Anatolikon

9781584980117

1584980117

"What interests me most in this collection of graceful scenes and interviews is the quiet way, that word again, John Ash develops his own sort of poetics of information. It seems to me that such a poetics--be it Pound, Olson, Allen Fisher, Cage, Kenneth Irby--is the notable achievement of our post-narrative age, the ability of verse to handle huge tracts of stuff from our slaughterhouse of data, and bring them to shape, sense, social fact: where information becomes the informing of society. Ash can move from the vernacular to the formal very smoothly, can sound a little like Pound, or Kavafis, or even (as in "Language Poem: 2000 BC-2000 AD") like Olson written by Rexroth. The man's own voice is secure enough to allow these gestures, almost playful reminders of how other poets have been battered by this material, this Anatolia, the Rising Country, the source of the sun. I saw it from the air once, hard and red and barren, the highlands, and felt this was a place that still needs to speak. Ash is more civil than my harsh mountains, but he clearly speaks the place. And that is where travel poem becomes just poem.