John Ashbery: “The Skaters”

The following eighteen poems are part of the dossier from John Ashbery's personal archives containing the first typescript of “The Skaters.”

Except for “To a Waterfowl,” published first in Locus Solus in 1961 and reprinted in the Library of America Collected Poems 1956-1987, they were all previously unpublished.

Since four of the poems only are dated—“Houlgate” (June 21, 1961), “For the Left Hand” (January 5, 1962), “The Bodice” (May 1962), “Lists” (January 1, 1964)—we have presented the ensemble in alphabetical order.

Our transcription includes as much of the variants as we were able to read. Due to the limitations inherent to HTML, we haven't always succeded in reproducing with exactitude the visual aspect of the page (notably in the case of interlinear additions), but the reader interested in these matters will find an accurate description of the sources in our XML-TEI file.