Poem on Martin Amis

                   AMIS

                    1

Hello, my name is Martin Amis;

I bend right over and kiss my anus.

Women are stunned by the way I hate them;

Their humiliation is my entertainment.

The hero is a man who can reach

Into the lives and dreams of others.

The younger journos know that if they try --

 Add clever syntax, acid bleach --

My style of writing is within their span.

Watch them follow me, ape my mannerisms

Young guns, emulating worldly cynicism

Eye on the main chance.

A part of me knows that the real writer

Is the opposite of hero, the epitome of the unusual

Afflicted by independence, not merely unfashionable

But entirely outside the very notion of fashion.

A good writer honours the humanity inside him

Makes natural connections, writes simply

Does not need to posture, or strain to add

Pretentious themes to lightweight work.

My own perspective is entirely different.

What's mutual is mediocre --

That's my deepest fear. Whatever I hold 

In common, I rigourously suppress.

Instead I prefer to be a Superman, seeing over

My literary empire, its creatures in abject subjection

To my capricious will. Any fictional being

Capable of independence is a direct threat to me.

As a consequence, I have never invented

A plausible or fully rounded character 

Merely straw men and women, embellished stereotypes

For my own godlike entertainment.

As tyrant over my narrative

What I demonstrate is pure technique. 

The polished surface and mot juste

Are greater glory to the author.

2

I am the artist's politician

I love the powerful, loathe the weak.

My instincts are pure snobbery

I have less sympathy for humanity than a virus.

If I incline to the left it's because that's the future.

My politics are a function of my ambition.

I have a certain view of progress --

The winners write history. It justifies a pure regress

To adolescent assertiveness. As for thought itself

I'm so light I could float upwards.

My special gravity is based

On acolytes clinging to my feet.

                             3

My most curious and perhaps my saddest feature

Is that I am a genuinely fine comedic writer

As good as my lamented father, my reputation

Justly and independently earned. Kingsley, it was said

Would arrive at the breakfast table

A little the worse for wear. But one glance

At the inanity of the newspaper headlines

Was usually sufficient to make his eyes

Pop out over his cornflakes. Gibbering with rage

He would depart to his study, amply

Motivated for a morning's hard work. So I

Continue to fight the moronic inferno:

A just cause. But the secret of unhappiness

Is to be dissatisfied with oneself

And hanker after another life. I strive to be

The greatest British writer. On that at least

I know how to work the superficialities. I am a master

Of the sound-bite, the television interview

The newspaper article pontificating on great events

Like a regular master. Underneath, though

I'm a material boy, who thinks big advances

Embellish my importance. My personal lifestyle

My beautiful wives, my dental expenditure

Construct a literary parody of Hollywood.

My youthful cover portraits breathed smoke:

The smouldering glance, the bee-stung lips

Conflating James Dean and Gina Lollabrigida.

Later portraits emphasise gravitas

The author supreme over all he surveys:

A growling delivery, the carefully chosen apothegms:

Someone who has seen it all.

Beneath that fashionably crusty surface

I make the deepest-dyed Tory seem radical.

I haven't had an original thought yet

But I've shown how far that you can go

With some showy prose and huge ego.

                           4

Meanwhile, my literary dance in front of the media

Distracts attention from better modern writers --

Justin Cartwright, Russell Hoban, Graham Swift

The late W G Sebald or Penelope FitzGerald --

Who live or lived quieter lives

In the shadows, dedicated to their work

Painstakingly constructing beams of sunlight

Or the exactitude of dust.

The machinery of my publicity moves forward

As I crowd out my rivals with a prima donna's elan.

Each year that passes

I talk more anxiously of my posterity.

Yet inside me an anxious fear gnaws

A rat of doubt sits in my stomach.

I hear the empty echo of my voice

Selling a brand, a market commodity:

The florid workings of a literary surface

Hiding a vacuous interior. Celebrity is a succubus

Eating its owner, the mask burning into the face

Until the image owns the soul.

As I grow more famous, so my writing 

Decreases in quality, as though the two

Are inversely related. I have not written 

A first-rate work in twenty years.

While I preen and dance to fashionable adulation

The true task of a writer slips further away.

Each of my new works trivialises its subject, becomes

A mere parody of its predecessor.

                             5

As my writing diminishes, so my reputation grows --

Proof, if proof were needed

That the leading figures of literary London

Are as impressed with material success as I am.

Bound together in mutual support, we remain

A small, self-serving incestuous tribe, fearful of outsiders 

Whose chief achievement is to keep real talent at bay

While absorbing just enough to maintain a semblance

Of literary virtuosity. Meanwhile

The publishers of leading literary houses

Have bound themselves to the wheel of celebrity

As tightly as any chat-show host.

Strange, too, that it takes a literary elite --

Self-evidently cultured, humane, discriminating

Anti-capitalist -- to construct a perfect demonstration 

Of the dark art of advertising.

Like a tyranny which traps its own lead characters

In a web of collusion

Happy to engage in mutual conspiracy

My reputation grows by what it feeds on.

At every public opportunity, I press forward

To give my views, carefully composing

Orotund generalities aimed at easy targets

Dismembering Stalin fifty years after his death.

There's nothing so inane

As a shallow man attempting profundity.

"I'll never forgive Thatcher for our loss of civility." 

"Bush is more primitive than Saddam."

These are not thoughts, but noises designed

To impress a certain kind of bien-pensant reader.

I know my constituency -- the chattering classes

Their hopes, fears, hatreds, secret snobberies.

Sometimes, pour encourager les autres

Emphasising my superiority over my native culture

Attempting to chastise and discipline

My retinue of jackals

I threaten to decamp to New York.

But a different regime holds there --

Autonomous, self-confident, unimpressed

By a faux-American whose worship of success

And manipulation of self-image is a byword. 

My hypocrisy is such, I cannot repress a sneer

At the sincerity of American aspiration. So I hover

Endlessly poised between threat and fear.

                             6

There is a primary division in literature between

Those who write, and those who want to be a writer.

The first are genuine, the latter poseurs

Literature's straw-men, ambition's servants.

Instead of striking out for my own private space

I am the king of the literary celebrities

The Will Selfs and the Sadie Smiths. 

The small thief's hero is a major criminal.

If the works of Shakespeare and Dickens,

Austen and Melville, Hawthorne and Joyce

Are founded on generosity to their characters

Mine are based on sadistic relations.

My characters are ciphers, whose actions

Are designed to show humanity as sordid

Venal, shallow, utterly bereft

Of nobility or complexity.

And why not? My narrative is myself.

My downwards sneer

Is what distinguishes and separates me

From you, amongst others ...

Meanwhile, my admiration for my own writing

Constructs a perfect solipsistic circle ...

Hello, my name is Martin Amis;

I bend right over and kiss my anus.