by John Ashbery
HOW TO CONTINUE
Oh there once was a woman
and she kept a shop
selling trinkets to tourists
not far from a dock
who came to see what life could be
far back on the island.
And it was always a party there
always different but very nice
New friends to give you advice
or fall in love with you which is nice
and each grew so perfectly from the other
it was a marvel of poetry
and irony
And in this unsafe quarter
much was scary and dirty
but no one seemed to mind
very much
the parties went on from house to house
There were friends and lovers galore
all around the store
There was moonshine in winter
and starshine in summer
and everybody was happy to have discovered
what they discovered
And then one day the ship sailed away
There were no more dreamers just sleepers
in heavy attitudes on the dock
moving as if they knew how
among the trinkets and the souvenirs
the random shops of modern furniture
and a gale came and said
it is time to take all of you away
from the tops of the trees to the little houses
on little paths so startled
And when it became time to go
they none of them would leave without the other
for they said we are all one here
and if one of us goes the other will not go
and the wind whispered it to the stars
the people all got up to go
and looked back on love
Permissions Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is hereby made to the publications in which many of the poems in this book first appeared:
A Garland for Stephen Spender, “Seasonal”; American Poetry Review, “Double Sestina”; Antaeus, “Just Wednesday”; Bad Henry Review, “In Vain, Therefore”; Blacky Warrior Review, “The Art of Speeding”; Boulevard, “That You Tell”; Bridge Book, [untitled]; Broadway 2, “A Mourning Forbidding Valediction”; The Bulletin, “Susan,” “The Old Complex”; Conjunctions, “Autumn on the Thruway,” “It Must Be Sophisticated”; Cuz, “The King”; Denver Quarterly, “Avant de Quitter Ces Lieux”; Gold Coast, “Autumn Telegram”; Grand Street, “Of Dreams and Dreaming,” “The Beer Drinkers”; Harvard Advocate, “A Hole in Your Sock”; Harvard Book Review, “Another Example”; Hodos, “From Palookaville”; Joe Soap’s Canoe, “The Whole Is Admirably Composed”; Michigan Quarterly Review, “Irresolutions on a Theme of La Rochefoucauld”; Mudfish, “The White Shirt”; New American Writing, “Oeuvres Complètes”; The New Yorker, “Baked Alaska,” “Brute Image,” “Film Noir,” “Hotel Lautréamont,” “In Another Time,” “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” “Notes from the Air,” “The Phantom Agents,” “Poem at the New Year,” “Still Life with Stranger,” “The Garden of False Civility,” “The Large Studio,” “Withered Compliments”; The New York Review of Books, “A Sedentary Existence,” “As Oft It Chanceth,” “Erebus,” “From Estuaries, from Casinos,” “On the Empress’s Mind”; o-blek, “Villanelle,” “Wild Boys of the Road”; Occident, “Kamarinskaya”; Painted Bride Quarterly, “The Great Bridge Game of Life”; The Paris Review, “Korean Soap Opera,” “Musica Reservata,” “Of Linnets and Dull Time,” “The Departed Lustre,” “The Youth’s Magic Horn”; PN Review, “Alborada,” “American Bar,” “And Socializing,” “Elephant Visitors,” “From Palookaville,” “How to Continue,” “In My Way/On My Way,” “Le Mensonge de Nina Petrovna,” “Not Now but in Forty-five Minutes”; Poetry New York, “The Little Black Dress”; Poetry Review, “Avant de Quitter Ces Lieux”; Private, “A Stifled Notation”; Scripsi, “Where We Went for Lunch”; Shiny, “Quartet”; Soho Square, “Livelong Days”; Southwest Review, “Livelong Days”; Times Literary Supplement, “A Driftwood Altar,” “And Forgetting,” “Autumn Telegram,” “Joy,” “Light Turnouts,” “Part of the Superstition,” “Private Syntax,” “Retablo,” “Revisionist Horn Concerto”; Voices, “Central Air,” “Harbor Activities”; The World, “The Wind Talking”; Yale Review, “A Call for Papers.”
About the Author
John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He studied English at Harvard and at Columbia, and along with his friends Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, he became a leading voice in what came to be called the New York School of poets. Ashbery’s poetry collection Some Trees was selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—the first of over twenty-five critically admired works Ashbery has published in a career spanning more than six decades. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and since then Ashbery has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors.
For years, Ashbery taught creative writing at Brooklyn College and Bard College in New York, working with students and codirecting MFA programs while continuing to write and publish award-winning collections of poetry—all marked by his signature philosophical wit, ardent honesty, and polyphonic explorations of modern language. His most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012. He lives in New York.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1992 by John Ashbery
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4804-5910-6
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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