Can You Hear, Bird
Poems
John Ashbery
For
Harry Mathews
and
Marie Chaix
Contents
Publisher’s Note
A Day at the Gate
A New Octagon
A Poem of Unrest
A Waking Dream
Abe’s Collision
Allotted Spree
Andante Misterioso
Angels (you
Anxiety and Hardwood Floors
At First I Thought I Wouldn’t Say Anything About It
At Liberty and Cranberry
Atonal Music
Awful Effects of Two Comets
… by an Earthquake
By Guess and by Gosh
Can You Hear, Bird
Cantilever
Chapter II, Book 35
Chronic Symbiosis
Collected Places
Coming Down from New York
Dangerous Moonlight
Debit Night
Do Husbands Matter?
Dull Mauve
Eternity Sings the Blues
Fascicle
Five O’Clock Shadow
From the Observatory
Fuckin’ Sarcophagi
Getting Back In
Gladys Palmer
Heavenly Arts Polka
Hegel
I Saw No Need
I, Too
In an Inchoate Place
In Old Oklahoma
Like a Sentence
Limited Liability
Love in Boots
Love’s Stratagem
Many Are Dissatisfied
Military Pastoral
My Name Is Dimitri
My Philosophy of Life
Nice Morning Blues
No Earthly Reason
No Longer Very Clear
Obedience School
Ode to John Keats
Of a Particular Stranger
Operators Are Standing By
Others Shied Away
Palindrome
Penthesilea
Plain as Day
Point Lookout
Poor Knights of Windsor
Quick Question
Reverie and Caprice
Safe Conduct
Salon de Thé
See How You Like My Shoes
Something Too Chinese
Swaying, the Apt Traveler Exited My House
Taxi in the Glen
The Blot People
The Captive Sense
The Confronters
The Desolate Beauty Parlor on Beach Avenue
The Faint of Heart
The Green Mummies
The Latvian
The Military Base
The Peace Plan
The Penitent
The Problem of Anxiety
The Sea
The Shocker
The Waiting Ceremony
The Walkways
The Water Carrier
Theme
Three Dusks
Today’s Academicians
Touching, the Similarities
Tower of Darkness
Tremendous Outpouring
Tuesday Evening
Twilight Park
Umpteen
What the Plants Say
When All Her Neighbors Came
Where It Was Decided We Should Be Taken
Woman Leaning
Yes, Dr. Grenzmer. How May I Be of Assistance to You? What! You Say the Patient Has Escaped?
Yesterday, for Instance
You Dropped Something
You, My Academy
You Would Have Thought
Young People
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 suc
h 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.
A Day at the Gate
A loose and dispiriting
wind took over from the grinding of traffic.
Clouds from the distillery
blotted out the sky. Ocarina sales plummeted.
Believe you me it was a situation
Aladdin’s lamp might have ameliorated. And where was I?
Among architecture, magazines, recycled fish,
waiting for the wear and tear
to show up on my chart. Good luck,
bonne chance. Remember me to the zithers
and their friends, the ondes martenot.
Only I say: What comes this way withers
automatically. And the fog, drastically.
As one mercurial teardrop glozes
an empire’s classified documents, so
other softnesses decline the angles
of the waiting. Tall, pissed-off,
dressed in this day’s clothes,
holding its umbrella, he half turned away
with a shooshing sound. Said he needed us.
Said the sky shall be kelly green tonight.
A New Octagon
my chances. Nothing in this blue vault belongs
where you put it; therefore are you the dupe
of its nonchalance. Try to wriggle free, remembering
what the great collector said: Serenity is a mild bridle
lending dignity to any occasion. The best truss
is the severest, but your village
ends where mine begins. Angry little houses litigate;
the roof leaks. Present your wrist for stamping
as you go out into the northwestern territories, otherwise
we’ll see whose absence becomes it.
Daughters Tiffany and Brittany concurred. There
isn’t much in the way of agony impeding the astral
path you seek. On with the
ways and
the variance sequestered by others.
A Poem of Unrest
Men duly understand the river of life,
misconstruing it, as it widens and its cities grow
dark and denser, always farther away.
And of course that remote denseness suits
us, as lambs and clover might have
if things had been built to order differently.
But since I don’t understand myself, only segments
of myself that misunderstand each other, there’s no
reason for you to want to, no way you could
even if we both wanted it. Do those towers even exist?
We must look at it that way, along those lines
so the thought can erect itself, like plywood battlements.
A Waking Dream
And the failing panopticon? That happened before,
when my uncle was in his bathrobe, on vacation.
Leastways, folks said it was a vacation …
Are you referring to your Uncle Obadiah,
the one that spent twenty years in the drunk-tank
and could whistle all the latest hits when sprung?
No one ever cared to talk much about it, it seemed a little too
peculiar, and he, he had forgotten the art
of knowing how far to go too far.
Just so. When driven, he would materialize in a Palm Beach suit
and Panama hat with tiny rainbow holes in it.
That was someone who knew how to keep up appearances
until he had exhausted them. Some of the railroad crew
got to know him at times, and could never figure out how he knew
exactly when a storm would hit. And when its anthracitic orgasm
erupted, we were out in the salley gardens mending coils
from the last big one. Such is my recollection. And vipers
would pause to notice. Meanwhile he was acting more and more
like a candidate. Then the wave of beach chairs crashed over us
and there was nothing more to be said for it. The case was closed,
it was “history,” he liked to say, as though that were a topic
he could expand on if he chose, but it was more likely
to be night, and no one could extricate it properly.
Yet I had been told of an estimate.
That’s what we don’t know! If only I could get my senses
back in the right order, and had time to ponder this old message,
I could have the sluice-gates opened in a jiffy. As it is,
they’re probably more than a little rusty, and do we know,
really know, as chasm-dwellers are said
to know, which way is upstream?
Abe’s Collision
So much energy deployed
in circumnavigating the seer’s collisions!
Don’t do it yet,
it hasn’t happened.
There is something in it.
And if we were a guidepost,
life would come along one day,
verify its balance, then leave
straight into the flustered ballooning of branches,
hands on the long ramp
leading to the restaurant with its coffee.
Sure, it’s time we merged.
There are no others to do it
for us, we think we’re nice.
That’s why we’ve got to do it.
It takes balls to do it
and a heavy-duty sucker across the way.
A snake will unplug the drain.
The slate will light up and read itself.
Allotted Spree
How the past filled its designated space
with every kind of drollery, so there
were not just the things one knew about.
It’s the secret of my gospel, it can never
be gone for too long or get too fancy.
Everybody wants to own a share in it!
This, too, is impossible.
I saw a woman in red move, come out from behind the brush.
I saw ten milky-white puppy dogs who chanted at me:
“You’re a handful.” I saw the spire of St. Diana’s
prick and light up the sky. Those were gnashed doldrums.
Down where the last coitus happened,
another, a new madman in a cloak and hat,
was rising with the moon. They don’t let you off
for these little things. Try imagining it.
Yes but against the sofa of your captivating lens
your appetites are wizard, dear. Le
t’s give them all
a chance. On to the starboard
list of the apartment, to the gemstone-crusted tankard.
Andante Misterioso
The perfume climbs into my tree.
It is given to red-haired sprites:
words that music expresses
almost amply.
The symphony at the station
then, and all over people trying to hear it
and others trying to get away. A “trying”
situation, perhaps, yet no one is worse off than before.
Horses slog through dirt—hell,
it’s normal for ’em.
And that summer cottage we rented once—remember
how the bugs came in through the screens, and
all was not as it was supposed to be?
Nowadays people have cars for things like that,
to carry them away, I mean,
I suppose.
And wherever man sets his giant foot
petals spring up, and artificial torsos,
dressmakers’ dummies. And an ancient photograph
and an ancient phonograph, that carols
in mist. Pardon. The landlord locked us out.
Angels (you
know who you are), come back
when you’ve aged a little, when the outdoors
is an attractive curiosity no longer.
Don’t get me wrong, I like your waving
turquoise mittens extantly. I must polish
my speech, having spent a life
watching old Steffi Duna movies, and being warned
about the consequences. It seems I should pass;
there’s only one essay question, and it can be about anything
you like. Yet I hesitate, like a spermatozoid
that’s lost its way and doesn’t dare ask directions—
they’d club it if it did. Once you’re en route
it doesn’t matter if you know, besides, anyway.
Conversely the winter circuit closes down
until some time in spring, but more likely forever.
Signs of rot and corruption are everywhere
and are even copied by the fashion-conscious.
I must sugar my hair. And my factotum?
You said there was one more in your party.
No one is in a hurry.
Suddenly the day is crocus-sweet.