Dash is a project which dates (in terms of initial composition) from late July 1997 to December of the same year. It consists of about 50 poems. They were written in a sustained chain reaction, and for the most part have a very distinctive quality which marks them as belonging to a group or family.

The precise genesis of the project, I don't really recall. However, many of the poems have a quite propulsive feel to them, which I believe reflects the drive and purpose with which they were written.

In one sense, Dash occupies a rather anomalous position in my work. In the early nineties, even before the publication of my first book, I found myself having to reevaluate my life and my poetry. It seemed to me that I had to try and reground things. One consequence of this movement to reconfigure things was the desire to write differently.

I sometimes think that the best of my earlier poems have been defeated, in some senses – have lost (or never possessed) a belief in the bond between poetry and people, and a belief that the beauty of poetry is profoundly effective, in the sense that (in one way) the world depends upon it. In fact, I feel that these earlier poems rebuke and deconstruct my later work – and will always stand as a valid (if disconcerting) challenge to my more mature writing.

The earlier poems of which I'm speaking – for example, Feint Bivouac – have surrendered their belief in people. Writer and reader are alienated from each other; the work of art is a form of moral luxury, a game, a pastime, without radical power; poetry is an anaesthetic and not an aesthetic experience.

Well… this was a dead end. In order to resurrect writing within myself, I felt that I had to rethink my understanding of the relation of writer to reader. I had to seek to believe in the reader – then, the poetry would be real. To put this another way, I felt I had to go towards the reader; and perhaps this very process of going towards the reader was the process of poetry itself.

My work from the early nineties onwards has been a search for this regrounding. In terms of this regrounding, Dash now seems to me to be, in one way, a kind of evolutionary spur. Having written the poems, I set them aside, possibly intending to go back to them at some point. However, around the summer of 1998, I began the poems which would make up the second half of a.m., and Dash was put into storage. I now have no immediate intention of publishing Dash, as the gravity of my poetry has shifted to a new centre. Nevertheless, I welcome this opportunity to make some of the poems available to readers.

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.

For a more extended commentary on Dash, please click here, or download the PDF of the e-chapbook to which the extended commentary forms an afterword.