Several years ago, David Kermani proposed that I work with John Ashbery and him on a big manuscript-focused digital project. David and I have been working on the PennSound archive of the audio and video John’s recordings. David and John were intrigued by the new digital version of The Waste Land that had just come out, but also unhappy with pirated digital editions of John’s work that, in addition to being unauthorized, were chock full of errors. I said I’d love to do something with “The Skaters.” David laughed. “I knew you would say that –– and you are the only one that would ask for that poem first.” David and John had liked my long essay on “The Skaters,” written for the celebration of John’s 80th birthday (recently collected in Pitch of Poetry).
Some weeks later, David handed me two gigantic white binders that included two hand-corrected typescripts for the “The Skaters” (with many cancelled lines) and a raft of poems written at the same time but never published. I was ecstatic. I suggested to Robin Seguy, then a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, that he take on the project (digital editions were the focus of his research). Seguy scanned and transcribed everything in the notebook, creating code that provides novel ways of reading through and searching the poems, including quantitative date about the poem; a set of evocative grouping of textual features of the works, such a place names, personal names, pronouns foreign words, seasons, reference to color, light, and weather; plus a hypertext index to every word in “The Skaters.” There is also a text-voice aligned version of Ashbery reading the poem and to the source text he used in writing it.
There is nothing that gives a more thrilling sense of Ashbery at work. Many of the rejected lines are as good as the ones included — and the unpublished poems are endlessly appealing.
The genetic, digital edition of “The Skaters” is here.
Charles Bernstein is a poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. He is the author of 40 books of poetry and prose, including most recently Pitch of Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 2016).