As We Know Read online

  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

  Stands straight up like a tail.

  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

  Beyond the chain-link fence

  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

  Over it like a wave,

  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