Notes on recent work

(Poems, & the novel Dustless)

1 Poems

These poems are all post-a.m., with the oldest of them dating from 2000. It's probable that most of them are not in a 'final' form, and so I apologise to readers for their provisional state.

In one way, I think a writing life – any life – is seamless. I suppose, for myself, I create a myth of organisation (a system of priorities and objectives) which plays its part in encouraging me to write. It may be quite arbitrary, but it is effective.

In terms of this myth, then, I look at a.m. as a book which clears the ground for other work. Looking over the poems I've selected for this section of the website, I would say some of them build on the poetry of a.m., attempting to deepen and enrich it, while others signal the opening up of new paths.

I associate much of the poetry of a.m. with a kind of compositional intensity. They were fierce poems to write. Technically, many of them were built upon the statement and restatement of themes, the repetition of phrases, and the rotation of themes and phrases through different semantic planes. In my own experience of the poems, this writing process gave several of them a kind of heaviness, a mass – Ronin, for example, or Pacific Union, or 26 Letters.

Some of the poetry written after a.m. seeks to extend and work out this 'heavy' mode of writing (Human, for example, and Total Eclipse and Partial Eclipse). Other recent poems respond quite dialectically to that heaviness, and are atmospherically much more relaxed and lightly moving.

In terms of possible collections, I am accumulating work which (at the moment at least) seems destined for at least two very different books. One of these books exists more in terms of my desires and ambitions rather than in realised poetry. Very simply, I want to write a book which is extremely positive about humanity, which is meant to inspire and encourage – an idealistic book, which is relaxed about pleasure, politically open and optimistic. I have no definite title for this rather spectral book, but Radiant is a possibility…

I am planning a more realisable collection, to be called Metropolitan. In very broad terms, I view Metropolitan as a return to the theme of cultural malaise explored in the unpublished Dash poems. I'm thinking of dividing Metropolitan into two sections (and possibly even two separate volumes) – the Politics of the Sublime and Politics of the Mundane.

I had hoped to make one of Metropolitan's substantial poems, M81, available to visitors to this site, but for reasons of length and other considerations have been unable to do so. However, I am able to make available other poems currently earmarked for Metropolitan – The 20 Sleepless Years, Do You Believe in the Spirits of the Mirror? and Coriolanus, for example.

The germinal event of The 20 Sleepless Years was an article I read on the publication of work on the human genome. The title refers to the notion that if a person were to speak all the letters which make up the genetic code describing the human genome, it would take 20 years without sleep.

At around the time of the publication of the human genome, there was a lot of debate, and somewhere I read a statement to the effect that the genetic sequence of the genome provided us with the most complete picture of humanity ever recorded.

The 20 Sleepless Years has a rather science fiction premise. The notion is that a genetically engineered post-human will arise, and it is to this coming post-human that the poem is addressed.

Coriolanus is interesting to me because of its quite symphonic form. It develops three distinct registers. This allows for an element of ironic counterpoint. All the different 'movements' of the poem were heartfelt – it is only when the poem is seen as a whole that the schisms between the impulses which inspired each movement can be seen.

Do You Believe in the Spirits of the Mirror? has a theatrical, ventriloqual element to it which I like.

Of the other poems, Barents is one I feel is important in the development of my work.
One aim of mine has been to achieve a greater plainness in my writing. This is probably dependent on a particular frame of mind, which has to do with a certain serenity and acceptance, and a falling away of self-consciousness. (There is a great poem by Mayakovsky, written shortly before his suicide, in which he seems to achieve a moving stasis, and he writes: 'In hours like these you get up and you speak / To the ages, to history, and to the universe.' The mood of Mayakovsky's poem is really unique, I know of nothing else like it: I suppose he was about to bring his life to a conclusion, and this led him to write conclusively. I love the bareness of that poem, its wryness, tenderness, the way it arrests itself at the end with those lines I've quoted)…

If plainness has been one aim of my work, another is musicality. Unfortunately, apart from Coriolanus, I can't share any other examples of poems which develop musically – no others are in a sufficiently finished state. By 'music', I mean a singing quality to the lines, a rhythmic energy, a heightened attention to sound qualities, an acoustic playfulness – as against, say, Barents' simplicity and essentialism.

Music – particularly pop music – has been one of the great inspirations of my life, and I hope to incorporate more musical elements into my later work.

Several of the poems in this section are love poems of one kind or another (Siberia, Total Eclipse, Partial Eclipse, Human, Jasmine, Barents). They represent a different impulse in my work to many of the poems which will go into Metropolitan.

I would say that there is a certain violence in my poetry, a violence which the poetry at once feeds upon and seeks to escape. The spirit of violence I'm discussing is onerous, it wears one out. It is only liberating in a restricted way. It is difficult to imagine violence as generous. One immolates problems, including the problem of oneself, in violence: or that is perhaps the dream of violence.

I suppose I see the violence as something one must pass through. If you don't encounter violence, serenity is diminished; if you experience violence, or experience violently, then serenity (if it comes) is amplified.

The poetry I'm intending to go into the first section of Metropolitan (The Politics of the Sublime) represents one end of my writing – a violent, critical, antagonistic, poetry in which the individual is seen as menacing and terroristic – a consuming and a self-consuming thing. The individual grows sublime, which (to adapt an insight of Coleridge's) means that the individual destroys any means of comparison with itself. Coriolanus, with its strand of despair and nihilism, a desire to disengage, and The 20 Sleepless Years, too, in its own way, embody an unease with this consumerist individual – a type of individual which at all times bears the conditions of its own crisis within itself, and which also brings a kind of fatuous doom in its shadow.

Poems like Barents and Siberia move towards a different end, or move at least in a different way. While I hope all my poetry is a form of contribution of one kind or another, my own belief is that a poem like Siberia forms an inherently greater contribution than a poem like The 20 Sleepless Years.

Fortunately, however, I will never be and can never be called upon to make a decision over the relative worth of my poems. Even if the world could be reduced to a situation of 'either/or', the poems don't belong to me – they never have done, and they never will do.

To whom, after all, do poems belong?

2. Dustless

Dustless is the name of a gigantic novel, itself part of a projected 'hypernovel', Metallic.

I have been working on Dustless since October 2001. I'm currently on chapter 14 of an anticipated 16 chapters. I hope to finish the first draft later this year.

The use of generic descriptions is often counterproductive, and so it's rather diffidently that I describe Dustless as a 'Fantasy' novel. My own view of the novel is that it is a kind of 'heavy metal fairytale'. It certainly draws on fairytale plots and scenarios, and Dustless at least (if not the whole of the Metallic project) is concerned with themes of childhood and innocence – and, therefore, of adulthood, and experience. Seen from another perspective, Dustless is a compendium of influences, a kind of sustained homage to entertainments which have given me pleasure – and perhaps a list of some of these entertainments may give you an idea of the mobile world of Dustless.

I would include as important inspirations: from cinema, Blade Runner, Dune, the samurai films of Kurosawa, Japanese samurai films in general, Sergio Leone's films (which were drawn, in part, from Kurosawa's films), the Western in general (influential upon Kurosawa, of course), Solaris, Akira (the masterpiece of Manga), The Red Shoes, Edward Scissorhands, The Wizard of Oz, Disney, Forbidden Planet, Metropolis, Them, Alien, Chronos… From literature, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Orwell, Huxley, Swift, Tolkien, comics, nursery rhymes, fairytales, Coleridge, Rimbaud, Buddhist texts, Kafka, the Arthurian cycles… Really, the list is very long and eclectic. Music is also very important, though less easy to trace as direct influences – but the industrial and metal musics of various genres, and electronic music, from Kraftwerk to Coil…

Dustless is a highly metaphorical novel, quite musical in the way it repeats over and over again certain elements – some of which have symbolic significance to the world of the characters themselves, others of which escape the characters but which may be understood by the reader.

The main theme of Metallic, which is sounded in Dustless, is the theme of power, and of the futility of a human (and perhaps, more specifically, a masculine) drive to achieve certain kinds of power.

As I remember, even weeks before beginning Dustless, I had no real intention of writing a novel – but then the events of 11 September 2001 occurred, and this seemed to trigger within me a desire to model, on an epic scale, a metaphorical account of the theme of power. From childhood, I had carried an image in my mind of a lonely watchtower, set beside a road, where each night a man would ascend a platform to light a beacon fire and to keep a vigil – even though no one ever came down the road. For some reason, this image fused and crystallised with the images of 11 September, and so I began writing Dustless.

I am now in the later, rather exhausted stages of writing Dustless. In one sense, I feel the novel has distorted my writing life, in the sense that I have had to devote enormous amounts of time and energy into it – resources which, had I not started the book, may have been used to develop my poetry. I am certainly looking forward to completing the novel. If it is published, then I will continue with the Metallic project, of which Dustless is a part. However, if I cannot find a publisher for Dustless, then I don't know whether I will continue with Metallic. While Dustless is a labour of love, it is also, frankly, an attempt to ground my writing life financially. But that is for the future: my first priority must be to finish the novel, and then rewrite. Indeed, I may opt to write different versions – a 'heavy' and a 'light'; but again, this is for the future…

For interested readers, the editor of Shearsman has kindly made an excerpt from Dustless available in PDF format.

The world of Dustless is precisely that – a world. It would be very difficult to preçis the novel in a satisfactory way, and so I have elected simply to excerpt a section of Dustless, as it stands, in unrevised draft form, with only a minimal introduction.

Hopefully, this will at least give a reader some flavour of Dustless.

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.

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