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

“‘This may be the most auspicious debut of its kind since Auden’s,’ The  New York Times Book Review said of John Ash’s The Branching Stairs, his third book of poems.”

     So opens the blurb on Ash’s most recent collection, Disbelief. It is nicely arch: accepting the accolade while debunking the source. Ash is well aware how reputations are made and it is clear from his critical prose that he doubts the worth of much contemporary poetry, which he sees as complacent and provincial.

     There is a sense in which his own poetry - ‘taking music as paradigm’, delighting in its sophistication, and creating ‘beguiling aesthetic structures’ - aims above all to subvert our notions of what poetry ought to be and do. In ‘Some Boys (Or The English Poem circa 1978)’, ‘the world appears as a very dull novel in which the characters … observe/bleakly or with sighs, that it is raining again’. In ‘Easy Journeys to Other Planets’ the erstwhile ‘Martian’ poets are renamed ‘Troutfarmers’:

     The poets of this school are never boring. They write about everything as if they had just that minute arrived from a distant planet or trout farm. Reading them one’s life is changed! In future how will it be possible to look at a light bulb and not see a luminous fruit, to look at a detumescent penis and not think of a frozen prawn, to see the columns of the Parthenon without thinking of corduroy trousers!

     In the same piece a ‘ new poet of the primal’ is discovered, whose first book is called Owl Pellets:

‘The reviewer finds it forceful, vigorous, masculine. He finds that it reveals essential truths… ‘ I try to imagine myself approaching a bookshop … But I am distracted by thoughts of the truths that might be considered inessential. No doubt these are numberless as dust motes in air . . .'

     Though I wouldn’t want to be too solemn about it (Ash is after all having fun here), it’s worth emphasising that Ash’s target is not individual poets so much as the small, self-important and self-regulating poetry world. I think that is a key to much of his writing. He writes against the mainstream, preferring to cultivate the ‘inessential truths’, looking as he says in ‘Advanced Chorography for Beginners’, for a ‘sense of reality/that deepens when realism is abandoned.’ His poems are witty, melodious and delivered with panache; yet at the same time are almost always sprawling and littered with loose ends and often beautiful but inconsequential images. They amass detail upon detail as if by way of proof or mitigation: but we never find out what it is he is defending - unless it is the right to compose poems in that manner. After a random list of objects and actions (in ‘Advanced Choreography For Beginners’), he announces: ‘the point is:’

to establish a new lyricism in which all these
     things will find their place
equally, like buildings on the loop of a promenade
doors and windows open towards a calm sea that
     reminds us
inevitably of a sheet of cellophane that has been
     crumpled up
and smoothed out again, but not completely -

     ‘Letting things find their own place equally’ is something Ash is very good at. A common procedure in his work is the building of a system of receding transitions where subordinate clauses and incidental descriptions are allowed to make off with the original sentence (and indeed often the whole poem). In this way the poems actualize two of Ash’s continual preoccupations: they challenge
us to consider how we perceive ourselves and our world; and they enact as they do so an elaborate dereliction, charting the last - endless, pointless - moments of a society which has specialised itself into obsolescence:

     Concerning the crisis that is coming:
     it happened yesterday. Meanwhile
     we sit in cafes, and the music continues

     sentimental as ever, strewing roses in your lap…

     …the news is bad, but that is no reason
     to alter the habits of a century; besides
     reports are confused…
     …and it is pleasant to watch the sunsets
     with a critical and comparative eye -

                             (‘Without Being Evening’)

     In ‘Having Windows’ he contrasts that society - which is not unlike our own - with one we would refer to as ‘underdeveloped’. But all the narrator can find to remark is that

     It has become fashionable
     to regard this new pallor of the poor -
     who only recently laboured to plant crops and dig
     incalculable miles of irrigation ditches -
     as ‘beautiful’. But I cannot approve of this fad,
           for
     I declare it to be a perversion of aesthetics...

     The irony is not simply in the refusal to see a connection between ‘the regions of poverty rising in dim mounds, treeless/like spoilheaps’ and a society where

     In discussion with our architects we dream of
           pools,
     guest pavilions with electric gates

     but somehow every project fails…
     and what was new
     last year is ruinous today.

     The real irony is that the artist can only occupy him or herself with aesthetics. Or, shifting the emphasis, as Ash has said in an interview, ‘It sounds corny, but I think it’s true that poetry is not for offering solutions, but for properly articulating the questions.’ Or again, as he says in ‘Ghost Preludes’:

     Did you think
     you could just pick up language and use it
     as if it were a pen or a spade -

     the one called a spade…

     This last quotation returns us to contemporary poetry: in fact to ‘Digging’, the opening poem in Seamus Heaney’s first book. It is

     Between my finger and my thumb
     the squat pen rests.
     I’ll dig with it.

     Heaney himself has said (in an essay) that he is well aware of the limitations of the metaphor. My guess is that Ash is not taking a shy at Heaney so much as the admirers of this poem, its easily-grasped procedures. It comes from that school of poems which might have been written specifically for the classroom: just the job for teaching poetic devices and everything ties up neatly at the end. Ash’s point in ‘Did you think/you could just pick up language and use it’ is that language is not - which this poem seems to believe - a transparent, value-free medium. It is akin to the ‘sense of reality/which deepens when realism is abandoned’. In fact it is simply another method of writing poems. Ash is more American than English, and (so I’m told) perhaps more French than American in the temperament and tenor of his writing. He is one of the few bona fide British postmodernists.

     But Ash’s postmodernism is more reader-friendly than most, and more entertaining. He is often complexly allusive and self-referential; there is nothing he seems to like more than disconcerting our expectations - from the ordinary, the concrete, he extrapolates rapidly into the bizarre and abstract without sacrificing wit or invention. Indeed it seems to feed his wit and invention. His images are often startling but exactly right. I stress this because in some quarters postmodernism has come to mean not just incomprehensible but dull and self-important. Ash is exciting - and, in that he is very readable, one of the most modest of contemporary voices. It is true there is at his worst a certain elitist tone to Ash, a sophistication that tips over into snobbery. But his writing is rarely hermetic, arcane or merely ‘clever’; and it is almost always engaging. ‘Willing Suspension’, for instance, which ends:

     The cab stalls on the far bank, its headlights
           ablaze.
     I couldn’t photograph any of this for you.
     I couldn’t show its reflection in a windshield.
     I could tell you about the rain: it is not raining.

Or the opening of ‘From A High Place’

     Dear, don’t visit me,
     or visit me differently like an evening
     with descending birds and the speech of bells,
     bring with you the echoes of things
     happening far away or long ago
     like a party in a chateau; let it all
     come down at last to mists
     and stars like diamonds, to beds
     like banks of moss and ferns; let us
     lie in the substance of sleep…

     In their different ways these draw the reader in. To enjoy the extracts I don’t think you need know - though it is actually the point of the poetry - that in the first he is alluding to Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ (the punch-line amplifies the idea set up in the title); or that in the second he repeats words to create language as music in a piece of fifty-odd beautifully intricate lines, ending

     Dear. Bells. Visit. Echoes. Sleep.
     Repeat me now on your piano long ago.