'A Love Poem'

And they have to get it right. We just need
A little happiness, and when the clever things
Are taken up (O has the mouth shaped that letter?
What do we have bearing down on it?) as the last thin curve
("Positively the last," they say) before the dark:
(The sky is pure and faint, the pavement still wet) and

The dripping is in the walls, within sleep
Itself. I mean there is no escape
From me, from it. The night is itself sleep
And what goes on in it, the naming of the wind,
Our notes to each other, always repeated, always the same.

'As We Know'is John Ashbery's eighth major collection of poetry, his second from Carcanet ('Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror' was published in 1977). 'As We Know' includes forty-seven short lyrical pieces and the ambitious and rewarding long poem, 'Litany'.

'Litany'is in many ways Ashbery's most ambitious long poem, written in double columns as two independent but related monologues, meant to be seen or 'overheard' simultaneously. The attempt has been to write a polyphonic dialogue, and the effect is close to that of certain modern music, in which the instruments seem to converse and argue with one another - as in Charles Ives's Second String Quartet and much of the music of Elliott Carter.

In 'Litany', as in the shorter lyrics, Ashbery's verse continues to chart the progress of the self in search of an identity it finds reflected - sometimes in the cacophony of the modern urban world, sometimes in the solitude and silences of the spirit.