The second typescript
The second typescript of “The Skaters” must have—according to its page numbering— consisted originally of 25 pages, three of which (pp 1, 2 and 4) are nowadays lost.
The typescript presents a state of the poem close to the printed version, although, significantly, two full stanzas at least have been discarded at that stage (page 3). Most of the other corrections (three distinct campaigns: black ink, lead pencil, and blue pencil) involve adjectives or punctuation marks
An intermediary state of the corrected typescript (including corrections from two different campaigns) seems to have been the text of Ashbery's August 23rd, 1964 reading of the poem (see our note on the text)
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.
View full transcript with variants
