The Middle Kingdom

In those days we spent our time

sitting quietly in softly lighted rooms

designed for that purpose, trying not

to let any involuntary line of thought

arrive at its logical (and, of course,

regrettable) conclusion: namely

that our days were numbered.

We were all well-fed and warmly clothed,

and experienced no misgivings on this account.

The oceans were calm and shallow,

the rivers stocked with salmon. Each spring

brilliantly coloured birds passed over

on their way to northern lakes and hills.

Poems were often penned concerning

their brief and glorious transit. When

they returned in autumn we succumbed

to appropriate feelings of mild regret.

Our figurative art gave no hint of the fact

that male animals experienced erections,

nor were children obliged to light the match

that would incinerate their families.

Similarly It was not considered necessary

to rip your opponent’s lips from his face,

or force him to digest his ears.

How slow that time now seems,

how sweet, how gradual every graceful gesture!

But it is impossible to regret its passing.

It was not a time of truth and realism.

The passage of migratory birds

did not accord to the facts, nor

the coming of spring, nor the love of mothers

for their children, nor a man’s respect

for women, nor courtesy, friendship, honour…

Regret is impossible

(and, besides, nostalgia

is an imprisonable offense) now

that every issue is as clear as blood,

bright as tears, and we live

in understanding even as we die.

JOHN ASH

The Burnt Pages (Carcanet Press, 1991)

One of the pleasures of being alive is reading John Ash.

Think of a prize-winning poet, someone you think of as a poetry household-name: that’s how good John Ash is and how well-known he should be. I have a strong suspicion that none of this means a jot to him, which makes me enjoy his work even more.

I first came across his work in Cliff Yates’s great book of teaching poetry, Jumpstart; which contains a marvellous poem of faux-instructions of Ash: ‘Some Words of Advice: After Hesiod’. The poem opens:

Never believe the words you hear in popular songs.

Conversely, believe them all,

even the ones about changing the world and living forever.

This is a microcosm of many of Ash’s procedures: the importance (or complete irrelevance) of words; a relish in artefacts of popular culture; and a profound sense of decay. Most of all, these lines have a conversational lightness of tone, a characteristic he shares with the late Kenneth Koch who used to say that just because his poems were not solemn did not mean they were not to be taken seriously.

‘Some Words of Advice’ led me to buy Ash’s Selected Poems which of course it did not contain. By this time I had read Ash’s poem ‘Smoke’ in Peter Sansom’s terrific Writing Poems. This poem also contains references to ‘snatches of show tunes in the corridors’ and ‘old arias of desire’, but now the tone is chastened, cautious, elegiac:

In a city of burnt throats there can never be

enough sweet water to start the songs

and if you would dance, you must dance to the memory

of that lighted window the dusk carried off

Both ‘Smoke’ and ‘Some Words of Advice’ are contained in the second book of Ash’s poems based in New York, The Burnt Pages, where he moved in 1985.

If you do not know it, it is a seriously important piece of work. Without wishing to be reductive, it is as critical to our understanding of AIDS as the perhaps more famous The Man with Night Sweats (Thom Gunn), My Alexandria (Mark Doty) and What the Living Do (Marie Howe):

What is left is irretrievable,

but continues like a melody

whose logical and grieving progression nothing can halt.

(‘In Rainy Country’)

The book is about much more than that, of course, but I do think, in poems like ‘The Middle Kingdom’, ‘Smoke’, ‘Cigarettes’, ‘My Egypt’, ‘Following a Man’, ‘The Sweeping Gesture’, ‘Forgetting’ and ‘In Rainy Country’ Ash performs a sustained mediation on mortality and decay that is both exquisite and what Peter Sansom calls ‘urgent’.

For my money ‘The Middle Kingdom’ fuses together two of The Burnt Pages’ chief impulses: clear-eyed satire and deep personal ‘regret’, a word the poem uses three times: