Who Will Do the Kissing?
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Who Will Do the Kissing? - meaning Summary
Questioning Intimacy and Everyday Oddities
John Ashbery's brief poem stages a fragmentary, conversational scene where mundane details—an unheard comment, a leftover duck, and ice skating—are arranged around a direct, oddly urgent question: Who will do the kissing?
The poem juxtaposes domestic triviality with a question of intimacy and absence, leaving the speaker's perspective unresolved. It invites readers to notice how small, dislocated images and questions produce an elliptical narrative and a sense of everyday bewilderment.
You will not have heard that. What about the leftover duck? Who will do the kissing? They have gone ice skating.
from Commotion of the Birds (2016)
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