The modish packaging of John Stammers’ latest collection provides an excellent indication of the style of poetry that lies inside. The title Interior Night invokes the conventions of screenwriting, while the same scene-heading ‘Interior: Night’ is the title of the screenprint by British pop-artist and style icon Patrick Caulfield that serves as cover art. Thus, the contemporary world of the screenplay is established from the opening shot. It may be that Stammers has answered the call of Dorothy Parker, herself a poet turned screenwriter, in her parodic directive, ‘The Passionate Screen Writer to his Love’: ‘Come, curb the new, and watch the old win, / Out where the streets are paved with Goldwyn.’

There is of course nothing novel about writers experimenting with the possibilities of cinematic technique; they’ve been doing it since moving pictures were invented. However, Stammers fails to employ filmic technique to produce anything approaching a poetic block-buster with this collection. Instead, to my eyes at least, the poems read as poor attempts at screen-writing, with too many remaining as mere blueprints for an art that is never realised. Quentin Tarantino, a favourite director of Stammers’ (the poem ‘Closure’ in his previous collection, Stolen Love Behaviour, employs Tarantino-style jump cuts) once remarked that if he really considered himself a writer, he wouldn’t be writing screenplays: ‘If I was a full-on writer I’d write novels’. Stammers is, without doubt, a full-on writer but on the evidence of this latest effort he might want to try his hand at writing novels or at the very least a creditable screenplay or two.

Stammers has always strived to produce a poetry that keeps up with the latest trends while also paying lip-service to legendary, A-list predecessors. The self-professed ‘fell love-child’ of Frank O’Hara and Anne Sexton (an unlikely coupling), he burst onto the UK poetry scene in 2001 with Panoramic Lounge-Bar. This was followed some three years later by a pamphlet of E.J. Thribb-style elegies titled Buffalo Bills, while, hot on its heels, his second collection Stolen Love Behaviour appeared in 2005. Attracting such cooing blurb epithets as, ‘the newly-crowned king of neo-pop cool’ and the vacuous, ‘so hip that it is amazing’, you could hear the wolf-whistles as Stammers cut a dash through North London. Reviewers fell for his brand of ‘slick’, ‘hip’, ‘cool’, ‘urbane’ poetic pronouncements on the rubbish that is modern life. Indeed, Stammers has frequently been led to comment on the phenomenon of himself: ‘If there’s a way in which I’m new’, he explained to one interviewer, ‘it’s in trying to use irony like a lamp, which helps illuminate romantic motifs for the modern sensibility.’ The romantic bent, the eye for life’s little ironies, are still in evidence; but this latest offering from Stammers – who is not now the novelty he once was – strongly suggests that he has lost his mojo. It may be that he has become too comfy in his own über-trendy niche; that he has started to believe his own publicity. Stammers’ hero Lou Reed once admitted to being ‘so easily seduced by the public image of Lou Reed that I’m in love with Lou Reed myself.’ If we replace ‘Lou Reed’ with ‘John Stammers’ here we come close to what appears to be Stammers’ predicament. A talent that may have seemed dazzlingly fresh and original, now, on the evidence of Interior Night, looks faded and tired.

There is a clumsy, faltering quality to the mode of expression in Interior Night, and it makes for a long, bumpy car-chase from one god-forsaken poem to the next. Flat, lacklustre descriptions, more akin to the directions that one might encounter in a poorly-executed screenplay, are there on almost every page. In fact, a scene description from Tarantino’s script for Reservoir Dogs, ‘Six guys wearing black suits, black thin ties are sitting around a table eating breakfast in a restaurant’, carries more suspenseful force than the opening of many of Stammers’ poems, such as these lines from ‘The University’: ‘A brown paper carrier bag stands / upright and open in the hallway / like a manhole’. A lazy approach to poetic language and style is perhaps most in evidence in the opening lines of ‘Black Dog’:

From the inward night of the unconscionably tall arched doorway,

the shadows commence a faint unnerving undulation;

they wear an awful sheen, as if the shade has been interminably brushed

after being treated in some sciency new conditioner.

This is bland, sloppy writing. As poetry, and even as prose, it is inelegant and inept, lacking fluency, assurance and energy. The analogy ‘as if the shade has been [...] brushed after being treated in some sciency new conditioner’ would read like a preposterous parody of simile if it weren’t for the fact that Stammers is deadly serious. In the poem ‘Mr Punch in Soho’, to give another example of failed simile, the eponymous hero’s legs ‘dangle like transplants from a much smaller body’. Punchy writing this is not. Time and again, the figurative language throughout the collection is inert, utterly unmemorable and devoid of imaginative panache.

Repeatedly, we are presented with dull, half-baked scenarios by Stammers’ unvarying cast of deadbeat, self-engrossed personae, all of whom seem to be stuck in an adolescent time-warp as they pay homage at the shrine of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, and appear as out-dated as your old man’s bottle of Old Spice. We are treated to the ultimate in cringe, the dad-rock persona of mid-life crisis. One such charmless man is caught in sad-pervert pose fantasising about Alison Goldfrapp while waiting for a tube train: ‘Thank heavens for you at least, Alison Goldfrapp / and your half-naked advert, your unconscionably elongated legs’. That the speaker is in the dark confines of the London Underground is no doubt supposed to lend mythic and cosmic weight to this sad, incoherent affair. ‘Alison, / I could wait at the end of the line for you’, is the lame attempt at a chat-up line. There is nothing ironic or mordantly witty about any of this.

Still in this vein, we get Stammers going into Angry Old Man overdrive in a harangue on the fashion industry titled ‘Haut Ordure’. ‘House Sale’ is a meaningless rant about the property market (‘Take your filthy cash and your Algerian finance; / leave my house alone’) and, lastly, from our working-class hero, there is a monologue spoken by a dinner-party host and representative of upper-class ennui, titled, oh-so-ironically, ‘The Débâcle’. None of these are mildly amusing, let alone sharply satirical; in fact they are downright embarrassing. We read shielding our eyes with our hands. ‘O’ is a monologue delivered by a world-weary sometime drug-user, a spokesman for the ‘children of the amphetamine generation’ who has nothing of consequence to say over two pages. As this poem and others testify, Stammers is drawn to the shock-tactic, the taboo subject, but it is the flaccid language of these poems and not their subject matter (which is far from shocking) that actually appalls, as in the opening lines of ‘O’ where the speaker sets the scene: ‘In an upstairs spare room / are faces congealed’. The syntax here is clunky, the handling amateurish, resulting in a bad trip for the reader as much as for the speaker.

The relentless bouts of self-absorbed introspection become more and more tedious: ‘My personality lacks all cohesion. I am in fragments’ (‘Interior Night’) echoes the similarly-adolescent-sounding ‘I wish my life were more coherent,’ in Stolen Love Behaviour’s ‘Nom de Guerre’. Everywhere, Stammers seems more interested in creating flimsy effects and mere mood lighting. ‘Out of my Depth’ reads like an exercise in cliché: ‘“Is he conscious?” they might be saying. Yes, yes! I’m somewhere out here in the edgeless sea, / or I’m close to choking, sucked, / like the final minute in an hourglass’. Images such as the ‘hourglass’, the ‘unfathomable abyss’, smack of the type of effects that students use as an instant formula for heightened dramatic flourishes in creative writing exercises. Too many of the pieces in this collection read like chopped-up prose articulated by personae that mope from line to line lacking any real understanding of self or world. As dramatic monologues they fail to deliver. The voices of these poems never become convincing presences; rather, like the members of a therapy group for out-of-work, washed-up actors, they are too engrossed in their own brand of self-indulgent theatricality to consider the possibilities of art itself.

It as though Stammers is reaching after a cinematic quality in his poetry that constantly eludes him. ‘Nightsweats in the Afternoon’ evokes a drink-fuelled siesta-time in some seedy tropical bar, making for a mind-numbing hangover experience for the reader. Every second sentence contains a gawky, sagging simile: ‘the bar’s screen door snaps closed / like a fly trap onto an incautious wasp’; ‘[I] wrestle up out of my bed / the way a forest moth squeezes itself / wriggling, eyeballs-out, from its cocoon’. There are lines that seem to be missing a verb: ‘Times like these I seek out the kitchen, / its long, wide screens slid fully back, / oblongs of wet tropical air into the room.’ Such attempts at creating a believable setting and atmosphere fall flat because the language itself is too obtrusive and graceless to convey anything.

Elsewhere, in the manner of Hitchcock perhaps, Stammers aims for something more enigmatic, casting mysterious, well-dressed women for this purpose. Thus, ‘The Woman’ opens with a woman sitting in a shaded corner. Initially, readers may find themselves being drawn into the woman’s world, but this feeling quickly evaporates when, just two lines on, the speaker, alone in a ‘vacant house’ turns unreliable:

I feel a touch on my arm. I look about the room.

There is no one else. The touch remains.

This is the type of attempt at an ominous, suspenseful tone that one might expect from beginners’ creative writing. The ham-fisted glut of misfiring similes in the opening lines is characteristic of the Stammers method. One of these spectacular misses is surely the simile to end all similes: ‘Her thighs kiss like delicate lesbians’, which rather spoils the mood. I won’t give away the ending of this set-piece except to say that it does come. Indeed, a common experience while reading Stammers is to find oneself thinking that one has reached the end of the poem only to turn the page to see that there is still some way to go. Alfred Hitchcock’s insight that ‘the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder’ is instructive. More successful is the over-stylized ‘Encounter with M.’ which builds gradually into a macabre evocation of human isolation. In this overtly cinematic poem the mise-en-scéne of the ornamental flower garden setting varies slightly with each take as two speakers in dialogue constantly reframe the memory and meaning of a love affair. And so, the sun is at first low casting long shadows, then high, then there are no shadows; the lawn is white then green then white again; the woman’s dress is first black then white, and so on. This filmic technique, disorienting for the first-time reader, plays effectively with representations of time and space, memory and continuity. ‘The Shrine of Proteus’ and ‘Paris Anywhere’, both impassable blocks of text, come towards the end of the collection, at which point the reader is now convinced that he has been reading prose all along. Perhaps, like Molière’s M. Jourdain, Stammers may be alarmed to discover that he has in fact been speaking prose for the past forty years without knowing it.

There are a small number of half-inspired moments throughout this otherwise droopy, half-hearted performance. Stammers’ rendering of Rimbaud in ‘His Stolen Heart’ is interesting in the way that it brings out the ironic self-reflexivity of what is too often read as the  straightforwardly autobiographical. Rimbaud is of course the poète maudit, an icon for rock and punk-rock culture, and his influence is pervasive – an unsurprising model for an ageing devotee of the Underground – but, as Leonard Cohen put it, ‘it’s hard to be a poète maudit when you have a good tan’, and Stammers is too old to be confining his talents to empty teenage kicks and showy, adolescent-style romantic gestures which too often fall flat. It is no accident that many of the best poems in Stammers’ oeuvre are homages to the artists who have influenced him and whose example has, in some cases, inspired and enlivened his own writing. His tribute to Weldon Kees (‘Aspects of Kees’) from Panoramic Lounge Bar deserves a mention for its energetic word-play and the propulsive rhyming riff that drives the words over the breaks with dexterous ease. Much of the appeal of Stammers’ previous work lay in the way that he addressed the subject of contemporary love and marriage as a self-described ‘post post-modern love poet’, playful and exuberant when at peak performance.

Now, some years on, it seems that his heart isn’t in it, and this latest collection fails to reach a point of maturity or insight. Instead, we get Stammers struggling with mindless special effects, desperately ransacking his fast-depleting store of props and gimmicks, and wheeling out the same desperate characters. That the poems fail to unfold in an organic, fluid way proves that any resemblance to Frank O’Hara is purely fictitious. Stammers has, from the first, been marketed as ‘an English Frank O’Hara’, but if his current form is anything to go by he is the very opposite of the American poetic dynamo, formal athlete and artistic sophisticate. Stammers’ is not free verse, but it should come free of charge.  Stammers needs to borrow a pair of O’ Hara’s tight pants and stop letting himself go if he’s to lose the verbal flab and tone up for his big-screen come-back. Cinema and poetry have long looked to each other; as O’Hara himself quipped, ‘only Whitman, Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies’. Stammers has a long way to go if he is ever to equal the movies.

© Maria Johnston

John Stammers, Interior Night, Picador, 2010. £8.99, ISBN 978-0-33051-338-8

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.