Indignant

Here's a fragment of another long poem by Cashberg, written in the mid 50s.  You can see that Ashbery's style of the md-seventies is heavily indebted to Cashberg's:


As we sifted through the hotel archives of past indignations

the white hot edges of them burned through our memory,

though the root causes were forgotten: the way the word demotic

does not belong, itself, to any vernacular, and thus was misunderstood

by those to whom it was directed. They were right to be insulted,

perhaps.  So too, the prize designed for the undiscovered village crank

genius went, as always, to the Princeton professor du jour.  Are you getting this down?

Are you taking notes quickly enough, ma cherie? I thought not.

My sprezzetura was taken as simple carelessness, but to correct the mistake

would have made it all the worse, limping into twilight-burnished

corridors, under cover of stale leaves...