Free Wakefulness: Poems by John Ashbery Page A

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.

WAKEFULNESS
    An immodest little white wine, some scattered seraphs,
    recollections of the Fall—tell me,
    has anyone made a spongier representation, chased
    fewer demons out of the parking lot
    where we all held hands?
    Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me.
    I was touched by your care,
    reduced to fawning excuses.
    Everything was spotless in the little house of our desire,
    the clock ticked on and on, happy about
    being apprenticed to eternity. A gavotte of dust-motes
    came to replace my seeing. Everything was as though
    it had happened long ago
    in ancient peach-colored funny papers
    wherein the law of true opposites was ordained
    casually. Then the book opened by itself
    and read to us: “You pack of liars,
    of course tempted by the crossroads, but I like each
    and every one of you with a peculiar sapphire intensity.
    Look, here is where I failed at first.
    The client leaves. History goes on and on,
    rolling distractedly on these shores. Each day, dawn
    condenses like a very large star, bakes no bread,
    shoes the faithless. How convenient if it’s a dream.”
    In the next sleeping car was madness.
    An urgent languor installed itself
    as far as the cabbage-hemmed horizons. And if I put a little
    bit of myself in this time, stoppered the liquor that is our selves’
    truant exchanges, brandished my intentions
    for once? But only I get
    something out of this memory.
    A kindly gnome
    of fear perched on my dashboard once, but we had all been instructed
    to ignore the conditions of the chase. Here, it
    seems to grow lighter with each passing century. No matter how you twist it,
    life stays frozen in the headlights.
    Funny, none of us heard the roar.

BALTIMORE
    Two were alive. One came round the corner
    clipclopping. Three were the saddest snow ever seen in Prairie City.
    Take this, metamorphosis. And this. And this. And this.
    If I’d needed your company,
    I’d have curled up long before in the clock of weeds,
    with only a skywriter to read by.
    I’d have laved the preface
    to the World’s Collected Anthologies,
    licked the henbane-flavored lozenge
    and more. I’m presuming,
    I know. And there are wide