The poems of this section are arranged in two groups: those in the first section are roughly contemporaneous with poems written for the a section of a.m. (early–mid-90s); those in the second section date from very late 1997 or from 1998.

Section 1

I don't propose to say very much about these poems in themselves. In terms of their conventional structure, they are straightforward, and they seem to share with each other a similar spiritual and emotional temperature.

Two of the poems have the same title — Clock factory. The bonding of different poems under identical titles has been something I've done since the period of my first book — in Poems 1987–1992, there are two poems called The famines in Africa.

This 'twinning' of poems is in one way a simple technique for emphasising that I don't see poems as self-standing objects, units of language which can switch themselves on and off. Rather, I see poems as calling to each other, relying upon each other, maintaining each other. Poetry is dynamic and processual, liquid rather than lithic. This calling of poems to each other can happen within a writer's own work; but one can also see poems from very different writers calling to each other across time and space, and across cultures and languages. Thus I see poetry as (in some senses) a deeply communal endeavour: there is a theory of poetry which sees all poets (unbeknownst to themselves) working on a vast 'superpoem' — an image I rather like.

One of the two 'factories' here ends with a stanza which is full of images of machinery and production lines. In another echoing device, this poem contains the line 'I have heard the sound of machines dreaming' — a line also used in one of the Dash poems. I am very intrigued by industrial processes, by robotics and by the notion of the 'ghost in the machine'. I suppose part of my work is motivated by a desire to fight off an impulse for human beings to understand themselves in terms of mechanics and biological or evolutionary systems — an impulse to strip humanity down to the genetic skeleton, as it were, and to make of the mind a kind of chemical engine. The impulse to imprison ourselves within the terms of reductive images which we ourselves have created is one I find baffling and desolating…

Section 2

These poems were written after those of the Dash project, and probably mark the furthest extension and the exhaustion of the impulse which went into the writing of that book.

Many of the remarks I made in relation to Dash (see the introduction to Dash, and the author's commentaries) would apply to these post-Dash poems. Philosophically, these pieces seem concerned with the nature of analysis, and how we must disintegrate things in order to try and understand them. The poems evince the desire to stabilise and bracket off elements of themselves, as if from attack, or a kind of experiential subsidence.

Samsara is quite a schizophrenic poem, in that it opens with Dash-like notation, but then switches into couplet-like rhymes — a language much more in tune with some of my current work. Seamus Heaney (I think) described the couplet as a kind of 'piston engine', and I am instinctively very drawn to the couplet precisely because of those propulsive, repetitive qualities. (It will come as no surprise that I'm a fan of Augustan poetry)… In Samsara, the rhymes are hazy and the rhythm irregular, so it's probably inaccurate to describe the poetry in terms of couplets — however, that is, intuitively, the model I have in my head here…

Samsara is a very musical poem, I believe, and delights in sound patterns. The figures it names are all professional cyclists — 'samsara', for those who are not familiar with the term, is the wheel of life and death in Buddhist philosophy — and hence the poem plays with images of cycles and wheels, repetition and racing, craving and dissatisfaction…

In one sense, then, Samsara could be seen as a later analogue of the world of the second Clock factory. Both poems, though stylistically very different, are concerned with a vision of human nature which sees our lives in terms of automotive repetitions and cycles (of birth, reproduction and death) which are essentially meaningless, but which we cannot escape. The gleaming technology of robotics and assembly lines which we employ to create machines may thus be seen as a metaphoric extension of the microtechnology of atoms and proteins, enzymes and genes, the tiny machines on whose assembly line we lie, and whose product we are…

Briefly, and very broadly, it seems to me that in these areas at least, poetry of this kind is related to the works of English Romanticism — particularly to the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth. Blake's unease at the industrialisation and mechanisation of thought itself seems to me very relevant now. It seems to me that poetry as such, in order to be poetry, must radiate a value which refuses what, in more contemporary terms, we might describe as 'the commodification of significance'.

I would also call this attritional process one of 'demeaning' — using the term in the specialised sense of a process of loss or reduction of potential meaning from language and from the world (in effect, the Orwellian dictionary growing smaller and smaller with each edition).

Poetry, I believe, seeks to prevent language becoming demeaned.

In an age of prose, poetry thus has a potentially heroic part to play:
Prose can change what you think. Poetry changes what thinking is.

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.

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