John Ashbery's "To a Waterfowl"

It is easy enough to find transcriptions on the web of Ashbery's "The Dong with the Luminous Nose", even exhaustively annotated transcriptions, and one can also find a recording of Ashbery reading "To a Waterfowl", but the latter poem its text one cannot, as far as I can determine, find on the web—or rather could not, until now. It is transcribed below from volume one, issue two of Locus Solus, where it first appeared.

Moderately interesting things: that issue of LS is, the contents page declares, a "special collaborations issue". "To a Waterfowl" is the first thing listed, and the subsequent contents are listed in more or less chronological order. "More or less" because, for instance, the second-to-last item in the collaborations section is by "Uri Gagarin and William Shakespeare, arranged by Ruth Krauss"—in which case I suppose the text at hand if not all of its components was recent. I also hedge because I'm not really certain of all the dates. But: more or less. "To a Waterfowl" is the only title in the table of contents that does not have its authors listed (or, in the case of "five Chinese poets", described, presumably for reasons of length). However, the "Individual Notes on Works and Authors" at the very end of the issue states that it was "composed by John Ashbery". Ashbery says, in the recording of the reading linked above, that he only discovered after having written it (he describes himself in the recording as having written it) that the cento technique (which he calls a form) employed had any, or a long, prior existence. Also, the lineation is not always such as to keep different sources from mixing on the same line, as in the beginning of the second-to-last, longest stanza.

To a Waterfowl, by John Ashbery

Where, like a pillow on a bed
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude
Where through the Golden Coast, and groves of orange and citron
And one clear call for me
My genial spirits fail
The desire of the moth for the star
When first the College Rolls receive his name.

Too happy, happy tree
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.
Forget this rotten world, and unto thee
Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.

Calm was the day, and through the trembling air
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair
And she also to use newfangleness…
Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?
Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
Unaffected by "the march of events",
Never until the mankind making
From harmony, from heavenly harmony
O death, O cover you over with roses and early lilies!
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you
Sunset and evening star
Where roses and white lilies grow.

Go, lovely rose,
This is no country for old men. The young
Midwinter spring is its own season
And a few lilies blow. They that have power to hurt, and will do none.
Looking as if she were alive, I call.
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground.
Obscurest night involved the sky
When Loie Fuller, with her Chinese veils
And many a nymph who wreaths her brow with sedge…
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
In drear-nighted December
Ripe apples drop about my head
Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!
O well for the fisherman's boy!
Fra Pandolf's hand
Steady they laden head across a brook…
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
Fills the shadows and windy places
Here in the long unlovely street.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The freezing stream below.
To know the change and feel it…

At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere
Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips
Where the dead feet walked in.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die,
Or the car rattling o'er the stony street.

Comments

[Rosanne Wasserman]

You can find all the sources for this Ashbery cento on my blog: http://groundwater-zanne.blogspot.com/2008/11/john-ashbery-to-waterfowl-cento-sources.html

[ben]

Ah, so it was online before! I wonder why I was never able to find it.