by John Ashbery
Hotel Lautréamont
Poems
John Ashbery
FOR PIERRE
Contents
Publisher’s Note
Light Turnouts
And Forgetting
The Large Studio
The Garden of False Civility
Autumn Telegram
Notes from the Air
Still Life with Stranger
Hotel Lautréamont
On the Empress’s Mind
The Phantom Agents
From Estuaries, from Casinos
Cop and Sweater
Musica Reservata
Susan
The King
The Whole Is Admirably Composed
By Forced Marches
Autumn on the Thruway
The Little Black Dress
Part of the Superstition
The Art of Speeding
American Bar
From Palookaville
Another Example
Avant de Quitter Ces Lieux
The White Shirt
Baked Alaska
Private Syntax
Not Now but in Forty-five Minutes
In Another Time
Withered Compliments
The Wind Talking
Joy
Irresolutions on a Theme of La Rochefoucauld
A Call for Papers
Love’s Old Sweet Song
Wild Boys of the Road
Le Mensonge de Nina Petrovna
Of Linnets and Dull Time
Korean Soap Opera
A Driftwood Altar
Poem at the New Year
Central Air
The Youth’s Magic Horn
Brute Image
Of Dreams and Dreaming
Seasonal
Kamarinskaya
Elephant Visitors
The Great Bridge Game of Life
The Departed Lustre
Villanelle
A Sedentary Existence
Erebus
The Old Complex
Where We Went for Lunch
As Oft It Chanceth
Retablo
A Mourning Forbidding Valediction
I Found Their Advice
French Opera
A Stifled Notation
Haunted Stanzas
Livelong Days
Quartet
[untitled]
Oeuvres Complètes
Just Wednesday
In My Way / On My Way
No Good at Names
Film Noir
In Vain, Therefore
The Beer Drinkers
That You Tell
A Hole in Your Sock
And Socializing
Revisionist Horn Concerto
The Woman the Lion Was Supposed to Defend
Harbor Activities
It Must Be Sophisticated
Alborada
How to Continue
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 inte
ntional 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.
LIGHT TURNOUTS
Dear ghost, what shelter
in the noonday crowd? I’m going to write
an hour, then read
what someone else has written.
You’ve no mansion for this to happen in.
But your adventures are like safe houses,
your knowing where to stop an adventure
of another order, like seizing the weather.
We too are embroiled in this scene of happening,
and when we speak the same phrase together:
“We used to have one of those,”
it matters like a shot in the dark.
One of us stays behind.
One of us advances on the bridge
as on a carpet. Life—it’s marvelous—
follows and falls behind.
AND FORGETTING
When I last saw you, in a hurry to get back and stuff,
we wore tape measures and the kids could go to the movies.
I loomed in that background. The old man looked strangely at the sea.
Always feet come knocking at the door
and when it isn’t that, it’s something or other
melancholy. There is always someone who will find you disgusting.
I love to tear you away from most interests
with besotted relish, and we
talked to each other. Worked before, it’ll
work this time.
Look for the strange number at number seven. You see
I need a reason to go down to the sea in ships
again. How does one do that? The old man
came back from looking at it his replies were facile.
Rubber snake or not, my most valued fuchsia
sputtered in the aquarium, at once all shoulders
began to support me. We were travelling in an inn.
You were going to make what design an apple?
Then the hotel people liked us so,
it could have been before a storm, I lie back
and let the wind come to me, and it does, something
I wouldn’t have thought of. We can take our meals
beside the lake balustrade. Something either does or
will not win the evidence hidden in this case.
The plovers are all over—make that “lovers,” after all
they got their degrees in law and medicine, no one will persist
in chasing them in back lots, the sanded way
I came through here once.
These days the old man often coincides with me; his remarks
have something playful and witty about them, though they do not
hold together. And I, I too have something to keep from him:
something no one must know about.
I’m sure they’ll think we’re ready now.
We aren’t, you know. An icebox grew there once.
Hand me the chatter and I’ll fill the plates with cookies,
for they can, they must, be passed.
THE LARGE STUDIO
It’s one thing to get them to admit it,
quite another to get soap in your eye.
As long as I can remember I have been cared for,
stricken, like that. No one seems to scold.
I have had so many identity crises
in the last fifty years you wouldn’t believe it.
Suffice it to say I am well,
if you like peacock’s feathers on pianos
and cars racing their motors,
waiting for dates who never get done with doing their hair.
There have been so many velocipedes, millipedes,
and other words that I’m token senseless.
Just bring me one more drop of the elixir:
that’s all I ask.
But when you saw how many colors things come in
it was going to be a long rest of the day.
“Enjoy your afternoon,” he said, and it was roses
that you never get enough of and they make you sick.
It was kind of a cable
from which depended seven-branched candelabra
and feathers on the pine trunks
in that witch wood where nobody was supposed to stay—
say, do you think I could? Smell the roses?
Live like it was time?
Lo, it is time.
He raised the horn to his lips.
Such an abundance of—do you mind if I stay,
stay overnight? For the plot of a morrow
is needed to sort out the pegs in, meanwhile enough of me
lasts to give us the old semblance of a staring, naked truth,
with drinks, that we wanted, right?
And because a gray dustman slips by
unnoticed, a thousand cathartic things begin to happen.
Only we know nothing of these. Nothing can take their place.
Today I squeezed a few more drops of color
hoping to blot you out, your face I mean, and then this
extraordinarily tall caller asked if this was something I usually did.
Do I work against the plait often?
And sure, his boots were the right size. I replaced
my little brush and with it the thought of your coming
to absent me after dust and bougainvillea had chimed.
The answer was a nut.
And then there are so many harridans all over
the wall one is encouraged not toward a strict accounting
of all that is taking place, and we have washed, we are nice
for now. And the bowsprit (a word
I have never understood) comes undone, comes all over me, washes
my pure identity from me—help! In the meantime your friend has tunnelled
even as far as us, and it gets to be cold and damp
because the days are no longer making sense, are coming unlocked
in the tin aviary where we pinned them, and no one
right now has any good to say about what temperature
clashes with what other kind statistic we were all against
when it came out but who remembers that now?
Who was even engaged when we first thought of that?
I’ll bite your toes, see you in the morning.
Place the canopy on that old chest
allowing for a few grunts and drizzles, please,
and not another word of what you spoke to your father.
THE GARDEN OF FALSE CIVILITY
Where are you? Where you are is the one thing I love,
yet it always escapes me, like the lilacs in their leaves,
too busy for just one answer, one rejoinder.
The last time I see you is the first
commencing of our time to be together, as the light of the days
remains the same even as they grow shorter,
stepping into the harness of winter.
Between watching the paint dry and the grass grow
I have nothing too tragic in tow.
I have this melting elixir for you, front row
tickets for the concert to which all go.
I ought to
chasten my style, burnish my skin, to get that glow
that is all-important, so that some
may hear what I am saying as others disappear
in the confusion of unintelligible recorded announcements.
A great many things
were taking place that day,
besides, it was not the taxpayers
who came up to me, who were important,
but other guests of the hotel
some might describe as dog-eared,
apoplectic. Measly is a good word to describe
the running between the incoming and the outgoing tide
as who in what narrow channels shall ever
afterwards remember the keen sightings of those times,
the reward and the pleasure.
Soon it was sliding out to sea
most naturally, as the place to be.
They never cared, nor came round again.
But in the tent in the big loss
it was all right too. Besides, we’re not
serious, I should have added.
AUTUMN TELEGRAM
Seen on a bench this morning: a man in a gray coat
and apple-green tie. He couldn’t have been over fifty,
his mild eyes said, and yet there was something of the ruthlessness
of extreme old age about his bearing; I don’t know what.
In the corner a policeman; next, sheaves of wheat
laid carefully like dolls on the denuded sward,
prompting me to wish of dreaming you again. After the station
we never made significant contact again. But it’s all right,
isn’t it, I mean the telling had to be it. There was such fire
in the way you put your finger against your nostril
as in some buried sagas erupts out at one sometimes: the power
that is under the earth, no I mean in it. And if all the
disappointed tourists hadn’t got up and gone away, we would still
be in each other’s reserve, aching, and that would be the same,
wouldn’t it, as far as the illustrations and the index were concerned?
As it is I frequently get off before the stop that is mine
not out of modesty but a failure to keep the lines of communication
open within myself. And then, unexpectedly, I am shown a dog
and asked to summarize its position in a few short, angular adverbs
and tell them this is what they do, why we can’t count
on anything unexpected. The waterfall is all around us,
we have been living in it, yet to find the hush material
is just what these daily exercises force on us. I mean
