there. This is an outburst.
The last rains fed
Into the newly opened canal.
The dust blows in.
The disturbance is
Nonverbal communication:
Meaningless syllables that
Have a music of their own,
The music of sex, or any
Nameless event, something
That can only be taken as
Itself. This rules ideas
Of what else may be there,
Which regroup farther on,
Standing around looking at
The hole left by the great implosion.
It is they who carry news of it
To other places. Therefore
Are they not the event itself?
Especially since it persists
In dumbness which isn’t even
A negative articulation—persists
And collapses into itself.
I had greatly admired
The shirt.
He looks fairly familiar.
The pancake
Is around in idea.
Today the wisteria is in league
With the Spanish minstrels.
Who come to your house
To serenade it
All or in part.
The windows are open again
The dust blows through
A diagram of a room.
This is where it all
Had to take place,
Around a drum of living,
The motion by which a life
May be known and recognized,
A shipwreck seen from the shore,
A puzzling column of figures.
The dark shirt dragged frequently
Through the bayou.
Your luggage
Is found
Upon the plane.
If I could plan how
To remember what had indeed once
Been there
Without reference to professions,
Medical school,
Etc.,
Being there indeed once
(Everyday occurrence),
We stopped at the Pacific Airport
To hear the rush of disguises
For the elegant truth, notwithstanding
Some in underwear stood around
Puddles in the darkened
Cement and sodium lights
Beyond the earthworks
Until dawn touched with her cool
Stab of grace nobody deserved (but
It’s always that way isn’t it)
Le charme du matin
You and Sven-Bertil must
At some point have overridden
The barriers real or fancied
Blowing like bedcurtains later
In the oyster light—
Something I saw once
Reminded me of it:
That old, evil, not-so-secret
Formula
Now laundered, made to look
Transparent. Surely
There is a shoulder there,
Some high haunch half-sketched, a tremor
And intent to the folds that shower from the sky.
And must
At some earlier time
Seem the garter
The cow in the trees.
What was green before
Is homeless.
The mica on the front
Of the prefecture spells out
“Coastline”—a speedboat
Would alter even at a distance
But they shift anyway
Come round
To my idea
My hat
As it would be
If I were you
In dreams and in business
Only, in supper meetings
On the general line of progress
If I had a talking picture of you.
You are
So perversely evasive:
The ticking of a clock in the
Background could be
Only the plait.
We must learn to read
In the dark, to enjoy the long hills
Of studious celebrity.
The long Chinese shadow that
Hooks over a little
At the top
The stone that sinks
To the bottom of the aquarium:
All this mummified writing
As the dusting of new light
In the hollow collar of a hill
That never completes its curve
Or the thought of what
It was going to say: our going in.
The hedges are nice and it’s too bad
That one bad axe stroke could fell
Whatever needed to advertise its
Very existence.
And then cars strut forth on the highway
Singly and in groups
Of three and four: orange,
Flamingo, blue-pencil blue,
The gray of satisfaction, the red
Of discussion, and now, moved, the sky
Calls itself up.
As leaves are seen in mirrors
In libraries
Half-noticed, the sound
Half-remembered and the
Continuing chapter half-sketched—
O were we wrong to notice
To remember so much
When so little else has survived?
All were moments big with particulars
An elaborate pastry concocted in the wings
In darkness, and each
Has vanished on the carrousel
Of rage, along the coast
Like a chameleon’s hide.
The suffering, the pleasure that broke
Are these fixed limits, off-limits
To the game as darkness confounds
The two teams, makes it one with chance?
Still, somewhere wings are
Being slowly lifted,
Over and over again.
The point must have been made.
But out of so much color
It still does come again
The colors of tiger lilies and around
And down, remembered
Now as dirty colors, the color
Of forgetting-grass, of
Old rags or sleep, buoyed
On the small zephyrs
That keep the hour and remind each boy
To turn home from school past the sheep
In the paper meadow and to wind the clock.
An old round is being passed out,
The players take their places.
How nice that in the stalls
Is still room for certain boys to stand,
The main song is successfully
Programmed and the others too in part:
Enough gets through to make the occasion
A glottal one full of success
And coated with the film of success
In which are reflected
Many a bright occasion
Lads who go out with girls
In the numb prime of springtime
For instance.
Except for that, the camera sighs,
Is no hollow behind the black backing.
That was short-lived.
A sheaf of selected odes
Bundled on the waters.
A superior time
Of blueberries and passion flowers,
Of a four-poster.
The thirties light
Has infested the blond
Hairdo from the grooves up
But we must not treasure
It less in the magnesium
Flare that is manna to all things
In the here and now. You were saying
How she is coming along, praying
For it to be better
Day by day.
And some of these days the waning
Silver lashes out
Like a trussed alligator:
Mother and the kids standing around
The bowl that is portal,
Hitching post, tufted
Mattress and field of wild
Scruffy flowers are removed
One by one as a demonstration.
See, there is only light.
Nothing to live at,
To worry.
It is the old sewer of our resources
Disguised again as a corridor.
There is some anthropology here
It seems, and then
The dust on the jamb is warning
And intrigue enough. The summer day is put by.
The bells in the shower
Are outnumbered by plain queries
Whose answer is their falling echo.
Birds in modish, corporeal
Gear take off at the
Scallops of the umbrella.
This past is sampled and is again
The right one, and in testing
For the zillionth time we are
As built into the fixed wall of water
That indicates where the present leaves off
And the past begins, whose transparencies