One of the grimmer aspects of the response I got to my two notes regarding Amiri Baraka last week – and I received nearly as many emails as there were comments linked publicly to each note – was the overall sense that everyone has already made up their mind vis-à-vis his poetry. That seems to me a terrible trap for any writer, whether their work is regarded positively or negatively. It means that new works will not be looked at with any sort of fresh eye. Regardless of what it says or does, it will be seen as confirming what one already thinks one knows. If suddenly Baraka were to change as a poet, how would we know it?
Interestingly, I got notes telling me that I was an apologist for all the things Baraka has written & said, and notes telling me that my comments were blog equivalent of a drive-by hit on him. I don’t think I had done either, actually. What I’d hoped to do – still have some vain desire in this regard – is simply to pose the question: what if you or I or anyone is not reading him appropriately? What if there is greater continuity in his work than anyone – himself included – has been able to acknowledge? What would that mean? How would that change our reading?
As poets age, many readers come to think they know what this writer’s work means. You read a couple of early books & decide that X fits into this box or under that camp, or is simply not your cup of poetry. They may continue writing for another 30 or 40 years, but perhaps to an increasingly narrow audience as people gradually decided they know what the next John Ashbery or Sharon Olds or Michael McClure poem is going to look, sound & taste like, without having to do the work of reading the text itself.
And there’s no question, certain poets polarize audiences, sometimes in extreme ways. The late d. alexander used to tell the story of how he dedicated an early issue of his magazine Odda Talla to Clayton Eshleman only to have a woman show up at his apartment door waving a pistol in his face, telling him never to do that again. It was never clear to him why.
Eshleman is a polarizing figure, no doubt. He’s a man with strong opinions, with a vision for what he (and just possibly you) should be doing in the world, which he presents in a manner that could only be called blunt. It’s not a stance calculated to curry favor, but it has served Eshleman well, since it is the key to what’s made him one of the great editors of all time. Caterpillar may have been more raw than Sulfur, but it was the first publication to take the Olsonian paradigm to a new place. This gave it a fundamentally different flavor than, say, Coyote’s Journal (after which Caterpillar was to some degree modeled), whose goal had more to articulate projectivism than to inspect it critically. Edited with the help of contributing editor Robert Kelly, Caterpillar between 1967 & 1973 was the first publication to acknowledge the importance of poets such as Jerome Rothenberg, David Antin, Diane Wakoski & Jackson Mac Low. Its special issue on Jack Spicer remains a key text in the evolution of Spicer from a marginal outsider to a central figure in the New American canon. Caterpillar also gave Eshleman a vehicle through which to bring the poets whose work he was translating – Vallejo & Cesaire in particular – into a context that made them available to American poets, really for the first time. Considering Projectivism’s curiously nativist horizon – Paul Blackburn’s translations of the troubadours & of the Poem of the Cid is the major exception – Eshleman’s contribution went beyond his own considerable skills as a translator. It is absolutely impossible to imagine poetry today without Caterpillar’s impact very close to the surface of where we are, even for many poets who may never have even seen a copy.
In 14 books of his own poetry since the mid-1960s, Eshleman has spelled out his vision, both for poetry & of the world, returning again & again to themes that have taken him to the earliest cave paintings & to explore contemporary art & post-Reichian conceptions of the body & psyche. You may not agree with Eshleman – I can’t say that I’ve ever met anyone who did – but you have to admit that it all fits together. It’s as complete a vision as any poet ever gets to have.
And that, of course, both its pro & its con. If, reading a book or two, you sense that you “get it,” is there a reason to keep reading? The August issue of the online magazine Ygdrasil is devoted to Clayton’s poetry, and it’s an excellent opportunity to check out his current work & test this very question. Save for brief notes by John Olson &Ygdrasil’s editor, the bulk of the issue is given over to printing seven new poems from a larger manuscript entitled Life in the Folds. Here is the title poem:
Imagination has never met
a non-love it did not love, or
a wall with which it did not become engaged.
I am a convict of light
in the suction panic of the sun.
The range is eternity,
the focus? The halter of time —
a babe in halter we spring up and down,
restrained, eternity invades our dreams,
spreads across the stone,
form trancing form. What is
is inherent in what is not.
Only in the abyss do time and eternity
dissolve into a sinless
source of origin. The first image was
a prompter box, gesturing to
an us spread out like bat wings on
a stone relief. Each second is
vertical with middened hives,
I fish for bait trapped in my own line.
Across the stone, the actor hordes are
streaming ochre, enmassed
manganese penetrates
their menstrual pour. The tunnel is
enlightenment if
death's lager can be drunk there.
Silo hide, imprisoned sand
course my throat, an appled road rent
with all who have responded to daybreak's
roll call of bones.
In the suction panic of the sun, we are
entwisted spectres, our veins
streaming with verdure,
octopodal bursts of infant flowers,
tender calcium — in your
outstretched hand you hold our wheat,
in your torso interior a banquet hall collapses,
a Lethe seeping into mist-dead-dusk.
In comparison, all retwists — I watch
a watch-headed serpent
enter your red breast-hung hall —
on the same mobius strip
we act, via awareness of death,
as if we are alone.
Your head disappeared eons ago,
my tombal shoulders, armless, and dimming with
sallow orchards, writhe stilly
as your charge bolts and
makes beaver shapes in Matta's mind. I spot him
at the horizon's vortex where the panic hits
and the sun takes on stick insect
latitude, filmy cosmic trestle
before which we bend and whisper,
green fuses trapped in a summons that runs
through the known,
now picking up some shred turds of
uncharted waste.
I participate, in advance,
in future time. My point of reference is
spherical, amoebic,
a chorus of strings. I take my leads from
tunnel intestinal macaroni,
ancestor lines wandering
having left their rear-ending hole
— no one has touched bottom,
bottom is a hole at the speed of
engendering poles. The jungle holds up
a mirror, we see we are chalk traceries in
outer space grasped briefly
as elves under amanitas in the garden of
steel-infested self. Traceries
where armored gnomes slash at
menstrual slits. Right now
this raspberry is flooding my mind, a head of
yellow breasts is wearing a Pieta wig. I
set it aside to make way for
an automobile sprouting towers of enraged Iraqis,
like derricks of vegetal steam
they wave in and out of view.
I press no button
but I'm American through and not through,
mind is a jet engine suctioning
imperial drift, attempting to register
an allegiance to dehumanized Palestinians
as well as to the Daughters of Energy
still viable at Le Combel.
Matta now reveals himself:
red disk painted limestone
with a vulvar fold
perpendicular through his being.
A shift, and he is a flayed dog head studying
a vagina on fire as its soot
surges through an amber emporium of astral scree.
It is the profound and beautiful
femininity of the earth
that is always under man attack.
I crawl toward the mirage of an Aurignacian
candelabra
still glistening with cosmic dive.
I eat a leech and watch its Whitmanian suckers
unfold, this is wholeness,
or, as close as I'll ever get to a closure
packed with the rubble of
rhinocerotic metonomy.
[
The old obsessions are still all in place. Yet it is worth noting just how very specific Eshleman’s language is. There is nothing rote or bland or abstract here, even if the structure of the poem itself is expository. Yet, in reality, this is perhaps the most “abstract” poem in Ygdrasil selection, or perhaps more accurately, the poem that operates at the highest level of abstraction, in that it is the thematic text, whereas many of the others can be read as extensions or instances evolved out of its theses.
The syntax, as always the case with Eshleman, is modular & sensuous, the vocabulary remarkable. Even if you have no interest whatsoever in what Eshleman is arguing here, I think any poet can learn an enormous amount about writing itself from immersing oneself in Eshleman’s devices & tactics. In much the same way that one can read Michael McClure without being interested in his topics, his sense of the intersection between science & nature, or the history of the Beats per se, simply because there is no other poet better at the pacing of detail, Eshleman offers great riches when it comes to thinking through the relationship between line & syntax, between argument & word choice. And one thing revisiting this selection makes clear, Eshleman’s chops haven’t gone dull in the slightest. The Ygdrasil collection is published on a single web page, which makes it easy to download & save. You should.
