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Hotel Lautréamont

Page 13

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.

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