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Overview
And the Stars Were Shining originally appeared in 1994, toward the midpoint of a startlingly creative period in Ashbery’s long career, during which the great American poet published no fewer than nine books in ten years. The collection brings together more than fifty compact, jewellike, intensely felt poems, including the well-known “Like a Sentence” (“How little we know, / and when we know it!”) and the lyrical, deeply moving thirteen-part title poem recognized as one of the author’s greatest. This collection is Ashbery at his most accessible, graceful, and elegiac.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480459076 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 09/09/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 99 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He has authored more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, his work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he has won numerous American literary awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a National Humanities Medal. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. For many years, Ashbery taught graduate and undergraduate poetry courses at Brooklyn College and Bard College, and his most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012. He lives in New York.
Read an Excerpt
And the Stars Were Shining
Poems
By John Ashbery
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1994 John AshberyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-5907-6
CHAPTER 1
TOKEN RESISTANCE
As one turns to one in a dream
smiling like a bell that has just
stopped tolling, holds out a book,
and speaks: "All the vulgarity
of time, from the Stone Age
to our present, with its noodle parlors
and token resistance, is as a life
to the life that is given you. Wear it,"
so must one descend from checkered heights
that are our friends, needlessly
rehearsing what we will say
as a common light bathes us,
a common fiction reverberates as we pass
to the celebration. Originally
we weren't going to leave home. But made bold
somehow by the rain we put our best foot forward.
Now it's years after that. It
isn't possible to be young anymore.
Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend;
my own shoes have scarred the walk I've taken.
SPRING CRIES
Our worst fears are realized.
Then a string of successes, or failures, follows.
She pleads with us to stay: "Stay,
just for a minute, can't you?"
We are expelled into the dust of our decisions.
Knowing it would be this way hasn't
made any of it easier to understand, or bear.
May is raving. Its recapitulations
exhaust the soil. Across the marsh
some bird misses its mark, walks back, sheepish, cheeping.
The isthmus is gilded white. People are returning
to the bight: adult swimmers, all of them.
THE MANDRILL ON THE TURNPIKE
It's an art, knowing who to put with what,
and then, while expectations drool, make off with the lodestar,
wrapped in a calico handkerchief, in your back pocket. All right,
who's got it? Don't look at me, I'm
waiting for my date, she's already fifteen minutes late.
Listen, wiseguy—but the next instant, traffic drowns us
like a field of hay.
Now it's no longer so important
about getting home, finishing the job—
see, the lodestar had a kind of impact
for you, but only if you knew about it. Otherwise,
not to worry, the clock strikes ten, the evening's off and running.
Then, while every thing and body are getting sorted out,
the—well, you know, what I call the subjunctive creeps back in,
sits up, begs for a vision,
or a cookie. Meanwhile where's the bird?
Probably laying eggs or performing some other natural function. Why,
am I my brother's keeper, my brother the spy?
You and Mrs. Molesworth know more than you're letting on.
"I came here from Clapham,
searching for a whitewashed cottage in which things were dear to me
many a summer. We had our first innocent
conversation here, Jack. Just don't lie to me—
I hate it when people lie to me. They
can do anything else to me, really. Well, anything
within reason, of course."
Why it was let for a song, and that seasons ago.
ABOUT TO MOVE
And the bellybuttons all danced around
and the ironing board ambled back to the starting gate
and meaningless violence flew helplessly overhead
which was too much for the stair
Better to get in bed they cry
since Zeus the evil one has fixed his beady eye on us
and will never come to help us
But out of that a red song grew
in waves overwhelming field and orchard
Do not go back it said for if there is one less of you
at the time of counting it will go bad with you
and even so, many hairy bodies got up and left
Now if there was one thing that could save the situation
it was the cow on its little swatch of land
I give my milk so that others will not dry up
it said and gladly offer my services to the forces of peace and niceness
but what really does grow under that tree
By now it had all become a question of saving face
Many at the party thought so
that these were just indifferent conditions
that had existed before in the past from time to time
so nobody got to find out about the king of hearts
said the woman glancing off her shovel The snow continued
to descend in rows this rubble that is like life infested with death
only do not go there the time should not be anymore
I have read many prophetic books and I can tell you
now to listen and endure
And first the goat arose and circled halfway around the ilex tree
and after that
several gazed from their windows
to observe the chaos harvesting itself
laying itself in neat rows before the circled wagons
and it was then that many left the painted cities
saying we can remember those colors it is enough
and we can go back tragically but what would be the point
and the laconic ones disappeared first
and the others backtracked and soon all was well enough
GHOST RIDERS OF THE MOON
Today I would leave it just as it is.
The pocket comb—"dirty as a comb," the French say,
yet not so dirty, surely not in the spiritual sense
some intuit; the razor, lying at an angle
to the erect toothbrush, like an alligator stalking
a bayadère; the singular effect of all things
being themselves, that is, stark mad
with no apologies to the world or the ether,
and then the crumbling realization that a halt
has been called. That the stair treads
conspired in it. That the boiling oil
hunched above the rim of its vessel, and just sat there.
That there were no apologies to be made, ever
again, no alibis for the articles returned to the store,
just a standoff, placid, eternal. And one can admire
again the coatings of things, without prejudice
or innuendo, and the kernels be discreetly
disposed of—well, spat out. Such
objects as my endurance picks out
like a searchlight have gone the extra mile
too, like schoolchildren, and are seated now
in attentive rows, waiting trimly for these words to flood
distraught corners of silences. We collected
them after all for their unique
indifference to each other and to the circus
that houses us all, and for their collectibility—
that, and their tendency to fall apart.
THE LOVE SCENES
After ten years, my lamp
expired. At first I thought
there wasn't going to be any more this.
In the convenience store of spring
I met someone who knew someone I loved
by the dairy case. All ribbons parted
on a veil of musicks, wherein
unwitting orangutans gambled for socks,
and the tasseled enemy was routed.
Up in one corner a plaid puff of smoke
warned mere pleasures away. We
were getting on famously—like
"houses on fire," I believe the expression
is. At midterm I received permission
to go down to the city. There,
in shambles and not much else, my love
waited. It was all too blissful not
to take in, a grand purgatorial
romance of kittens in a basket.
And with that we are asked to be pure,
to wash our hands of stones and seashells—
my poster plastered everywhere.
When two people meet, the folds can fall
where they may. Leaves say it's OK.
JUST WHAT'S THERE
Haven't you arrived yet?
A sleepiness of doing dissolved my one
scruple: I lay on the concrete belvedere section
belabored by sun.
Nuts convened in the chancel,
a posse wheezed by in some oater: Chapter I, etc.
In the past I was bitten.
Now I believe.
Nothing is better than nothing at all.
Winter. Mice sleep peacefully in their dormers.
The old wagon gets through;
the parcel of contraband is noted:
a brace of ibex horns,
a scale worshipfully sung at the celesta.
We know nothing about anything.
The wind pours through us as through a bag
of horse chestnuts. Speak.
The orderly disappeared down the hall.
For a long time a sound of ferns rallied, then
nothing, only dumb snapshots of unknown corners
in strange cities. The tedious process
of fitting endings to stories.
Ground review. An obscurantist's trick.
Once you've wheedled as many as are there
at a given time, there's a certainty of dawn
in the not-much-else-colored sky. A phone booth
pivots daintily in air. O crawl back to the peach
ladder. A comic-book racetrack breathes somewhere.
A pianola was offered:
astonishment on the third floor.
The nice whore mended her ways.
The breathing came fast and thick.
The ushers will please take their seats.
TITLE SEARCH
Voices of Spring. Vienna Bonbons.
Morning Papers. Visiting Firemen. Mourning Polka.
Symphonie en ut dièse majeur. Fog-soaked Extremities.
Agrippa. Agrippine. Nelly and All. The Day
the Coast Came to Our House.
Hocus Focus. Unnatural Dreams. The Book of Five-Dollar Poems.
Oaks and Craters. Robert, a Rhapsody. Cecilia Valdés.
The Jewish Child. Mandarin Sorcerers. The Reader's Digest
Book of Posh Assignations. The Penguin Book of Thwarted Lovers.
The American Screwball Comedy.
Scenes of Clerical Life. Incan Overtures. The House on 42nd Street.
The Man in Between. The Man on the Box. The Motor Car.
Rue des Acacias. Elm Street and After.
The Little Red Church. The Hotel District.
I'll Eat a Mexican. The Heritage of Froth.
The Trojan Comedy. Water to the Fountain. Memoirs of a Hermit Crab.
The Ostrich Succession. Exit Pursued by a Turkey.
In the Pound. The Artist's Life. On the Beautiful Blue Danube.
Less Is Roar. The Bicyclist. The Father.
FREE NAIL POLISH
Cool enough. Granted,
she has beautiful legs, you know.
Men's thoughts are continually drawn behind
the apron of her success,
or to the tank top of her access
to the secrets of the great and philosophic,
of the most polite spirits
that invest these semitropic airs.
I need a tragic future to invest in.
Getting no support from others, I—
wait, here it comes along the rails,
a slow train from Podunk, the ironed faces
of the passengers at each window expressing something precise
but nothing in particular.
Yes, the mooing woods around this station are
partly extreme,
and wire fences are deep within
some parts of them. We know not
what they're for, nor why we snore
at a bug's trajectory
over the wallpaper's lilac lozenges.
TILL THE BUS STARTS
"This heart is useless. I must have another."
—The Bride of Frankenstein
I like napping in transit.
What I ought to do
just sits there. I like
summer—does it like me?
So much cursory wind
with things on its mind—
"No time to worry about it
now," it—she—says.
In short I like many
dividers of the days
that come near to eavesdrop on our thoughts.
What about gliders?
These, yes, I like these too.
And greened copper things
like things out of the thirties.
I must have one—no,
make that a dozen, all wrapped
fresh, at my address.
And were it but a foozle
schlepping round my ankles
by golly I'd give it the same
treatment all those guys,
years, gave me. You can't fasten
a suspender stud and not know about it,
how awful they looked,
and when they returned home under trees
nobody said
anything, nobody wanted it.
Still, I'll go
out in my way, waiting
for yet another vehicle.
It seems strange I read this page before, no,
this whole short story. And what
sirens sing to me now,
cover me with buttons?
THE RIDICULOUS TRANSLATOR'S HOPES
Gracious exertor, but the rooms are small and mean
and so papered over with secrets that even their shape
is uncertain, but it is the shape of the past:
no love, no extra credit, not even civility
from those shades. Do they even see you?
They were so anxious for you to be there,
once, in the playground of what was happening to them.
Messages were bright then, hats undoffed,
manners fresh and cool, like a seasonable day
in early spring. The glancing
rivulets in the gutters struck a note that was a trifle flint-like,
though, and the birds were wary, warier than usual.
It took a man with a cane to magnetize
all those invisible and partly visible crosscurrents,
reluctant, downright sullen, or ones that hadn't yet had the time
to reflect on what was being set up here: a point,
no more nor less. Instead of trying to kiss you,
I too felt sucked into the ambient animal-revenge scene:
By twos and threes the animals returned, to their cages,
and sat obediently while the trainer barked orders at them.
They, it seemed, had nothing to lose. Nor in all the whitewashed domain
of the present past tense was anyone privy to the secrets
that now make us strong, or tall, and vulnerable
as a bride left waiting at the church, inching backward
to the cliff's edge as the photographer gets ready to smile.
THE STORY OF NEXT WEEK
Yes, but right reason dictates ... Yes, but the wolf is at the door,
nor shall our finding be indexed.
Yes, but life is a circus, a passing show
wherein each may drop his reflection
and so contradict the purpose of a maelstrom:
the urge, the thrust.
And if what others do
finally seems good to you? Why,
the very civility that gilded it
is flaking. Passivity itself's a hurdle.
So, lost with the unclaimed lottery junk,
uninventoried, you are an heir to anything.
Brightness of purpose counts: Centesimal
victorious flunkeys seemed to grab its tail
yet it defied them with invention.
Stand up, and the rain
will be cold at first in your pockets.
Later, by chance, you'll discover supper
in the sparkling, empty tavern.
A nice, white bed awaits you;
your passport's in there too.
A HUNDRED ALBUMS
Acts have been cleaned up.
In the latest compromise
the hip audience mostly understands.
Unpleasantness, strange blips arise,
the nine-bathroom garage.
But where are we to begin again,
and what are we compared to Thee,
as two men scuffle in a checkout line
and a child bends
into the light, her knowledge of innocence
as a death now, name in the register
a gloved hand signs?
For what have we been rescued, if not
to see these and other things
that have no love for us?
For relishing something once done
in secret, and you lose footing further on,
out of the frame,
and everything that proves dimensionless is haggard.
He was something, wasn't he?
Until everyone has been let in and found sleep
we go his way, profiting
from the glances we get, the attentions to
special mores that are side-splitting.
And no caretaker comes to mulch us
once the ground is frozen,
no pike stabs the secret surface of earth
in time for a vigil of all you see.
The rose in the planetarium
asks for calm QUIET PLEASE can't you
see the door is leaking embers from that last, crucial light
we'd just stopped by for, like a mug of hot wine,
but it is soup that is being dashed in your face.
Then one day he sat down and wrote that line
that is so beautiful everybody wants to hum it
on this hillside, shoulders locked swaying to
its rhythm and the Master will come forward then,
the being no creation has seen,
perfect as a crowing cock in a ballad
most will have foretold, alas.
What wretch hasn't taught me that?
A WALTZ DREAM
She wasn't having one of her strange headaches tonight.
Whose fault is it? For a long time I thought it was mine,
blamed myself for every minor variation in the major upheaval.
Then ...
It may have been the grass praying
for renewal, even though it meant their death,
the individual blades, and, as though psychic,
a white light hovered just above the lake's layer
like a photograph of ectoplasm.
Those are all fakes, aren't they?
In slow-moving traffic a man acts like he's going to be hit
by the stream of cars coming at him from both directions.
Like a cookie cutter, a steamroller lops the view off.
There are nine sisters, nine deafening knocks on the door,
nine busboys to be bussed—er, tipped. And in the thievery
of my own dreams I can see the square like a crystal,
the only imaginary thing we were meant to have,
now soiled, turned under
like a frayed shirt collar
a mother stitches for her son who's away at school,
mindful he may not care, may wear
another's scarlet and sulfur raiment
just so he take part in the academy fun.
And later, after the twister, slowly
we mixed drinks of the sort
that may be slopped only on script girls, like lemonade.
Who knows what the world's got up its sleeve
next brunch, as long as you will be a part of me and all what I am doing?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from And the Stars Were Shining by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1994 John Ashbery. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Publisher's Note,TOKEN RESISTANCE,
SPRING CRIES,
THE MANDRILL ON THE TURNPIKE,
ABOUT TO MOVE,
GHOST RIDERS OF THE MOON,
THE LOVE SCENES,
JUST WHAT'S THERE,
TITLE SEARCH,
FREE NAIL POLISH,
TILL THE BUS STARTS,
THE RIDICULOUS TRANSLATOR'S HOPES,
THE STORY OF NEXT WEEK,
A HUNDRED ALBUMS,
A WALTZ DREAM,
FALLS TO THE FLOOR, COMES TO THE DOOR,
THE LOUNGE,
THE IMPROVEMENT,
"THE FAVOR OF A REPLY,
A HELD THING,
STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN AT NIGHT,
WORLD'S END,
ICE CREAM IN AMERICA,
WORKS ON PAPER I,
LOCAL TIME,
WELL, YES, ACTUALLY,
MY GOLD CHAIN,
FOOTFALLS,
WEATHER AND TURTLES,
SOMETIMES IN PLACES,
WILLIAM BYRD,
ASSERTIVENESS TRAINING,
LIKE A SENTENCE,
TWO PIECES,
THE FRIENDLY CITY,
THE DESPERATE HOURS,
THE DECLINE OF THE WEST,
THE ARCHIPELAGO,
GUMMED REINFORCEMENTS,
SPOTLIGHT ON AMERICA,
WHAT DO YOU CALL IT WHEN,
PLEASURE BOATS,
PRETTY QUESTIONS,
PATHLESS WANDERINGS,
ON FIRST LISTENING TO SCHREKER'S DER SCHATZGRÄBER,
DINOSAUR COUNTRY,
LEEWARD,
PARAPH,
NOT PLANNING A TRIP BACK,
MYRTLE,
MAN IN LUREX,
IN THE MEANTIME, DARLING,
JUST FOR STARTERS,
BROMELIADS,
COMMERCIAL BREAK,
SICILIAN BIRD,
MUTT AND JEFF,
COVENTRY,
AND THE STARS WERE SHINING,
About the Author,