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    Your Name Here: Poems
    Your Name Here: Poems
    Your Name Here: Poems
    Ebook170 pages1 hour

    Your Name Here: Poems

    By John Ashbery

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    About this ebook

    A mesmerizing, endlessly entertaining collection that shows John Ashbery at his most exuberant, honest, and inviting

    John Ashbery’s nineteenth original collection of poetry, first published in 2000, might be one of the “Ashberyest” of his long and varied career. In these poems, the slippery pronouns (who is speaking, who is being spoken to?), the high-low allusions (Daffy Duck, please meet Rimbaud), and the twists of context (where are we anyway, and what’s happening here?) that have long been hallmarks of Ashbery’s poetry are on full, rambunctious display. Beginning with the book’s very title, Ashbery invites the reader into the world of his poetry like never before; each poem can be read as a postcard to experiences that could be yours, his, or anyone’s.
     
    And yet the poems in Your Name Here are also personal and particular. The collection is dedicated to an old friend, and in the well-known “History of My Life,” Ashbery strikes a rare autobiographical chord.
     
    Some of the best-known poems of Ashbery’s later career are here, including “Not You Again,” “Crossroads in the Past,” and “They Don’t Just Go Away, Either.” Polyphonic, deeply honest, and frequently very funny, Your Name Here is both wonder filled and wonderful.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459144
    Your Name Here: Poems
    Author

    John Ashbery

    John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.

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      Your Name Here - John Ashbery

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      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,

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