RESPONSE TO SILLIMAN AND OTHERS

I appreciate Ron’s comradely display in printing my poem, and urging others to read me.

However, by cocooning the poem in some negative personal comments, I don’t think he offered my work a level playing field. The D Alexander statement about the woman with the gun was made up by D, as he later admitted to me, at the time he mistakenly thought I had had an affair with his current girlfriend.

For Ron to say that he has never met anyone who agreed with me is ridiculous. Maybe he should talk to some of the two hundred or so people who have reviewed my work in a positive way over the years. As for my old obsessions still being in place: probably true, and also true for many poets who have remained vital in their senior years, like Blake, Stevens, and Zukofsky. I suspect that Ron has not followed my work in the 80s and 90s while it was being effected by my research on the origin of image-making via the Ice Age painted caves of southwestern France. It is true that I came into poetry with a roily nigredo, and probably true that there are streaks of it in whatever transformations I have managed to carry off over the years. But these are matters that deserve a closer inspection than a dismissive generalization.

As for the poem itself: the title of “Life in the Folds,” comes from Henri Michaux. I believe La vie dans les plis is the title of a collection of his poems. I encountered the phrase, relative to my use of it as a title, at the Malingue art gallery in Paris, on my birthday (June 1), 2004, where I spent a very happy several hours inspecting a Matta show, with paintings and drawings from 1936 to 1944. Matta used the phrase in a statement that was posted at the beginning of the show. After a half hour or so of looking, I began to write rapidly (though not automatically) in a notebook, drifting around the gallery, from painting to painting (or drawing to drawing), letting Matta’s metaphoric deep space constructions (that evoke the cosmos as well as the recesses of the mind) to impinge and flush out language. A few of my phrases, “convict of light,” or “panic suction of the sun,” are spontaneous translations of Matta titles.

Matta is indescribable in the way that late Arshile Gorky is, and is thus a delicious challenge to articulate, since any words one finds seem to come out of a collision between one’s own tapped subconscious and anti-illustrative forms. Since no single responder on the blog mentioned Matta (whose name is mentioned twice in the poem, signaling, I would think, a direct connection), I suspect most of the reaction was just that—instead of a careful, thoughtful reading that would test the poem against the Chilean master’s tensions, ambiguities, contradictions, and psychic frustrations. Had someone said: I know Matta’s work, as well as Eshleman’s, and frankly I don’t think the latter connected here, I might disagree but I would accept such a position as fair—at least it would have come with a context.

We all know that anyone can pull a few lines out of context and shit on them (there are lines in Whitman, for example, that taken by themselves fairly writhe with vanity). So I don’t have much to say to those who used my poem for pot-shots.

Southside:is it possible that I, unwittingly, sat down on your pet chihuahua, while I was in Dublin, summer of 2003? If so, and if you will crawl out from under your anonymity helmet, I will send you a new one.

Curtis Faville: what have clogged freeways to do with my 25 year investigation of Upper Paleolithic art? Would you say the same thing to Jared Diamond (who unlike me does, at times, live in Los Angeles, where I have not lived since 1986) concerning his research in New Guinea?

As for your complaint about my line with the phrase “cosmic dive,” why didn’t you at least google the phrase? If you had, you would have found out something that might have given you pause for years: it appears that the cosmic dive may be the oldest myth we still know of, as it seems to have been brought via the Bering land bridge by the first European occupiers of the Americas possibly as early at 15,000 B.P. Thus there is the possibility that it was part of European Cro-Magnon consciousness. In my book, Juniper Fuse, you will find a section which mulls over this possibility. To determine whether or no I used the phrase effectively, you would have to know what it meant!

As for not being able to have thing both ways: poetry, on one level, is about having things both or all three or all nine ways. A = not A. Tat Tvam Asi. Lautréamont wants to say hello.

As for my line “I am an American through and not through,” please note the preceding lines, which forcast the jet engine metaphor which so upset you. It is true there is a waver in these 10 lines (beginning with “enraged Iraqis” down through “Le Combel”), with some very fast counterpoint but if you can follow Olson or Vallejo when they move fast, you should be able to grasp the coherence here. For 50 years I have been suctioning “imperial drift,” in a way that reminds me of jet engines devouring birds. American governmental insanity and ravage blows in whether I like it or not. An American through and not through, I am responsible and not responsible as a citizen poet, as someone who sees himself as a figure always positioned against a ground.

Clayton Eshleman