UTOPIA
REVISITED
John Ash: Disbelief,
Carcanet.
John Ash has always adopted a particular line in
aestheticism. In his works, the world is
present but estranged, not so as to make that strangeness terrifying or
alienating, as in Kafka, but to make it delightful and pleasurable, which
surely must be a more difficult, if also more necessary, transformation. It is also a more dangerous one, in that the
impedimenta of melodrama, pastoral silliness and campness must be used. Some poems in Disbelief, Ash’s latest and, in many ways, best volume, repeat the
strategies of earlier books. (See my
review of The Goodbyes, PNR 37.)
The operative staginess (‘These are steps we will descend in sleep/like
echoes of ourselves, each singing/in our different ways, without dull
repetition …’) does, in fact, seem to have been repeated too many times to
remain effective; all defamiliarising gestures have an entropy towards the
familiar, a danger Ash must be aware of, given the range of this new book. When not concerned with individual aesthetic
consciousness, Ash creates imaginatively playful utopias, which he then
describes, images of a possible non-alienating social freedom. It is precisely the question of description in this project which now
disturbs me. The idea that an image of a possible utopia might be
produced by defamiliarising and aestheticising the world alone, by making it
fictive - which still seems to me a necessary first step - seems unwittingly
complacent. Lyotard in ‘The Critical
Function of the Work of Art’ (in Driftworks)
questions art which remains ‘a representation
of something to come; this is to remain within the order of representation
…. The system, as it exists, absorbs
every consistent discourse; the important thing is not to produce a consistent
discourse but rather to produce ‘figures’ within reality. The poet holds language ‘under suspicion, ie
to bring about figures which would never have been produced, that language
might not tolerate, and which may never be audible, perceptible, for us’. To put it another way, Ash often argues,
rather insistently, the case for aestheticism: his transformations happen at
the level of semantics, often strikingly so: his ‘The Second Lecture: An
over-excited man tells us about clouds’ - with its use of synaesthesia and
imaginative and metaphoric dissolution - ends ‘We are effaced. A chrysanthemum of air remains poised to drop
its petals into the blue that will reshape them endlessly.’ But at the levels of syntax, rhythm, line,
phonology and grammar the conventions are often as intact as they are in the
varieties of contemporary poetry that Ash - rightly - has criticised
repeatedly. He tells us of the
postmodern condition, but he never enacts this formally:
I regard the world as a TV
on which I change channels at will,
never moving from the bed.
It is, I would contend, only through formal
disruption that a desire for change
can be activated, involving the reader directly in the construction of the
meaning of the poem, something Ash’s insistence makes hard: ‘utopia’ is not a
radiant isolated image, but an active education of desire.
Nevertheless, this
collection covers new ground, even within his aestheticism. His ‘urban pastoralism’ is extended
dramatically in an embarrassingly whimsical ‘Eclogue’ (for Black American
English: ‘Are these the locals honey? / They sure talk funny.’), but in ‘Men,
Women and Children’ the effect can be sour: although ‘life is a festive
marching to no purpose’, the ‘destination’ may yet turn out to be ‘the
oppressive portals of the capital, / the altars still smelling of blood’. The litany, ‘The sky my husband’, is a kind
of printout of possibilities that enacts metaphoricity itself as it cancels the
meaning of the repeated word ‘sky’: ‘The sky my galleries my icons / The sky my
radio my satellite my video’. Ash has
also turned more expansively to prose, as in ‘Every Story Tells It All’, which
is a serial writing in search of its own evasive narrative. There are ‘translations’ of Li Ho, a found
text from Lorca’s letters. But, particularly
towards the end of the book, there is a seriousness of tone, as in ‘The Nine
Moons of Austin’, which, when it addresses the poet Christopher Middleton,
approximates something of the older poet’s integrity and capacity for wonder:
You are translating from the German,
difficult words: heilignòchterne,
meaning both ‘holy’ and ‘lucid’
like this moment of stillness and clouds
passing, noble as HØlderlin’s
swans.
15 August 1987 PN Review 63, 1988
