Your Name Here: Poems Read online

  Your Name Here

  Poems

  John Ashbery

  For Pierre Martory

  1920-1998

  Contents

  Publisher’s Note

  This Room

  If You Said You Would Come with Me

  A Linnet

  The Bobinski Brothers

  Not You Again

  Terminal

  Merrily We Live

  Brand Loyalty

  Rain in the Soup

  Bloodfits

  Implicit Fog

  Dream Sequence (Untitled)

  What Is Written

  Caravaggio and His Followers

  Industrial Collage

  Frogs and Gospels

  Weekend

  Get Me Rewrite

  Invasive Procedures

  Paperwork

  The History of My Life

  Toy Symphony

  Memories of Imperialism

  Strange Occupations

  Full Tilt

  The File on Thelma Jordan

  Two for the Road

  Heartache

  The Fortune Cookie Crumbles

  Onion Skin

  Redeemed Area

  Variations on “La Folia”

  De Senectute

  The Gods of Fairness

  Who Knows What Constitutes a Life

  Sacred and Profane Dances

  Here We Go Looby

  Avenue Mozart

  Life Is a Dream

  Vowels

  Beverly of Graustark

  The Pearl Fishers

  They Don’t Just Go Away, Either

  Conventional Wisdom

  And Again, March is Almost Here

  A Descent into the Maelstrom

  Sonatine Mélancolique

  Stanzas before Time

  A Postcard from Pontevedra

  A Suit

  Crossroads in the Past

  The Water Inspector

  Cinéma Vérité

  The Old House in the Country

  Autumn Basement

  Hang-Up Call

  Lost Profile

  How Dangerous

  Humble Pie

  More Hocketing

  Amnesia Goes to the Ball

  Railroaded

  Honored Guest

  Our Leader is Dreaming

  Last Legs

  Lemurs and Pharisees

  The Underwriters

  Pale Siblings

  Nobody Is Going Anywhere

  Poem on Several Occasions

  Slumberer

  Pot Luck

  Short-Term Memory

  Vendanges

  Small City

  Vintage Masquerade

  To Good People Who Should Be Going Somewhere Else

  Another Aardvark

  Has to Be Somewhere

  The Don’s Bequest

  Strange Cinema

  A Star Belched

  When Pressed

  The Impure

  Crowd Conditions

  Enjoys Watching Foreign Films

  Fade In

  Over at the Mutts’

  Pastilles for the Voyage

  Of the Light

  Your Name Here

  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.

  THIS ROOM

  The room I entered was a dream of this room.

  Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.

  The oval portrait

  of a dog was me at an early age.

  Something shimmers, something is hushed up.

  We had macaroni for lunch every day

  except Sunday, when a small quail was induced

  to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?

  You are not even here.

  IF YOU SAID YOU WOULD COME WITH ME

  In town it was very urban but in the country cows were covering the hills. The clouds were near and very moist. I was walking along the pavement with Anna, enjoying the scattered scenery. Suddenly a sound like a deep bell came from behind us. We both turned to look. “It’s the words you spoke in the past, coming back to haunt you,” Anna explained. “They always do, you know.”

  Indeed I did. Many times this deep bell-like tone had intruded itself on my thoughts, scrambling them at first, then rearranging them in apple-pie order. “Two crows,” the voice seemed to say, “were sitting on a sundial in the God-given sunlight. Then one flew away.”

  “Yes ... and then?” I wanted to ask, but I kept silent. We turned into a courtyard and walked up several flights of stairs to the roof, where a party was in progress. “This is my friend Hans,” Anna said by way of introduction. No one paid much attention and several guests moved away to the balustrade to admire the view of orchards and vineyards, approaching their autumn glory. One of the women however came to greet us in a friendly manner. I was wondering if this was a “harvest home,” a phrase I had often heard but never understood.

  “Welcome to my home ... well, to our home,” the woman said gaily. “As you can see, the grapes are being harvested.” It seemed she could read my mind. “They say this year’s vintage will be a mediocre one, but the sight is lovely, nonetheless. Don’t you agree, Mr. ...”

  “Hans,” I replied curtly. The prospect was indeed a lovely one, but I wanted to leave. Making some excuse I guided Anna by the elbow toward the stairs and we left.

  “That wasn’t polite of you,” she said dryly.

  “Honey, I’ve had enough of people who can read your mind. When I want it done I’ll go to a mind reader.”

  “I happen to be one and I can tell you what you’re thinking is false. Listen to what the big bell says: ‘We are all strangers on our own turf, in our own time.’ You should have paid attention. Now adjustments will have to be made.”

  A LINNET

  It crossed the road so as to avoid having to greet me. “Poor thing but mine own,” I said, “without a song the day would never end.” Warily the thing approached. I pitied its stupidity so much that huge tears began to well up in my eyes, falling to the hard ground with a plop. “I don’t need a welcome like that,” it said. “I was ready for you. All the ladybugs and the buzzing flies and the alligators know about you and your tricks. Poor, cheap thing. Go away, and take your song with you.”

  Night had fallen without my realizing it. Several hours must have passed while I stood there, mulling the grass and possible replies to the hapless creature. A mason still stood at the top of a ladder repairing the tiles in a roof, by the light of the moon. But there was no moon. Yet I could see his armpits, hair gushing from them, and the tricks of the trade with which he was so bent on fixing that wall.

  THE BOBINSKI BROTHERS

  “Her name is Liz, and I need her in my biz,” I hummed wantonly. A band of clouds all slanted in the same direction drifted across the hairline horizon like a tribe of adults and children, all hastening toward some unknown destination. A crisp pounding. Done to your mother what? Are now the ... And so you understand it, she ... I. Once you get past the moralizing a new winter twilight creeps into place. And a lot of guys just kind of live through it? Ossified soup, mortised sloop. Woody has the staff to do nothing. You never know what. That’s what I think. Like two notes of music we slid apart, far from one another’s protective jealousy. The old cat, sunning herself, had no problem with that. Nor did the diaphanous trains of fairies that sagged down from a sky that suggested they had never been anywhere, least of all there. At the time we had a good laugh over it. But it did hurt. It still does. That’s what I think, he slapped.

  NOT YOU AGAIN

  Thought I’d write you this poem. Yes,

  I know you don’t need it. No,

  you don’t have to thank me for it. Just

  want to kind of get it off my chest

  and drop it in the peanut dust.

  You came at me and that was something.

  I was more than a match for you, you

  were a match for me, we undid the clasps

  in our shirtings, it was a semblance of all right.

  Then the untimely muse got wind of it.

  Picked it up, hauled it over there.

  The bandy-legged man was watching

  all this time. “... to have Betty back on board.”

  Now it’s time for love-twenty.

  Assume your places on the shuffleboard.

  You, Sam, must make a purple prayer

  out of origami and stuff it. If you’ve

  puked it’s already too late.

  I see all behind me small canyons, drifting,

  filling up with the space of drifting.

  The chair in the attic is up to no good.

  Then you took me and held me like I was a child

  or a prize. For a moment there I thought I knew you,

  but you backed away, wiping your specs, “Oh,

  excuse ...” It’s okay,

  will come another time

  when stupendous seabirds are carilloning out over the Atlantic,

  when the charging fire engine adjusts its orange petticoats

  after knocking down the old man the girl picks up.

  Now it’s too late, the books are closed, the salmon

  no longer spewing. Just so you know.

  TERMINAL

  Didn’t you get my card?

  We none of us, you see, knew we were coming

  until the bus was actually pulling out of the terminal.

  I gazed a little sadly at the rubber of my shoes’

  soles, finding it wanting.

  I got kind of frenzied after the waiting

  had stopped, but now am cool as a suburban garden

  in some lost city. When it came time for my speech

  I could think of nothing, of course.

  I gave a little talk about the onion—how its flavor

  inspires us, its shape informs our architecture.

  There were so many other things I wanted to say, too,

  but, dandified, I couldn’t strut,

  couldn’t sit down for all the spit and polish.

  Now it’s your turn to say something about the wall

  in the garden. It can be anything.

  MERRILY WE LIVE

  Sometimes the drums would actually let us play

  between beats, and that was nice. Before closing time.

  By then the clown’s anus

  would get all chewed up by the donkey

 
that hated having a tail pinned on it,

  which was perhaps understandable. The three-legged midgets

  ran around, they enjoyed hearing us play so much,

  and the saxophone had something to say

  about all this, but only to itself.

  Clusters of pollen blot out the magnolia blossoms this year

  and that’s about all there is to it. Like I said,

  it’s pretty much like last year, except for Brooke.

  She was determined to get a job in the city. When last heard from

  she had found one, playing a sonata of Beethoven’s (one

  of the easier ones) in the window of a department store

  downtown somewhere, and then that closed, the whole city did,

  tighter’n a drum. So we have only our trapezoidal reflections

  to look at in its blue glass sides, and perhaps admire—

  oh, why can’t this be some other day? The children all came over

  (we thought they were midgets at first) and wanted

  to be told stories to, but mostly to be held.

  John I think did the right thing by shoveling them under the carpet.

  And then there were the loose wickets

  after the storm, and that made croquet impossible.

  Hailstones the size of medicine balls were rolling down the slope anyway

  right toward our doorstep. Most of them melted before they got there, but one,

  a particularly noxious one, actually got in the house and left its smell,

  a smell of violets, in fact, all over the hall carpet,

  which didn’t cancel one’s rage at breaking and entering,

  of all crimes the most serious, don’t you fear?

  I’ve got to finish this. Father will be after me.

  Oh, and did the red rubber balls ever arrive? We could do something

  with them, I just have to figure out what.

  Today a stoat came to tea

  and that was so nice it almost made me cry—

  look, the tears in the mirror are still streaming down my face