Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     You can’t read many poems by John Ash without being struck by his patrician outlook (Marie Antoinette rather than Coriolanus) - not for him ‘dull bourgeois music’, ‘conventional families/with an average number of children’, ‘beaches swamped - /with a greasy human tide’, ‘cheap mirrors’, ‘vile scent’, ‘those figurines in doubtful taste’, ‘a small crapulous town full of absurd hoardings’, or ‘a country where half the population/are criminals or fools’ (England); rather ‘the beautiful sorrows’/cultivated in the idleness of a lost age’, ‘the feline grace of deathbed politics’, ‘the young/cavalry officer toying with an elegant pistol at his temple’, ‘Voices like diamonds/and fountains, orchestras of vaporous silk’, etc. He is unlikely to be found ‘watching/for (say) yellow dahlias to appear/ at the drab end of a short garden’; or, for long, among the citizens - ‘Ach, this babble of civilised voices!/These people have no idea - /no idea!’; as for the ‘local elite’, who ‘pride themselves on their advanced ideas’, PLEASE!

     Ash’s camp disdain is his own, and he’s welcome to it, but his style infringes copyright. The effect is not so much of ‘Nabokov versified by Superveille’ (pull the other leg) as of infatuation with Ashbery. It ought to be clear to the Hudson Review critic that ‘his sophisticated - one is tempted to say very French’ manner is itself indebted to Eliot (Laforgue, Beaudelaire, etc, - see the insufferable notes to Casino) and Ashbery. A fair sample (from ‘The Rain’) sounds like this:

      something that would throw a cool light, stop-
      ping short
      of indifference, onto the tragically altered
      landscape
      revealed with the abruptness of a stage-set, -
      the empty chairs, cushions and useless reading
      lamps (it’s clear
      this story will never be told: the hired costumes
      are returned to the agency) and we don’t need
      to ask
      questions about the flowers, their colour or
      number
      their aptness for the awful occasion:
      it will now be possible to describe this new and
      too familiar
      sense of loss with some appearance of calm.

     A third of a single sentence; punctuated and grammatical, with nothing Poundian or Projective about it. The versification, the proliferation of clauses, the tenuousness (though Ash has a dogged lucidity beneath the surreal surface), and the self-possession of the speaking voice are all characteristic of Ashbery, as quotation from say, ‘Pyrography’ reveals:

      The land wasn’t immediately appealing; we
      built it
      Partly over with fake ruins, in the image of
      ourselves:
      An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a
      crumbling stone pier
      For laundresses, an open-air theater, never
      completed
      And only partly designed. How are we to inha-
      bit
      This space from which the fourth wall is inva-
      riably missing,
      As in a stage-set or dollshouse, except by stay-
      ing as we are…?

     In reviewing The Branching Stairs, Peter Porter apologised for his earlier ‘ManxAshbery’ gibe, finding that book ‘more truly his own’ and ‘more definitely English’; the work of an ‘experimental writer’ who ‘takes risks’. But when ‘Four Poems’ first appeared in PN Review I remember finding, disbelievingly, that almost every cadence and figure of speech could be traced to Ashbery. ‘She gave her nurse a hard time (this was in/ the third chapter…’ deploys his favourite trope, and compare ‘effacing stars of mica in the granite kerbs’ with ‘coaxing/ Mica glints out of the flat, unappreciative sidewalks’; or ‘Carthage/ (Carthage, Missouri, that is)’ with ‘My wife/ Thinks I’m in Oslo - Oslo, France. that is)’!

     And what, anyway, is ‘experimental’ or risky about adopting this style in the 1980s? Flat-earthish denunciations may still appear (e.g. Paulin’s ‘A Naked Emperor?’ in Poetry Review £74/3), but it’s now an available, familiar mode, almost as fashionable lately as Martianism! I’m reminded of Thomas A Clark’s comment on rhyme - ‘for me it’s experimental poetry - quite avant garde!’ and of a remark in The Double Dream of Spring: ‘But today there is no point in looking to imaginative new methods/ Since all of them are in constant use. As for Englishness. ‘Easy Journeys to Other Planets’ is a mincing satire on Hughes, the Martians. and by implication English culture, which (according to Michael Hulse in Prospice 24) Ash is constantly trashing in articles such as ‘Drool, Britannia’ (Village Voice) from enthusiastic exile in New York.

     So it’s ironic that the following description (of ‘a number of gifted English poets. all under forty’) should fit Ash startlingly well:

‘Free from the constraints of immediate post-war life, and notwithstanding the threats to their own culture, they have developed a degree of ludic and literary self-consciousness reminiscent of the modernists . . . It is a change of outlook which expresses itself, in some poets, in a preference for metaphor and poetic bizarrerie to metonymy. and plain speech.’

     This is of course from the introduction to The Penguin Book of Comtemporary British Poetry. Ash makes more sense of it than almost anyone else, and his affinities with the contributors could be copiously illustrated. Similes such as ‘the white staircases of palaces/ resemble a bride’s train and in casinos/ out of season chandeliers/ tied up in sacks are like testicles’ (1978) are Martianisms avant la lettre, and ‘Snow: A Romance’ compares the sun to a blood orange, then comments: ‘He sees resemblance everywhere. It is his trade, his survival technique.’ Ash’s elegant necrophilia and taste for ‘bizarrerie’ find an analogue in Fenton’s ‘A German Requiem’: ‘Your uncle’s grave informed you that he lived on the third floor, left./ You were asked please to ring and he would come down in the lift/ To which one needed a key…’; and a fine detail in ‘Epitaphs for the Greeks in India’ - ‘It was odd discovering a production of Blithe Spirit in the tropics, like finding a cricket match in the background of a Mughal miniature’ - sounds like a Martian Motion!

     But the smooth transition from Eliot and Ashbery to PBCBP emphasises the real nature of the ‘shift in sensibility’ that has ‘taken place very recently in British poetry’ (Penguin brand): what Alvarez would call a ‘negative feedback’ to the very English tradition of ‘light verse’. The key figure here is obviously Auden (cf Lucie-Smith’s comments in the new edition of British Poetry since 1945). American Auden has been severely criticised, notably by Larkin, for his ‘extraordinarily jarring…dialect’, ‘a wilful jumble of Age-of-Plastic nursery rhyme, ballet folklore and Hollywood Lempriere served up with a lisping archness that sets the teeth on edge’: but it’s precisely this idiom that Ashberv has blended with Eliot, Stevens and (alright then) French Surrealism into a major poetic style. Larkin’s essay, ‘What’s become of Wvstan?’, gave classical statement to the received account of Auden’s ‘departure for America

‘At one stroke he lost his key subject and emotion - Europe and the fear of war - and abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns.'

     Larkin laments the ‘irreparable’ decline of ‘a tremendously exciting English social poet’ into ‘an engaging, bookish American talent, too verbose to be memorable and too intellectual to be moving’: and concludes that ‘Auden, never a pompous poet, has now become an unserious one.’ But Auden’s most wonderful poems - ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’, ‘In Praise of Limestone’, ‘Moon Landing’ - can accommodate camp, infantile and self-indulgent humour with no loss of seriousness or emotional depth; he can modulate from ‘Games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,/ Little noises we dared not laugh at,/ Faces we made when no-one was looking’ to

     ‘One rational voice is dumb: over a grave
     The household of Impulse mourns one dearly
     loved.
              Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
              And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.’

     The English Auden is the familiar, Sunday Supplement figure, but the finest poet is the American -who, incidentally, recognised and encouraged Ashbery (and O’Hara) in the fifties.

     The ‘negative feedback’ is to Auden’s silliness, ingrown literariness, virtuoso facility - to all the attributes of genius, in fact, without the genius. The Penguin poets are accomplished, occasionally more, but a general impression of lightweight sophistication (owing more to George MacBeth and John Fuller, surely, than to ‘the emergence and example of Seamus Heaney’), even of triviality, is difficult to shake off. Happily, with the recent publication of A Various Art (Carcanet, 1987); and two series of excellent books from Allardyce/Barnett and Paladin, a rather more inspiring picture of contemporary British poetry is becoming available.

     It is, of course, Ash, rather than Auden, who merits most of Larkin’s strictures; and the failure of his poetry to transcend pastiche disables its implicit challenge to Larkin’s vision. Ash’s world is diminished by Larkin’s - ‘Half past eleven on a working day/ And these plucked out of it’ - rather than the other way round. Essentially, Larkin has more in common with Ashbery than either has with Ash.

     Perhaps it’s unfair to end so dogmatically. ‘A Beauty’ is generous and very funny in its head-shaking appreciation of an eccentric aristocrat; and Ash’s finest tropes are more than Martianisms  ‘The dictionary of architecture lies open, in three dimensions’ (‘Early Views of Manchester and Paris’); or the Coleridgean apparitions in ‘The Stranger in the Corridor’ that decline to ‘take on some more certain form, - / a swirl of colour (orange or green) in an otherwise/ transparent marble’, for example. But the new half of The Branching Stairs, together with Disbelief, are evidence more of idle prolixity than copious inspiration - the poet does indeed appear to be ‘Becoming a Berceuse’ in his very own Greenwich Village eclogue.