Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Can You Hear, Bird: Poems
    Can You Hear, Bird: Poems
    Can You Hear, Bird: Poems
    Ebook211 pages2 hours

    Can You Hear, Bird: Poems

    By John Ashbery

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A 1995 collection of poems that finds John Ashbery at his most conversational, funny, and surprising

    In Can You Hear, Bird, John Ashbery’s seventeenth collection, language is both a plaything and a sandbox. The poems are arranged not in the order of their composition but alphabetically, by the first letter in their titles, like the neatly arrayed keys of some fabulous Seussical instrument. In line after line, Ashbery demonstrates his alertness to language as it is spoken, heard, broadcast, and dreamed—and sets himself the task of rewriting, redefining, and revising the American idiom we think we know so well. Can You Hear, Bird is a decisive example of the uniquely Ashberyan sensibility his many fans love, revealing a generous and acute chronicler of the everyday bizarre, an observant and humane humorist, and an ear trained on decoding our modern world’s beguiling polyphony.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459045
    Can You Hear, Bird: Poems
    Author

    John Ashbery

    John Ashbery’s latest book of poems is Quick Question. From 1960 to 1965, he was the International Herald Tribune art critic and the ARTnews Paris correspondent. France has named him a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an Officier de la Légion d’honneur. He has received a National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Obama.

    Read more from John Ashbery

    Related to Can You Hear, Bird

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for Can You Hear, Bird

    3.5/5

    12 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I found this to be Ashbery's most accessible book by far. Still a bit acerbic and airy. Read it to improve your vocabulary.

    Book preview

    Can You Hear, Bird - John Ashbery

    EARLY BIRD BOOKS

    FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

    LOVE TO READ?

    LOVE GREAT SALES?

    GET FANTASTIC DEALS ON BESTSELLING EBOOKS

    DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY!

    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

    Sleepers Awake

    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 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.

    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

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1