by John Ashbery
The Plural of “Jack-in-the-Box”
How quiet the diversion stands
Beside my gate, and me all eager and no grace:
Until tomorrow with sifting hands
Uncode the sea that brought me to this place,
Discover people with changing face
But the way is wide over stubble and sands,
Wider and not too wide, as a dish in space
Is excellent, conforming to demands
Not yet formulated. Let certain trends
Believe us, and that way give chase
With hounds, and with the hare erase
All knowledge of its coming here. The lands
Are fewer now under the plain blue blanket whose
Birthday keeps them outside at the end.
About the Author
John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He studied English at Harvard and at Columbia, and along with his friends Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, he became a leading voice in what came to be called the New York School of poets. Ashbery’s poetry collection Some Trees was selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—the first of over twenty-five critically admired works Ashbery has published in a career spanning more than six decades. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and since then Ashbery has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors.
For years, Ashbery taught creative writing at Brooklyn College and Bard College in New York, working with students and codirecting MFA programs while continuing to write and publish award-winning collections of poetry—all marked by his signature philosophical wit, ardent honesty, and polyphonic explorations of modern language. His most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012. He lives in New York.
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Grateful acknowlegment is made to the following publications, in which some of the poems in this book originally appeared : American Poetry Review: “Litany” (Part II). Broadway: “Otherwise.” Cincinnati Poetry Review: “And I’d Love You to Be in It.” Contemporary Poets Calendar (1980): “A Tone Poem.” Harvard Magazine: “The Picnic Grounds” and “Their Day.” New York Review of Books: “My Erotic Double” and “Histoire Universelle.” The New Yorker: “Haunted Landscape,” “Knocking Around,” and “Tapestry.” Paris Review: “Homesickness” and “This Configuration.” Ploughshares: “No, But I Seen One You Know You Don’t Own,” “The Shower,” “Landscapeople,” and “The Plural of ‘Jack-in-the-Box’” (as part of the sequence “Kannst du die alten Lieder noch Spielen?”). Poetry: “Many Wagons Ago,” “The Sun,” “Five Pedantic Pieces,” “Flowering Death,” “Not only /but also,” “Train Rising out of the Sea,” and “Late Echo.” Vogue: “As We Know.” The World: “Sleeping in the Corners of Our Lives” and “In a Boat.” Zero: “Variations on an Original Theme” and “The Other Cindy.”
“The Preludes,” “A Box and Its Contents,” “A Sparkler,” “The Wine,” “There’s No Difference,” “Hittite Lullaby,” “No, But I Seen One You Know You Don’t Own,” “The Shower,” “Landscapeople,” and “The Pleural of ‘Jack-in-the-Box’” appear in Solitary Travelers, a volume of Mellon Lectures published by Cooper Union.
Copyright © 1979 by John Ashbery
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4804-5905-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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