Murat Nemet-Nejat
A Few Thoughts On John Ash
John Ash was a difficult man, no doubt. especially after he started being drunk routinely until his death. I myself had a few tussles with him. But he possessed a sweetness under his contankerousness and an intelligence and a knowledge of poetry that demanded respect. As a result, many of us forgot our fights and made up with him, often several times.
Most important of all, John Ash was a great poet and a meditator on spiritual landscapes, which in his case, was all too casually named as "travel writer." He was a member of a group of outsiders who were captured by the magic of the city of Istanbul and, for a period of time, became part of it, entered and lived within its crevices, Melville, Kavafis, Baldwin, Foster, to name a few.
Ash entered the city, absorbed its melancholic, manic spirit, drank and ate at its taverns, lived for a while a five-minute's walk from the beauty of the Bosphorus, and Ahab-like chased the miulti-layered, yet fragmented, elusive, often disappeared details of the city's and Anatolia's Byzantive past. In his final years, he lived in an apartment which was in shambles in Galata, the area of the city where ethnic minorities lived and its dives were located, before finally being gentrified for tourists. He lived a few minutes' walk from the Galata Tower (built by the Genoese in 1348 during the Byzantine times), another outsider/insider denizen of the city's landscape.
People consider his period of residence in Galata an emblem of his personal decline from the more upscale apartment near the Bosphorus. Though in one sense, factually, true, to me, that period represents Ash's final, total absorption into the melancholy, molecular soul of the city, joining, as his poetry does, the spiritual, crooked landscape of its Eda:
Alarm
The kind man at the hotel said:
Last night we thought you were going to burn the town down.
Now Leyla is calm but the gold flame of her hair is not.
Interval
First comes the container ship Alligator Pond,
then comes the tanker Adonis,
and, darting between them, with a palpable air
of impudence is a small fishing boat
named Ali Reis. Recaulked and repainted it will outlast them.
Talking To the Dead
I didn't think much of Aphrodisias
but liked the restaurant I found nearby.
The parking-lot was crowded with tour buses,
so we asked the waiter if the service would be slow.
He spread his hands and exclaimed "If you like!"
The olive oil was delicious, but at Aphrodisias --
Why did they move all the people away,
and destroy their beautiful village?
... (from "A Short Divan," To the City)
John Ash was a difficult man, no doubt. especially after he started being drunk routinely until his death. I myself had a few tussles with him. But he possessed a sweetness under his contankerousness and an intelligence and a knowledge of poetry that demanded respect. As a result, many of us forgot our fights and made up with him, often several times.
Most important of all, John Ash was a great poet and a meditator on spiritual landscapes, which in his case, was all too casually named as "travel writer." He was a member of a group of outsiders who were captured by the magic of the city of Istanbul and, for a period of time, became part of it, entered and lived within its crevices, Melville, Kavafis, Baldwin, Foster, to name a few.
Ash entered the city, absorbed its melancholic, manic spirit, drank and ate at its taverns, lived for a while a five-minute's walk from the beauty of the Bosphorus, and Ahab-like chased the miulti-layered, yet fragmented, elusive, often disappeared details of the city's and Anatolia's Byzantive past. In his final years, he lived in an apartment which was in shambles in Galata, the area of the city where ethnic minorities lived and its dives were located, before finally being gentrified for tourists. He lived a few minutes' walk from the Galata Tower (built by the Genoese in 1348 during the Byzantine times), another outsider/insider denizen of the city's landscape.
People consider his period of residence in Galata an emblem of his personal decline from the more upscale apartment near the Bosphorus. Though in one sense, factually, true, to me, that period represents Ash's final, total absorption into the melancholy, molecular soul of the city, joining, as his poetry does, the spiritual, crooked landscape of its Eda:
Alarm
The kind man at the hotel said:
Last night we thought you were going to burn the town down.
Now Leyla is calm but the gold flame of her hair is not.
Interval
First comes the container ship Alligator Pond,
then comes the tanker Adonis,
and, darting between them, with a palpable air
of impudence is a small fishing boat
named Ali Reis. Recaulked and repainted it will outlast them.
Talking To the Dead
I didn't think much of Aphrodisias
but liked the restaurant I found nearby.
The parking-lot was crowded with tour buses,
so we asked the waiter if the service would be slow.
He spread his hands and exclaimed "If you like!"
The olive oil was delicious, but at Aphrodisias --
Why did they move all the people away,
and destroy their beautiful village?
... (from "A Short Divan," To the City)