Remarks on a.m.

Structure, gestation and chronology

a.m. (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003) is my second collection. Roughly speaking, it contains work from the early '90s to about 2000 – by this, I mean that the initial and main thrusts of composition were carried out between these dates. Relatively recently – over the last couple of years – I began to think of putting a book together, selecting which poems to use and how to sequence the book. At this point, I began to carry out revisions, in some cases quite substantial. Once I'd established the contents of a.m. and its overall order, I carried out a final set of revisions for publication.

The book is divided into two sections, the a and the m. The poems of a were largely written in the early nineties. (The single exception is the book's first poem, My Little Alphabet, which belongs to the late nineties.) The poems of m were written in the late nineties or in 2000.

The final form of the book was arrived at late in the day: I mean, I didn't sit down, and decide to construct a certain project, and then tailor the poems to suit that shape. The book only very gradually took on its definitive structure. However, now a.m. has come together, it does seem to me to have a definite architecture to it, a figural bond across poems of different eras. This suggests to me that my poetry has moved over a long period of time and through stylistic evolutions to a reasonably consistent thematic music.

Of the a poems, I'm not sure which was chronologically the first (possibly Der Turmbau zu Babel) – but, in one sense at least, I feel that 1976 Streets marked a decisive change in my approach. Here, the generally rather neutral language of my first book takes on a more positive charge, I think, while at the same time eschewing the depressed flamboyance of the Five New Poems (of Nosferatu, for example). It seems to me that 1976 Streets is an overt attempt to put into practice some of the intuitions I had regarding poetry during the early nineties. 1976 Streets forms (with Pocket Rimbaud and Transporter) a cluster of intimately related poems. I've described them in the past as the inside and the outside of the same egg.

Historically, much of the poetry of the a section of a.m. was for some time organised around a quite different axis, and I was thinking of the poems in relation to a possible volume to be called For Isaac and Arthur. The Isaac was Isaac Newton (the English scientist and mathematician), and the Arthur was Arthur Rimbaud (the French Symbolist poet). These two giants of their particular worlds seemed to me to be intuitively representative of certain approaches to life. In my configuration, Newton stood for a kind of centrality, the output of a terrific power of intellectual organisation, which could ground human life within a lawful paradigm. Rimbaud was a radically different figure, someone for whom vagary and ellipsis were elemental. Rather than attempt to ground the world, he drifted through it; instead of exercising his reason in a methodical way, he sought to methodically disarrange his senses and his reason in order to arrive at a new, unprecedented perceptual crystallisation. I was interested in the differences asserted by these two worldviews, and in oscillations which may occur as one shifts back and forth between them.

Transporter was originally, and for several years, entitled The Man with the Wind at his Heels – a paraphrase of a description of Rimbaud by Paul Verlaine. I eventually changed the title, partly perhaps to reflect a massive expansion of the central sections of the poem. (Like Der Turmbau, Transporter is a poem I've worked on for many years.) Perhaps the original impulse behind the poem was eventually sublimated into a new impulse, and I felt I had to mark that gradual sublimation by employing a new title.

Background and dilemmas

I have suggested elsewhere in this Shearsman Gallery site that my poetry over the last decade or so has been a search for 'ground'. In terms of poetic endeavour, I've had to try and rethink my poetry, and have considered basic questions, particularly to do with the relationship between writer and reader – in essence, what is my poetry for; and, who is my poetry for? I don't think a.m. necessarily provides the answers to those questions, but can be seen to be the process of questioning itself.

I should state clearly that I believe poetry is for the reader. That sounds obvious, but if one considers a kind of haze of ideas around artistic creation, one often comes across contrary notions: that a writer "writes for himself", for example, or that ultimately one works for "the work itself". Of course, these are not hard and fast positions, but indicate an intuitive array of approaches to work. My own position has come to be that what one may loosely call 'modernist' and 'postmodernist' notions of art and the artist are incoherent — or, in my case at least, unworkable.

In terms of English poetry, this era seems to be one of heightened literary self-consciousness, and I feel a.m. is in some senses a struggle against (or through) this self-consciousness. We are perhaps too clever, and we have seen perhaps a little too much, and seen it too often… We know what poems are, and we know what to do with them – they have a place, a position, they occur in certain ways… We know this one is an avant-garde one, which means it subverts certain conventions,while asserting other conventions; or that this one is a mainstream one, which means it upholds certain conventions, although it may question or play with them… We know the moves. Poetry is a literary form, and literature is something which has its place in the day, something one can pick up and put down. Art is not life, and life is not art, after all…

I don't believe this. a.m. is one way of not believing it.

a.m. is thus in certain ways a response to some of my other and earlier work, in which the literary malaise I've just described was, I feel, active. Historically, the rise of Deconstruction became a problem for me, I think. The problem of the deconstructive process – the integral failure of positions – is that a paralysing self-consciousness threatened to drain my poetry of its life. My own philosophical sympathies were partly with deconstruction (as I construed it), but it seemed to me that there was also something profoundly chloroformed about the way postmodernist society was developing — and that postmodernism in its most trivial and pervasive form was the perfect philosophy (or atmosphere of philosophy) for a decadent, narcissistic, consumerist West.

Well, it is of course an immensely complex issue, but it seemed to me that in concentrating too much on the often curiously literal-minded theories about language and poetry then prevalent, there was a danger that my writing would float loose of a wider public and political domain, and lose traction, as it were.

a.m. arises partially through a desire for a kind of candour, a desire to de-ironicise my work. (Again, it's a very complex issue, and so I'll only speak in terms of my own limited intuitions as they affected the poetry.) Irony (at least of a degenerate form) seems to me to be a second-order literary impulse, an easy way out.

I felt that in order to make any progress, I would have to accept responsibility for my poetic life, and not allow its awkward energy to be entirely dissipated in ironic deflection and disassociation. (Of course, a writer can invoke or employ deflection or disassociation with perfectly honourable and valid reasons, and I am not arguing against these modes as such – only, for myself at this particular stage of my work, they seemed inappropriate.) Irony is necessarily a reflective activity, and makes assumptions about the nature of the world and the security of the reflecting identity. Irony is stable.

But life is not stable, and life is not irony. And I wanted my poetry to be life, not an ironic distancing of itself from life. I wanted my poetry to be moving, not theoretically still. My understanding is that, in the moments of composition, my poems are experiential events. I do not first draw up a theoretical blueprint, and then go on to work up a mechanism from that blueprint. One might say that world and poem occur together, as each other.

To put things in bald, broad terms, I felt that the poet had to claim poetry – to stand by poetry, to believe in poetry in an age of prose. From my previous remarks, it follows that in order to believe in poetry, I had also to believe in readers of poetry – and not merely those readers who were already in control of the semantic regulations which govern poems, but also (and more importantly) those readers who exist outside the magic circle of other poets, critics, academics, and literary theorists. I wanted to write a poetry which would be understood by anyone who was prepared take a step towards my work. This would be a poetry which was accessible in certain ways…

Or, to use a slightly cryptic formula, I was searching in a.m. for a poetry which could be understood as poetry, and not in any other way.

To build a house upon the ocean

I think the poetry of a.m. (some of it, at least) could be seen as a kind of doomed struggle to build a house upon the ocean (to adapt an image from Transporter).

I feel there is a genuine danger that poetry itself may begin to leach away out of life. Or rather, I feel that this leaching process has already begun (in England, at least).

Of course, it is very difficult to measure the public reception of poetry, or the value a society places upon poetry, and so it is contentious to speak of a decline, or a leaching away, of poetry. Apart from the obvious problems of making gigantic generalisations, one also has to bear in mind the historical situation — is poetry in decline now, in an era of high literacy, compared to its state in, say, the period of the English Metaphysicals, when literacy rates were far lower, and poets circulated their poems in manuscript?

So, I am really speaking I suppose of anxieties and suspicions and intuitions about the world and poetry, rather than attempting to state facts. But I am also not really, or not only, talking about a leaching away, a demeaning, in numerical terms (there are fewer readers of poetry); I'm speaking of a demeaning in ontological terms, of the passing away of a particular mode of being, of people's relation to their own semantic condition.

If I may reprise some remarks made in connection to the poems from Dash: in a culture which relies more and more on accelerated and accelerating stimuli (the beats per minute go up and up), poetry, which is a way of allowing meaning to breathe, becomes more and more onerous for people. Poetry is figural, and there is a desire for literalist sensation, for things to be semantically limited, boxed-up, instant and almost affectless. Time is very precious, and needs to be filled with stimuli which rapidly gratify and secrete a response which is also a desire for an encounter with an identical stimulus: and poetry doesn't fit into that order of stimuli, and cannot, because poetry's means of gratification is, paradoxically, the infinite witholding of gratification.

a.m. is haunted by the genuine fear that poetry is dying, not because poets are producing bad poetry, but because the cultural ground is less and less receptive, more and more stony. The foundations of poetry are growing more fragile.

And if one cannot build upon the land, where else is there to build?

Valedictory quotations

Perhaps two quotations will throw figural light on these matters.The first is from Blok, who wrote:

We should remember and value the pilgrimmage of Signorelli who, coming at the end of his years to the steep, alien town of Orvieto, humbly begged permission of its citizens to paint the frescoes in their new capella.

The second is from Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist, by Myriam Anissimov (translated by Steve Cox, paperback edition, Aurum Press, 1999), and concerns an episode from Levi's incarceration in Auschwitz when he quoted Dante to a fellow inmate (Jean Samuel):

In the summer of 1944 a young Italian Jew recited The Inferno to a young French Jew as they walked the streets of Auschwitz. "The great stock of evil in the universe" was evoked in the words of a poet who had lived six centuries before them. But Dante could not have imagined the scale of the evil that would reign some day on earth. Levi gave a new reading and a new dimension to his poem by reciting it in the streets of an extermination camp. While six kilometres away, in the crematoria of Birkenau, thousands of men, women, and children were dying of cyanide poisoning and then being reduced to ashes, Dante's lines were rising into the clarity of Primo Levi's mind:

Consider what you came from: you are Greeks!
You were not born to live like mindless brutes
but to follow paths of excellence and knowledge.

The lines "Consider what you came from …," learned unenthusiastically at school, so far invaded Primo Levi's mind as to make him forget that he was in Auschwitz. He, the atheist, who sometimes felt envious when he observed the resources faith provided for some of his comrades, wrote that these lines affected him "like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God" (Man 113/119).

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.

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