A POEM IS NOT AT PEACE: ON MICHAEL AYRES

By David Hackbridge Johnson






Another look, and yet another look, at Arcadian Rustbelt, the fabulous anthology of the second generation of British underground poetry from Waterloo Press[1], could eventually lead to a reviewer quoting the entire text of the book, interleaved with Ptolemean epicycles of criticism, those dancing orbits that supposedly make the mathematics right.  In resisting that temptation, it is only to focus on one of the poets I had never heard of before, Michael Ayres, the person who is physically stopping Andrew Duncan from calling himself the only avant-garde poet born in Nottingham.  Inspired by the selection of work in Arcadian Rustbelt, here are some thought-gatherings from reading some other poems by Ayres – they scratch the surface of a copious body of work and mark a holding position for bigger critical beasts.

Of all the Rustbelt poets, as we might soon have to call them against their will, Michael Ayres is often the most deceptively simple.  He writes love poetry in which he is a participant not a disdainful onlooker – at the very least, if he dons a mask it is not to pour scorn on love from behind it.  Such poems can have the lucidity of Lee Harwood but often feel less of a moment held, than an epic of perpetual attempts at knowing both self and other.  In this way Ayres can create chains of love poems that move around in space, from situation to situation, even from country to country, as if love were a quest of almost tragic unattainability.  This makes for an inner turbulence that avoids easy settled outcomes and pat conclusions.  As we learn in ‘Transporter', surely one of the great long poems of recent decades, ‘A poem is not at peace'.[2]  Love might be at the centre of the poem but spiralling out of it is the energy of an extraordinary inner monologue that time-shifts and time-zone-leaps all over the globe as if the world were a plaything for scattered feelings for a fast-fleeing lover: ‘Java, Cyprus, London, Red Sea: / dreaming of embarkation. / You are the man with the wind in his heels / shackled to the ground by a chain of cloud.'[3]  We note that the constant geographical shifts spring out of the opening stanzas that indicate travel via perusal of a stamp collection: ‘Brightest stamp of your collection, / the mind a fort against the boredom. / a pirate stockade against the sand and heat, / news of elsewhere, pale air-mail blue / franked with a tiger's stripes.’[4]  But we also note the wind at the heels of, perhaps, Hermes, always on the move and to be found at crossroads, waiting for you.  Towards the end of ‘Transporter’, the poetic voice has become all-embracing, a force so strong that it is self-propelling beyond a discernible ego centre: ‘I write my poems on the back of rain, / on atoms, neurons, apogees and storms; / I write poems on the reverse of time, on nanoseconds, microns, kappas, phis;'.[5]  As the list of things on which poems get written grows ever longer, the effect is Whitmanesque but without the grandiloquent intoning – more like Hermes tripping lightly over all of creation.  We are not surprised to see the ‘I’ put in inverted commas a few stanzas later, as the ego drops out entirely, being made redundant by the fecundity of poetry itself: ‘ ‘I' what the dying mouth says to the word / and almost something that the word replies...'.[6]  When the ‘I’ returns at the very end of the poem, it is tentative as if somehow diminished by the voluminous effects of poetry itself: ‘but I mean so little now, I wonder, / maybe I've worn out what my words can say / like a sea-swimmer who ventures too far from shore / and belongs to the sea, now, but keeps on swimming, / thinking the sands will still be there for them...[7]  In the end it is not the lover who sleeps but the words themselves.  This radiant, beautiful and ambitious epic poem ought surely to be better known – it has a telling mixture of the experimental and the accessible, it has shifts of perspective that alarm and delight, and can launch itself across the centuries with neither the bombast of space operas nor the abracadabra of magic realism.  After 60 pages of sustained invention, the melos remains beautifully measured, modest even, in the final settling of its aims. 

To say that Michael Ayres' poems are open-ended is merely to appreciate that his work can appear through-composed from poem to poem and volume to volume.  Take ‘1976 Streets’ first published as Poetical Histories Number 44 by Peter Riley in 1998, but also appearing in the Salt collection a.m.  This poem contains a number of touchstone personalities for the poet: Isaac Newton, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Camus, Scheherazade, Zarathustra and Nietzsche.  Some of these also occur in ‘Transporter’ and other poems.  The year 1976 is at the tail end of hippiedom and on the cusp of punk, and we get a flavour certainly of the former: ‘And the planet of your love an orange in your pocket, / nicking off work, the day hanging loose like a mouth. / You want to kiss it, shut it up, stop it yawning –  '.[8]  There is a sense that at the end of ‘1976 Streets’ the reader is passing from one poem straight into the next: ‘All the streets grow blurred; the map yearns for its edge, / And behind the blown thought, and a dark door, / an address no one comes to, / but everyone leaves for.’[9]  This gives the permanent feeling of transition as if poems occur between two cardinal points, neither of which can be truly reached.  It is in this liminal interzone that Michael Ayres' poems have their being and where all his favourite historical characters –  poets, painters, musicians – can meet and be illuminated by his lyric gift, and he by theirs, not in the manner of name-dropping but as part of the poet's continual dialogue with a living past.  In this way Ayres' experiments with time and space are not gratuitous but are the marrow of his aesthetic.  The space between failed departures and arrivals might remind readers of the passage in Bend Sinister of Nabokov, where Krug is caught on a bridge with the horrified feeling that he might be refused escape from either exit, thus condemned forever to walk between them.   

 

What's not to like about Peter Riley's series of pamphlets, Poetical Histories?  Before me now is one by Michael Ayres, Number 51, The Sky That Was Your Guide.  It features an attractive woodcut on the front cover by Lisa Kirkham and was published in 2000 out of Cambridge.  The poems within are collected in the Salt book a.m. but it's pleasurable to have them in their original form on grey, grainy, handmade paper, especially since the four poems, ‘A great calm descends’, ‘Cuba’, ‘Pushkin’, and ‘26 Letters’ have been widely separated in a.m.  The little quartet forms a kind of family in more than one sense – it is dedicated, as a whole, to the poet's parents, with the third poem, ‘Pushkin’, containing a further dedication to the poet's brother.  On hand are Michael Ayres' talismanics; César Vallejo is quoted in a superscription (absent in the a.m. version), and we also find Neruda, Schumann, Mandelstam, and Blok whispering in his ear, as it were, and constituting another kind of family.  A singular beauty of reading is to be had by just studying these four poems slowly, without the distractions of other poetical burgeonings.  The first poem, ‘A great calm descends’, presents love forming in the presence of an avalanche.  A primal being, Adam, is anointed with snow.  The poem subjects its phrases to permutation to create an hypnosis before the discovery that mortality and therefore death has been born: ‘Time forms, and ice; and a great calmness. / And you will lose everything that you've ever loved.'[10]  ‘Cuba’ achieves lyric perfection: ‘I lay my head on a pillowslip of goldfinches / and almond blossom.’[11] But there's a catch here, since the Chinese seamstresses who make the pillowslips go blind with overwork.  In ‘Pushkin’, the poet's brother's dreaming form inspires him into the poetic world of the great Russian poet – Ayres is both inside the words of Pushkin but also laying out a heartfelt homage:  ‘Pushkin.  In the Russian night, / they will bury the son of their poetry / in February, in Pskov province.’[12]  ‘26 letters’ seems to be addressed to death and is both lyrical and revengeful: ‘I am going to do with you / what the fire did with my mother.’[13]  The Sky That Was Your Guide is an exquisite pamphlet.

In the last decade Michael Ayres has demonstrated an extraordinary fecundity for producing texts either in book form or in digital form on his blog hypergram.[14]  Most of these works are long sequences of connected texts that explore interrelated themes to do with language, meaning and perception.  Some of the texts have become increasingly fragmented as if language is breaking down and has to be reassembled like a building that has tumbled to rubble and whose bricks must be individually mortared back together.  It is hoped that the digitally available work, When the volts flowed,[15] written approximately between 2003–2006, will reach book form.  Beginning with an invitation to attend to ‘the principles of silence' with Rilke on hand, the poet dwells within this hollowed out space and waits for things to be lowered into it: ‘Is this the sound of darkness itself? / Something lowered, inch by inch, into a silence? / A jagged plumb, like an arrowhead, / a heart with sharpened sides?'  As if determined to explore extremes, we find the poem also inhabiting plunging temperatures: ‘Like washing in frost, the pronouns glitter and shimmer along the line, / stiffened, it’s so cold in this poem, / even the ghosts have frozen.' 

As if to underline this writer's extraordinary level of productivity, I shudder to contemplate the series of prose-poem fantasy books under the overall title of Dustless that has now reached its twelfth volume, with some of the volumes running to many hundreds of pages.  Michael Ayres has run far ahead of critics and mainstream publishers.  It would require marathon reading sessions to even attempt to keep up with the pace.  And yet there is no sense in which Ayres is merely turning the knobs on a language machine – his prose remains lucid, balanced, even if at times on a tightrope.  Dustless shows him to be Lord Dunsany reconfigured for digital sensibilities.  And to return to the concept of connections between two points never reached, we find the same concerns in the Dustless series; this from the jacket summary of Volume 3, Stories in the Falling Snow: ‘The purpose of a road is to connect one thing with another, and to enable travellers to traverse the landscape with greater ease.  Yet, what happens when the land seems too great for the road? and when the road seems endless, connecting the traveller to nothing?  What becomes of a journey once it appears to have no destination?'  Whether there is the perpetual becoming of the Buddhist operating along these roads, I plead an insufficiency of knowledge – if the mode is spiritual it is likely one along a synthetic plane of the poet's devising.  Such work, daunting yet somehow encouraging the reader to adopt a light touch of eyes, might constitute some of the best poetical fantasy work being written today.

But to return to Arcadian Rustbelt where I first read Michael Ayres.  The slim volume Only was brought out by Oystercatcher Press in 2010 and there is a generous extract from it in Arcadian Rustbelt.  Although it has superscriptions by André Kertész and Howard Hodgkin, the poem itself is largely absent of helpers or eavesdroppers, and consequently the poem feels more intimate and is laid out in simple phrases.  It is only the juxtapositions of these phrases that alert the reader to the shifts in content which can be as dramatic as those in his more freewheeling poems.  Two short stanzas from the poem can show this method in action: ‘There is rain everywhere tonight / and water runs / down the green stems of our memories // Slam a car door cut a journey in two / I didn't reach you / only tonight, I reach you.’[16]  Once again the idea of journeys not completed and in these two stanzas an entire complex narrative might be unravelled if there were but time. But the poet is likely to elide sense with other looming possibilities.  Like ‘26 letters’, Only begins with a burning, which suggests another painful elegy is before us. 

Michael Ayres then.  Unknown to me before my reading of Arcadian Rustbelt.  In lyricism, in his leaping across time zones, across continents, across the inky pages of beloved artists, across the smoke-filled gaps of memory, Ayres has made a body of work so remarkable as to beg the question why he isn't better known.  His generosity, his readability, means he needs no cabal of initiates to promulgate his work.  But he writes poetry that I suggest demands to be read.

©David Hackbridge Johnson 2024.


[1] Edited by Andrew Duncan and John Goodby, Waterloo Press, 2024.

[2] Michael Ayres, a.m., Salt Publishing, 2003, p. 66.

[3] Ibid. p. 31.

[4] Ibid. pp. 30-31.  My late uncle, Roy G. Bates, one-time Secretary, subsequently Vice-President, of the Leytonstone Wanstead & District Philatelic Society (Founded 1936), once told me, ‘you can learn almost anything from stamps, they take you round the world.’

[5] Ibid. p. 86.

[6] Ibid. p. 87.

[7] Ibid. p. 92.

[8] a.m., p. 23.

[9] Ibid. p. 29.

[10] Michael Ayres, The Sky That Was Your Guide, Poetical Histories No. 51, 2000, unpaginated.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[16] Michael Ayres, Only, Oystercatcher Press, unpaginated.