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History. By Carl Rakosi. Oasis Books, London. Paperback, £l.50.

The Bed & other poems. By John Ash. Oasis Books, London. Paperback, £l.80.

     Taken together, John Ash and Carl Rakosi present us with vivid shots of opposing worlds. Rakosi’ s world is sited recognisably in some of the most severe events of our epoch. His work is founded on an attitude of compassionate realism, and the poems dwell at a point of intersection between private and public conflict.

     He seeks, in his preface, to explain how these particular pieces have now come to co-exist between covers: Over the years I have written poems having to do with the sense of the times in the 1920s and l930s, but I didn’t realise until much later that they belonged together, and that with some later poems what I had been writing about was history. Hence the title. In his concluding words, he adds : I wonder myself now why ‘History’ contains so few metaphors. I don’t think it was only because the comment was sufficient without them, that it could speak for itself. I think that it was also that I refrained from using the transforming power of the metaphor and the imagination, because of my respect for the singular gravity and trauma of what was happening in the world.

     But abstention from metaphor on these grounds reflects a rather limited view of the scope of the device. Denial of metaphor for such reasons is hardly a general practice in the field of verse. The justly renowned poem, Death Fugue, for example, from the earlier poems of Paul Celan, fearlessly seizes on the Jewish holocaust as its subject, and lives passionately from first word to last by figurations that contain both the historic process and the projections of the individual:

Black milk at daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink...............

Or, to quote a sharply different case from the art of cinema, the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin seethes with visual metaphor in the act of celebrating a notable revolt.

     The taming down of metaphor as employed by Rakosi hints at a further disturbing critical question. Can a poem afford to proceed without metaphor at all? An instinctive response to that challenge is that no poem can. And yet, the bias toward documentary values evident in Rakosi forces considerations which cast some doubt on the belief that metaphor is poetry, and that poetry is necessarily a matter of metaphor.

     Rakosi’s compatriot Reznikoff brought out, in 1978, two volumes under the title Testimony. Published in elegant form by Black Sparrow Press, Testimony was tendered to the public as a look of poems, although in its pages we find the poetic function reduced to the skilful editing of old law reports concerned mainly with accidents and crimes which form part of the general dossier of rural and industrial America. Its virtue rests in the arrangement of line-length and the massing of narrative across the page in vers libre manner. Reznikoff seems to have kept close to the language of his sources and to have allowed the conviction of ‘fact’ purged of imagination to effect its own emotional work upon the reader. The tragic accounts from Testimony come off the page as a deed of pure journalism in which there is no unclarity, no distortion. They could be said to have been raised thereby to the level of prose-poems of a special kind. Indeed the frontispiece claims the entire work as ‘Recitative’, but we would have to scour hard and long among these sad anecdotes to find even one act of individual imagination or a fully minted metaphor. Instead, a very bare mode of narrative obtains:

Johnnie Cotton was a boy of fifteen or sixteen
but he was earning his own living as a laborer.
The engineer and fireman of the locomotive pulling a freight train
out of San Antonio
invited Johnnie on board to ride to his home,
and he got on the tender.

While the train was in motion,
the fireman put the nozzle of the hose, connected with the boiler,
into Johnnie’s hip pocket.
They were going to send a stream of cold water down his leg -
just for fun -

but the valve was turned on to discharge steam and hot water,
and the engineer turning on the boiling water and steam
scalded Johnnie
from his hip to the heel of his foot.

It is questionable whether readers will concede this example to be classifiable as poetry; but the passage should make it clear that Reznikoff is engaged in a peculiar form of translation. Reznikoff’s narrative lies at two removes from the incident, yet he tries to bring it very close to the reader, face to face, almost. At the same time the reader’s response is affected by the knowledge that the incident is now very remote in time. There is an ambivalence about the emotion which the text generates.

By contrast, Rakosi composes as eyewitness, and is inclined in his verbal reconstructions to use the present tense

They sit in a honky-tonk,
                                        motionless,
the gods of the B52
                                 diffident, reliable young men
with steel-trap minds,
                                   our exquisite defenders.
From time to time
                                pick up a glass
from the table,
                          slow, mechanical,
and take a drink.
                             Observe the thirteen-year-old
whose virginity was sold
                                          for 15,000 piastres.
Their bright young faces
are singularly handsome and untroubled.

(from Saigon: 14,000 whorehouses)

The silent spaced-out editing of the phrases helps to give the picture force, and asserts the metre. The omission of the word they before the word pick, and, later, before the word Observe gives both a double function. The first function is to continue the previous sentence in its action beyond the full stop. But the second is to introduce a quasi-imperative meaning, drawing the reader into the described scene, and almost inviting participation. The latter effect resembles that of a zoom lens. Moreover, the final two left-hand lines, which are closely placed together, though they seem to be descriptive, are really very judgemental, and revert the poem in mood to a comment made, as it were, in long-shot. The strong impact of Saigon is due to this cinematic economy of phrase, the tight montage by which the whole is controlled, and to the discreet irony of tone.

     Rakosi’s last poem in the collection, Epilogue openly states his credo:

facts

        moulder of peace

of dissent too

                         the rock underneath

and trust

                   crying from the bowels

for an honest leader

not too ambitious

facts    facts

                        the mountain of the Lord.

     However, one cannot ignore that the situation in life is that there are facts, and facts. And even more facts, on, on, to infinity. Reznikoff’s chosen facts were tragic, but small-scale, localised in time and space. They were facts which might in themselves have gone on to be politically aware, long-term responses, but they were never facts which could be called, in the larger sense of their historic significance, important. In dealing with the minutiae of American social history, Testimony bore the stamp of a cool systemisation. The effect is cumulative, and heavy. By contrast with this type of literature we are able to see that Rakosi chooses facets from complex facts of a more central historic status. It is a general public consciousness and a conscience about the Vietnam intervention which operate as contexts in the reader’s mind as he tracks through Saigon, behaving as a magnetic field of force affecting his perception of the scene which the poet describes.

     Rakosi is not engaged in testimony, of course, but in a form of political comment, pitched in ultra-low key. In spite of the claims made in his preface, he never simply lets the facts speak for themselves. It is he who speaks for them, and through them. He conveys by indirection where he approves and disapproves, expecting, no doubt, the reader to travel along with him, sharing and endorsing his own assumptions. But it does not seem ever to be part of Rakosi’s brief to consider how facts of all kinds, social as well as physical live inevitably as functions of a hypothesis or a formed ideology, whereas the historians, the professionals are constantly taken up with this prime problem. For this reason, History does not seem to be the best title that could have been found. Because the poems stand side by side today as a late act of choice, and because they have been lifted out from his other work, on account of a revealed affinity, the collection ends up as a rather lightweight affair. By dint of the manner of its assembly, it remains a loose thematic folio, a sequence which, nonetheless, decants much acute pathos and many moments of inspired anger about various matters that matter along its very sensitive course.

     In style, and posture, John Ash and Carl Rakosi could not be more widely divided than they are. Like all true realists, Rakosi subordinates the ‘fiction’ which is the poem to the rigour of the remembered event. The reader then credits the re-presentation carried out by the structure of words as having fidelity to origin.

     Ash rejects that approach, decisively. Post-surreal in temperament, he does not apply himself directly to events, scenes or situations which are known to have been set in the historic flow, or inside the case-history of one person. In fact he makes a manifest break with the tradition of confession and biography which has been so influential in recent mainstream verse. Instead Ash assumes a similar orientation to the one displayed (in the kindred medium of painting) by Magritte. What he does is to take up the unique capacity for creating a ‘fiction’ latent in any language (graphic or oral), and develop that capacity in order to build illusions which are permutations and combinations of the elements of logical order found in the explained world. In the recesses of such fantasy, an atmospheric beauty will often reside. In brief, Ash plays elaborate games with the widespread human wish to believe. He plays with our native tendency to take on trust any vivid description as a case of solid truth, just as a young child likes to treat a fairytale as literal. He elicits music from the keyboard of credulity.

     One marked innovation in Magritte was that his surrealism showed itself to be technically self-aware. He is a jester as well as a painter. Unlike his precursors, he injected a deep sense of humour into a genre that others claimed in all solemnity to be a creative process directed by the unconscious mind. Ash shares with Magritte this gift of informed frivolity, a dimension in their work which separates them off from the earnest dreamers who sprang up in Paris in the twenties. It is a gift that dances on the surface of its own commitment, and thereby comments on it. In a critical note, Gavin Ewart gets very near to defining the essence of Ash when he writes of him that he produces the thinking man’s surrealism. There is indeed a cerebral element.

     Although it has been suggested that Rakosi lies at the opposite pole to Ash, a paradox survives in the recognition that both writers do actually share one prominent fact of organisation, one very contemporary technique of composition. They both deploy their imagery and marshal their vision by methods born of the art of the motion-picture. The both make ‘movie-poems’ In Rakosi it runs, as has been stressed, to documentary; in Ash it runs to animation. Ash is an animator of his own imagination, a sophisticated projector of dream-substance, who often mocks the projection even as he projects it, somewhat like a man with a magic lantern who might deride aloud the sequence of tableaux vivants with which he is entertaining his viewers. He is a scenic painter and at the same time a critical editor of painted scenes.

     That he knows precisely what he is doing is evidenced in his poem, Accompaniment to a Film Scene. Here he begins

Start with the knowledge
that representation is not enough
that the aim is -

a ‘sense of reality’ that deepens
when realism is abandoned.........

Now this appears at first sight to be the principle by which the imagined film-studio, ostensible subject of the poem, has to proceed in its fabrication of scenes and locations. And, certainly, on one level it is just that; but simultaneously Ash here makes a comment on his own attitude toward poetry as a whole, while softly making fun of it, as will later be seen. There is a double attitude. Moving, now, into his metaphor, Ash continues

when the sea at night is sheets
of gleaming black plastic lashed into a storm
by men concealed under them with long poles,
when the love-scene takes place in a conical room
decorated with Japanese erotica
                                          and yes, of course
there are two or more people doing something on the bed -
just as, on occasion, real spray hits the painted backdrop;
there are also soft moans and sighs that penetrate
the hubbub of the score to fill us
with a destructive nostalgia that confuses everything, -

By now, Ash has achieved his total voiceover tone, and can freely invent such felicitous lines as the four which follow, so reinforcing the major figure:

the views of various cities
gardens and coastlines -

trees breaking into red flower
at the wrong season …

At this stage in the development, Ash has enough going for him to be able to transpose into a mode of absolute fantasy, and at the same moment to telescope the illusion outwards. So he now introduces a full sense of irony which accompanies a supposed series of observations by the supposed technical staff engaged in the manufacture of the film set - the credible fake destined to deceive us all. (In its assumed glib professional manner, the speech is Audenesque):

But there is no sense of guilt
there is no deception but a form of imitation
unconnected to ordinary ideas of accuracy
of accuracy. Buildings and mountains
are reproduced exactly, but all is much larger
than life size ....

Ash is now emboldened into playing more freely still with his already stated form of imitation unconnected to ordinary ideas of accuracy. He has, in effect, licensed himself by the previous argument of the poem to do so. The dream gets wilder :-

    It is the details of the small things
time abolished in the person of an efficient
waiter wiping the table clean are more difficult
to establish. Were there crayfish
and burst figs ? Ashtrays and paper napkins ?
It’s certain the sauces were much too rich
but the profound words spoken in our cups
have proved no more durable than sky-writing
announcing a forthcoming boatshow or rodeo.

The blow-up of the initial metaphor is complete. Ash can now make the film team doubt its own ‘reality’ (the reality of a fabricated reality) using devices of scepticism and interrogation. Then he moves to his conclusion:

And it is increasingly difficult to disguise the general air
of “nervousness bordering on panic”. The project
has already exceeded by millions the estimated
budget, and the problems remain: it isn’t enough
to paint the sky, clouds must be seen to move
and we are experimenting urgently with several
different kinds of vapour jet. There’s still the fear
that we’ll arrive one day to find the gates of the dream-
studio closed behind a huge cocaine white disc
on which the words NO ENTRY are written in blood,
and the backers withdrawn to penthouses on private
asteroids from which they send us letters
demanding repossession, concluding in signatures
of a fantastic and lethal elegance.

     Fantasists must always be deeply threatened with loss of nerve. They must surely be afraid that one false step in the misc-en-scène will bring about public disbelief, and the bankruptcy of the whole venture. In Accompaniment to a Film Scene Ash, by a spectacular critical tour-de-force establishes and holds firm that anxiety. The whole poetic theory and aesthetic position of the surrealist movement is held up for inspection by one of its skilled practitioners. It is significant that the final emotion is one of contradiction in which doubt and exuberance mingle. Elsewhere, in The Bed and Other Poems John Ash cheerfully manages to suppress his scepticism, and has written a series of witty entertainments that feed succesfully, in their fast-moving make-believe, on the thrust of a most fecund imagination.