A Wave
Poems
John Ashbery
Contents
Publisher’s Note
At North Farm
Rain Moving In
The Songs We Know Best
When the Sun Went Down
Landscape (After Baudelaire)
Just Walking Around
A Fly
The Ongoing Story
Thank You For Not Cooperating
But What Is the Reader To Make of This?
Down by the Station, Early in the Morning
Around the Rough and Rugged Rocks the Ragged Rascal Rudely Ran
More Pleasant Adventures
Purists Will Object
Description of a Masque
The Path to the White Moon
Ditto, Kiddo
Introduction
I See, Said the Blind Man, as He Put Down His Hammer and Saw
Edition Peters, Leipzig
37 Haiku
Haibun
Haibun 2
Haibun 3
Haibun 4
Haibun 5
Haibun 6
Variation on a Noel
Staffage
The Lonedale Operator
Proust’s Questionnaire
Cups with Broken Handles
Just Someone You Say Hi To
They Like
So Many Lives
Never Seek to Tell Thy Love
Darlene’s Hospital
Destiny Waltz
Try Me! I’m Different!
One of the Most Extraordinary Things in Life
Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are
Trefoil
Problems
A Wave
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.
At North Farm
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?
Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him
sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?
Rain Moving In
The blackboard is erased in the attic
And the wind turns up the light of the stars,
Sinewy now. Someone will find out, someone will know.
And if somewhere on this great planet
The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun,
It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one
Will be better for it, but things can’t get any worse.
Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step
Into disorder this one meant. Don’t you see
It’s all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires
Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial has been set
And that’s ominous, but all your graciousness in living
Conspires with it, now that this is our home:
A place to be from, and have people ask about.
The Songs We Know Best
Just like a shadow in an empty room
Like a breeze that’s pointed from beyond the tomb
Just like a project of which no one tells—
Or didja really think that I was somebody else?
Your clothes and pantlegs lookin’ out of shape
Shape of the body over which they drape
Body which has acted in so many scenes
But didja ever think of what that body means?
It is an organ and a vice to some
A necessary evil which we all must shun
To others an abstraction and a piece of meat
But when you’re looking out you’re in the driver’s seat!
No man cares little about fleshly things
They fill him with a silence that spreads in rings
We wish to know more but we are never sated
No wonder some folks think the flesh is overrated!
The things we know now all got learned in school
Try to learn a new thing and you break the rule
Our knowledge isn’t much it’s just a small amount
But you feel it quick inside you when you’re down for the count
You look at me and frown like I was out of place
I guess I never did much for the human race
Just hatched some schemes on paper that looked good at first
Sat around and watched until the bubble burst
And now you’re lookin’ good all up and down the line
Except for one thing you still have in mind
It’s always there though often with a different face
It’s the worm inside the jumping bean that makes it race
Too often when you thought you’d be showered with confetti
What they flung at you was a plate of hot spaghetti
You’ve put your fancy clothes and flashy gems in hock
Yet you pause before your father’s door afraid to knock
Once you knew the truth it tried to set you free
And still you stood transfixed just like an apple tree
And now you think you see it from your lofty perch
The others come and go they’re just a dime a dozen
You react to them no more than to a distant cousin
Only a few people can touch your heart
And they too it seems have all gotten a false start
In twilight the city with its hills shines serene
And lets you make of it more than anything could mean
It’s the same city by day that seems so crude and calm
You’ll have to get to know it not just pump its arm
Even when that bugle sounded loud and clear
You knew it put an end to all your fear
To all that lying and the senseless mistakes
And now you’ve got it right and you know what it takes
Someday I’ll look you up when we’re both old and gray
And talk about those times we had so far away
How much it mattered then and how it matters still
Only things look so different when you’ve got a will
It’s true that out of this misunderstanding could end
And men would greet each other like they’d found a friend
With lots of friends around there’s no one to entice
And don’t you think seduction isn’t very nice?
It carries in this room against the painted wall
And hangs in folds of curtains when it’s not there at all
It’s woven in the flowers of the patterned spread
And lies and knows not what it thinks upon the bed
I wish to come to know you get to know you all
Let your belief in me and me in you stand tall
Just like a project of which no one tells—
Or do ya still think that I’m somebody else?
When the Sun Went Down
To have been loved once by someone—surely
There is a permanent good in that,
Even if we don’t know all the circumstances
Or it happened too long ago to make any difference.
Like almost too much sunlight or an abundance of sweet-sticky,
Caramelized things—who can tell you it’s wrong?
Which of the others on your team could darken the passive
Melody that runs on, that has been running since the world began?
Yet, to be strapped to one’s mindset, which seems
As enormous as a plain, to have to be told
That its horizons are comically confining,
And all the sorrow wells from there, like the slanting
Plume of a waterspout: doesn’t it supplant knowledge
Of the different forms of love, reducing them
To a white indifferent prism, a roofless love standing open
To the elements? And some see in this a paradigm of how it rises
Slowly to the indifferent heavens, all that pale glamour?
The refrain is desultory as birdsong; it seeps unrecognizably
Into the familiar structures that lead out from here
To the still familiar peripheries and less sure notions:
It already had its way. In time for evening relaxation.
There are times when music steals a march on us,
Is suddenly perplexingly nearer, flowing in my wrist;
Is the true and dirty words you whisper nightly
As the book closes like a collapsing sheet, a blur
Of all kinds of connotations ripped from the hour and tossed
Like jewels down a well; the answer, also,
To the question that was on my mind but that I’ve forgotten,
Except in the way certain things, certain nights, come together.
Landscape
(After Baudelaire)
I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer’s cave
Dreaming, I’ll hear the wind in the steeples close by
Sweep the solemn hymns away. I’ll spy
On factories from my attic window, resting my chin
In both hands, drinking in the songs, the din.
I’ll see chimneys and steeples, those masts of the city,
And the huge sky that makes us dream of eternity.
How sweet to watch the birth of the star in the still-blue
Sky, through mist; the lamp burning anew
At the window; rivers of coal climbing the firmament
And the moon pouring out its pale enchantment.
I’ll see the spring, the summer and the fall
And when winter casts its monotonous pall
Of snow, I’ll draw the blinds and curtains tight
And build my magic palaces in the night;
Then dream of gardens, of bluish horizons,
Of jets of water weeping in alabaster basins,
Of kisses, of birds singing at dawn and at nightfall,
Of all that’s most childish in our pastoral.
When the storm rattles my windowpane
I’ll stay hunched at my desk, it will roar in vain
For I’ll have plunged deep inside the thrill
Of conjuring spring with the force of my will,
Coaxing the sun from my heart, and building here
Out of my fiery thoughts, a tepid atmosphere.
Just Walking Around
What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is no name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,
An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much, and wander around,
Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting,
Counterproductive, as you realize once again
That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near
The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there, and mystery and food.
Come see it. Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.
A Fly
And still I automatically look to that place on the wall—
The timing is right, but off—
The approval soured—
That’s what comes of age but not aging,
The marbles all snapped into the side pockets,
The stance for today we know full well is
Yesterday’s delivery and ripe prediction—
The way not to hold in when circling,
As a delighted draughtsman sits down to his board.
Reasons, reasons for this:
The enthusiast mopping through his hair again
As he squats on the toilet and catches one eye in the mirror
(Guys it has come through all right
For once as delivered it’s all here and me with time on my hands