Extended Notes on Dash

Looking back on the Dash poems now, I wonder what function they served at the time. I know I was interested in certain specific things during the writing. The title to the project derives from the use of the en-rule (–) to forcibly yoke words together. Without going into (rather arcane) detail, I was interested in the way words bond to form meaning.

In my own hazy, unprogrammatic categorisation of my work, I think of the Dash poems as fairly 'technical' ones. The Russian poet Mayakovsky, when speaking of his contemporary, Khlebnikov, said 'He is a poet not for consumers but for producers of poetry' – by which I suppose he meant (in part) that Khlebnikov's poetry was too complex and strange even to be recognised as poetry by anyone who themselves was not familiar with the canon and with leading-edge developments in poetry – with poetry's own narrative of its own development. Well, the poetry of Dash does not possess Khlebnikov's chemical-primeval-abyssal strangeness, but I think the more developed poems could certainly feel rather inaccessible to readers who are not familiar with contemporary theories of language and poetic practice – and this is why I think of parts of Dash as 'technical'.

I believe it's important for a writer to remain free of their own influence – I mean, not to see themselves as one kind of writer or another. Of course, some writers are quite monolithic, and they produce wonderful work with little apparent development – their style forms, and is then sufficiently strong and flexible to bear whatever load the writer's life places upon the writing. For myself, I see writing more in terms of process, of oscillation and of development, and I hope this Gallery site will give the reader some sense of this in regards to my own output.

Practically, many of the Dash poems tend to use entire stanzas as single rhythmic units. The lines organise themselves harmonically, and I do feel that these poems are quite musical. The rhythms are fairly strong, and driving.

There is a clear philosophical element to the poems. I was interested in how we construct our world semantically. I believe that we construct paradigms – exemplary areas of conventional thought, which enable us to live, and within which, providing we follow certain rules, things 'make sense'.

The Dash poems characteristically exist at the notional seams of these zones of conventional practice – the littoral between the land of the familiar and the sea of the strange. Bits tend to be falling off these poems, or the rhetoric has to struggle very hard to maintain the equilibrium upon which it is founded. Certain rhetorics exist in a siege-like state, and need to patrol themselves, fighting off competing rhetorics. Parcels of information need to be bracketed off, either to protect them from the rest of the poem, or vice versa.

In some ways, the Dash poems look backwards to the work of my first book. In both phases, I think there's an anxiety about the human inability to maintain a kind of impossible spiritual vigilance – to 'bear things in mind'. Because we are creatures of meaning, creative and irresolvable, we can never be vigilant in the sense I speak of – one always has to look away. Things drift, and go to pieces. There is no stability in human beings. Only an immortal and meaningless creature, for whom everything has happened and has a place, would be capable of such stillness.

To take a few concrete examples of some the things outlined in these initial comments:

— the opening to The Symbolic Church of the Red Truth evinces a desire to carefully iterate and reiterate a catalogue of phenomena. This opening stanza sort of goes back and forward, building up its list, like a kind of dreamy cargo manifest. However, the work is partially undone in the second stanza, where the notional receptacle for the objects is seen rotated through different (and, presumably, endless) definitions.

— Lemonade Kaiser is forced into constructing figures of grotesque complexity in order to try and express itself, and to secure its own internal rhetoric.

— Neardeathexperience seems to flow through a kind of series of locks, parts of sentences bracketed off, which qualify or form an alternative perspective, the relation of which to the rest of the poem isn't clear. The same poem ends with a stanza in the form of a sonnet, a recessive or a compulsive warning, perhaps, which could be imagined as being uttered forever (because the threat under which it operates is continuous and eternal)…

The Dash poems are also interested in the language of mathematics and of logical propositions – the use of variables, notions of equivalence, substitution, set theory, and so on. The syllogistic structure 'If … and … then' – sometimes establishing premises which seem freakish or ludicrous – is used on several occasions in Dash. Poems model scenarios, but are unable to achieve stability, so that one scenario melts or leaks or is invaded by another – or the premise on which the model is based fails and is replaced by another.

If I may use a stanza from the poem, Pilgrim Diner [i], to illustrate some of these things…

When the tower is 'it' and the object fort
kissing lips us all and we separate, you, I,
days in the sparkling inn of thought by the sea
crystallised like a sugar cube to the shape of philosophy
faces aching for fingers or a tongue
to dissolve from wrapped things to taste or touch
to melt into use and to constant users

We may see here that the poem is looking to ensure that when certain conditions operate, then certain conclusions will follow. In common with a large number of the Dash poems, Pilgrim Diner [i] is involved with buildings, in some sense literally 'seeking shelter'. Buildings house and make possible dwelling and abiding, and offer temporal and spatial security. Here, for example, the poetry seeks the assurance of 'the sparkling inn of thought' – although immediately there are ambiguities (is the inn thought itself?; or an inn which is thought of?) – and we might note that this building is not a residence, but a hotel, a place for transitory lives. The title of the poem, too, refers to a public building…

It's not my intention here to explore these poems in detail, but just to point out some of the salient features which struck me on re-reading the poems after an absence of years.
Among the poems I've selected, two – His Information Part 1 and Vanity Fair – stand a little apart from their peers. They deploy stylised narratives. In the early nineties in particular, I was writing plays for radio (none of which were commissioned), and these often utilised the narrative vehicle of detective fiction. One play – Plutonium Boulevard – which eventually grew to a completely impractical length, used a dream structure, where a desert town and its occupants had a dream mirror image: in the 'actual' town, the protagonist lived at an address on Platinum Boulevard, whereas his dreamdouble lived on Plutonium Boulevard. I cannibalised the play for elements in Vanity Fair…

The Dash poems vary thematically, but all of them, I believe, express that anxiety concerning stability and permanence noted earlier in these remarks. These poems are not impersonal – they are shot through, I mean, with biographical themes – but I think they do express a sense of a more general cultural malaise.

This malaise, as encountered in Dash, I would characterise as follows:

A culture founded on consumption is a culture founded upon the ephemeral. Our society is thus one that actively caters to ephemera. A capitalist identity is parasitical, feeding upon stimuli – but the stimuli only act to feed the hunger. This is not life, but an addiction to our own replacement by more fulfilled selves – selves which do not exist, have never existed, and can never exist (being ephemerally constructed, and endlessly replaceable).

Our existence becomes one of a bombardment by stimuli – but these consumerist stimuli are atomic, and have no deep social or spiritual purpose. Atomised from each other and within ourselves, we crave stimuli which will pacify us. We grow addicted to objects. But like any addiction, we allow it to cloud our judgement, and to set the agenda of our days; and our dependence upon objects distorts meaning, and our relation to meaning.

We fail meaning, and meaning fails us; we lose meaning, and – without us – meaning is lost.

Meaning is not an entity, but a may be seen as a mobile environment in which entities gather.

Meaning loves poetry.

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.
This commentary has also been made available as an afterword in the e-chapbook version of the Dash selection, which you can download as a PDF by clicking here. This PDF is almost 300kb in size and is compatible with Acrobat Reader version 4.0 and later.

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