The Clock of Years
-- William Carlos Williams

Every man
is his own clock
....Tic toc
he may rise
by the sun
and go to sleep
with the stars
....Tic toc
but if he
take stock
and come to knock
at fate's door
he may find
that he himself
has sprung the lock
against himself.
Useless
to knock
now, the door
will not open--
save only
at the shock
of love,
to deliver him
from that block,
unlock
his heart and
set it beating again:
....Tic toc
....Tic toc
....tic toc!

When I first sat down to piece together a post on Paul Auster’s Oracle Night, I found myself at a loss for a direction, as a paradoxical condition similar to being both loss in a labyrinth as well as being at sea without a compass. Not claustrophobic, but not the freedom of an open spaciousness either. Somewhere between the two?

Auster writes books of components, assembled within interconnected themes and characters and stories that constantly churn out further stories. Finding a center that holds the pieces all together?

Often with post-modern writing (I‘m thinking of DeLillo and Pynchon), the flood of information remains partly on the surface to demonstrate a contemporary world awash in the proliferated changes that have resulted from the past century’s exponential developments. And while this is an aspect of Auster’s writing also, the difference is that with each of the tangents he places into his narratives, even if only a page long, they are not without their own intensity.

One could imagine turning the book inside out with the main narrative becoming only minor and one of the side stories being developed into a central narrative, and done so without any loss to the end impact of the reading.

As a reader moves through Oracle Night, they find that the most prominent story in the book is concerned with marriage. David Orr is a writer in his mid 30’s, and when the book begins, we find that he has just reentered the world after a near fatal accident. More specifically, in the first few pages, we find him at a stationary shop to purchase some writing supplies. From here, the book burrows in and out of various striated story lines, of which include David’s daily life, his personal life, stories that are told by other characters, the manuscript he begins to write, books contained within the manuscript being written, and so on.

And all of these stories are told with exacting detail, reflecting the influence noir has had on Auster. All, except for David Orr’s relationship with his wife.

Through various cryptic remarks and behaviors displayed by David Orr's wife, the reader picks up on an intense uncertainty existing, which does not result in animosity or tension so much as a strain within the mind of David Orr (and the reader) to fill the gap, the blank, the unknown. And it is David Orr’s process of coming to terms with this unknown that becomes the focus of the book. Is it better to leave it as an unknowable? Something David Orr should simply let pass in its own good time? Should he play detective and assemble all the possible clues to formulate a ‘most likely’ scenario, at the risk of falling into personal subjectivity? Face the matter as a realist, believing that a factual account is possible and should be strived for as much as possible?

These are the questions we all ask of ourselves when understanding any relationship, and which become most prominent and consequential within a marriage. And this is in line with the rest of Auster’s books as they all involve the known and the unknown aspects inherent to relationships. Auster also writes about what it means to be a writer, especially in his first book, The New York Trilogy, and is returned to again in Oracle Night, but this also embodies a relationship, the relationship between the author and his work, which can then be subsequently extended to a person’s relationship with reading, with life, and with other people-- as something which we create. If not always the outcome, then our relational understanding of the relationship.

This is the second time I’ve read Oracle Night and the first time around it slipped past me from not picking up on how all the varied pieces work together. I’m hesitant to say “into a whole”, instead, closer to how they are all reflect one of the same.

The one thing I try to do in all my books is to leave enough room in the prose for the reader to inhabit it. Because I finally believe that it’s the reader who writes the book and not the writer. In my own case as a reader (and I’ve certainly read more books than I’ve written!), I find that I almost invariably appropriate scenes and situations from a book and graft them onto my own experiences—or vice versa. In reading a book like Pride and Prejudice, for example, I realized at a certain point that all the events were set in the house I grew up in as a child. No matter how specific a writer’s description of a place might be, I always seem to twist it into something I’m familiar with. I’ve asked a number of my friends if this happens to them when they read fiction as well. For some yes, for others no. I think this probably has a lot to do with one’s relation to language, how one responds to words printed on a page. Whether the words are just symbols, or whether they are passageways into our unconscious.

--Paul Auster; from a 1988 interview at BOMB Magazine

Paul Auster reads Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

[O’Connell Bridge; Jack B. Yeats, 1927]

Sky, be blue, and more than blue; wind, be flesh and
........blood; flesh and blood, be deathless;
....walls, streets, be home;
....desire of millions, become more real than warmth
........and breath and strength and bread;
....clock, point to the decisive hour and, hour without
........name when stacked and waiting murder fades,
........dissolves, stay forever as the world grows new

--from Denoument, Kenneth Fearing

Fearing's poems generally are longer than what I like to place into a post, so instead I'll keep it to excerpts, trying to focus upon those which show the duality in Fearing's portryals, how he can be both sympathetic and critical at the same time, as well as how his poetry is as relevant as it ever was, possibly even more so.

....City, city, city
eye without vision, light without warmth, voice without
........mind, pulse without flesh
mirror and gateway, mirage, cloud against the sun
do you remember that, that year, that season, that day,
........that hour, that name, that face
do you remember
....Only the day, fulfilled, as it burns in the million
........windows of the west
only the promise of the day, returning, as it flames on
....the roofs and spires and steeples of the east.

--from 'Manhattan'

Lady, the demand is for a dream that lives and grows
........and does not fade when the midnight theater
........special pulls out on track 15;
....cracker, the demand is for a dream that stands and
........quickens and does not crumble when a
........General Motors dividend is passed;
....lady, the demand is for a dream that lives and grows
........and does not die when the national guardsmen
........fix those cold, bright bayonets;
....cracker, the demand is for a dream that stays, grows
........real, withstands the benign, afternoon vision
........of the clublady, survives the cracker's evening
........fantasy of honor, and profit, and grace.

--from '$2.50'

....1000, 2000, 3000, 4000
is that just right to match the feeling that you want
5000, 6000
is that just right
7000, 8000
is that what you want to match the feeling that you have
9000, 10,000
would you like to tune in upon your very own life, gone
........somewhere far away.

--from 'Radio Blues'

But wondering, too, what it really was I at one time felt
........so deeply for,
The actual voice, or this muted thunder? These giant
........shadows, or the naked face?
Or something within the voice and behind the face?--

And wondering whether, now, I would have the courage
........to reply, in fact,
Or any longer know the words, or even find the voice.

--from 'Mrs. Fanchier at the Movies'

The primary way people are introduced to poetry is through major anthologies and classrooms, or at least that's the way it has been for the past couple generations. But the internet can change all that as it presents new ways and opportunities to expose people to poetry. Maybe poetry doesn't have to be so arcane after all, and this is especially valuable considering the number of poets with top quality material but don't make it into the major channels of eduation and distribution. Anyway, there are a few good essays online about Fearing which are helping to give him the exposure he deserves. First, from 'On Fearing's Poetry' at MAP:

Desire in Fearing's poetry circulates through a highly orchestrated and technical habitus of radios, magazines, tickers, boulevards, dance-halls, theaters, and clinics that all are wholly rigged for commodity exchange. In such a setting, one's full social being is constantly deferred and dispersed across a network of alienating subject positions of collectors, salesmen, movie queens, and magnates. Into this dehumanizing scene, Fearing deploys the verbal techniques of black humor, parody, and burlesque to unmask the ways in which advanced capitalism solicits subjects ideologically. Employing anaphora, the poet's relentless direct address to "you," the reader, seizes on the language of sales advertising so as to subvert its all too familiar categories of textual representation.

And from another essay at MAP, 'Kenneth Fearing's Carreer', which explains why I have little interest in Carl Sandburg but a lot of interst in Fearing:

He also takes over much of Sandburg's subject matter: cityscapes, working-class and criminal characters, and upperclass fools and scoundrels. But Fearing is no Sandburg clone. He is wittier than Sandburg, with a gift for parody that Sandburg lacks, and more impersonal, more pessimistic, and more cynical. Moreover, he also writes under the influence of the High Modernists, especially Eliot, and is therefore more experimental than Sandburg and more daring in his violation of traditional standards of logic, coherence, and literary decorum. And to this strange amalgam of the Sandburgian and the Eliotic, he makes three contributions of his own: the frequent use, and not always ironically, of a defiantly trite "unpoetic" vocabulary; an occasional fracturing of normal grammar (though never in the manner of Cummings); and a frequently oblique, offbeat approach to otherwise unoriginal subject matter, dramatic situations, or themes. When to all of this is added Fearing's gift for precise but unexpected and quirky turns of phrase, the result is a body of work that escapes easy classification. If Fearing occasionally sounds like another poet, no other poet ever sounds like Fearing.

Finally from the essay 'And Wow He Died As How He Lived' at Poetry Foundation, which is where I originally became familiar with Fearing's work:

During the darkest days of the Great Depression, artist Alice Neel painted a surreal portrait of her friend, the poet Kenneth Fearing. In it, the gaunt 33-year-old stares out through owl-rimmed glasses, eye sockets hollow from exhaustion and hunger, a gaping hole in his chest. There, a grinning skeleton perches, spilling a river of blood.

These were dark times. And Fearing was the poet for them.

Kenneth Fearing is known as the chief poet of the American Depression as he lived and wrote during the 1930’s and his subject matter focused upon urban disillusionment resulting from the ills of commercial capitalism. Predatory social behaviors, false expectations, emotional isolation, the commodification of the physical body, empty materialism, anxieties on top of anxieties, and, of course, the corruption of those with power and money on their side, provided Fearing with plenty of fodder to craft his poetry. Not surprisingly, it has much in common with pulp novels, which he also happened to write under a pseudonym. Low brow street talk providing a percentage of his vernacular, but also the use of irony, satire and vivid images to raise the poetry up to the level of literature. I open his selected poems for two random selections (‘Dear Beatrice Fairfax’ and ‘1933’ respectively):

But just the same, baby, and never forget,
….it takes a neat, smart, fast, good, sweet doublecross
….to doublecross the gentleman who doublecrossed the
………..gentleman who doublecrossed
….your doublecrossing, doublecrossing, doublecross
………..friend.

And,

Crawled amorously into bed. Felt among the maggots
……..for the moldering lips. The crumbled arms.
……..Found them.

Its been said before that poetry loss some of its audience in the early part of the 20th century because of the rise of other forms of media, such as radio, movies and eventually television. If this is true, it explains why there are not more Kenneth Fearings lining the poetry sections. While his poetry holds enough technical and historical merit to have it placed into the American canon, it is also poetry that’s FUN, in the same way a Tom Waits album or a graphic novel is fun, and both these mediums likely being what replaced the audience for the style of poetry Fearing wrote. But maybe ‘replaced’ isn’t the best word. Instead, ‘incorporated’ or ‘evolved from’, to help make notice of the similarities.

Part of this artistic fun includes good drama. As much as Fearing placed satire and critiques into his writing, there is an equal amount of melancholic compassion for his ‘characters’ as they struggle in the mire and cement of their urbanely urban lives. When Fearing does lay down his attacks, the portrayals are typically with minimal depth, similar in the way news articles present their stories, preferring a writing that is fractured, purposefully shallow and borderline sensationalistic, quantity over quality being the greed filled way. This thin sporadicism of coverage is something which Fearing artistically emulated, even composing at times from headlines and snippets of broadcasts to have his poetry echo the ways in which mass information is provided to the public (he also worked as a journalist). However, while unapologetically sardonic, what keeps Fearing from falling into an unappealing bitterness are the lone grace notes he plays at the end of his dark alleys, which remind his readers that he remains with hope towards a better future and not without sensitivity to all of our varied and lonely carks. From 'American Rhapsody (I)':

These are merely close-ups.
....At a distance these eyes and faces and arms,
....maimed in the expiation of living, scarred in payment
............exacted through knife, hunger, silence, hope,
............exhaustion, regret,
....melt into an ordered design, strange and significant,
............and not without peace.

[Landscape of the Summer Solstice; Paul Nash]

The second half of 'Secret Beach' by the Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau Quartet. Enjoy the Summer Solstice!

["Catfish"; Bakufu, 1940]

Waded, watched, warbled
learned to write on slate
with chalk from an ancient sea

If I could float my tentacles
through the deep...
pulsate an invisible glow

--Lorine Niedecker

Influence of the Japanese haiku master, Matsuo Bashō, is very prominent in Niedecker’s poems. Although they differ a bit in that haiku often has substantial leaps in the images and ideas, which brings both spaciousness as well as clarity to whatever is chosen to be brought into the poem. Niedecker, on the other hand, often keeps a lyrical quality in order to hold her poems together. Where Japanese haiku finds freedom in open connection, Niedecker finds freedom in sonic connection.

Something in the water
like a flower
will devour

water

flower

*

Sky
in my favor

to fly
to downtown crowds
home

and Bashō
on my mind

*

The eye
of the leaf
into leaf
and all parts
…..spine
into spine
neverending
…..head
to see

But now two examples for when Niedecker does incorporate a more traditional Asian style:

Stone
and that hard
contact--
the human

*

…….Frog noise
…….suddenly stops

Listen!
They turned off
their lights

As a result of the economic hardships during the 1930's, Niedecker went through a Socialism stage, a political stance which was also shared by the core Objectivists and probably by most in the arts during that time in American history. Niedecker's poetry in this phase though wasn't near as good as during the rest of her life. Too singular and obviously allegoric. She eventually loosened the writing up again, but did so while still bringing in socio-political subject matter, only as components for the poetry rather than their being the basis for the poems. Some examples:

........Foreclosure

Tell em to take my bare walls down
my cement abutments
their parties thereof
and clause of claws

Leave me the land
Scratch out: the land

May prose and property both die out
and leave me peace

*

The man of law
......on the uses
..........of grief

The poet
......on the law
..........of the oak leaf

*

Unsurpassed in beauty
this autumn day

The secretary of defense
knew precisely what

the undersecretary of state
was talking about

*

I rose from marsh mud,
algae, equisetum, willows,
sweet green, noisy
birds and frogs

to see her wed in the rich
rich silence of the church,
the little white slave-girl
in her diamond fronds.

In aisle and arch
the satin secret collects.
United for life to serve
silver. Possessed.

*For this last one, it maybe should be pointed out that, at least to me, the only time Niedecker left her distanced, 'objective' voice was when occassionally writing about marriage and love. Which I don't see as a weakness in her poetry, only that she was human (her first marriage ended because of economic reasons during the Great Depression and she never married again after that).

It is not entirely clear if Lorine Niedecker should be included with the original Objectivists or recognized as the movement’s first predecessor. In 1931 Zukofsky published an issue of Poetry magazine devoted to the Objectivists and Niedecker was so enthralled by the poetry, she mailed Zukofsky to express her enthusiasm and included a copy of one of her own poems. Zukofsky reciprocated the interest and a lifetime relationship began-- as friends, even lovers for a brief period early on, and fellow cohorts toward the aesthetics and principles of the Objectivist movement.

Though committed to the concept of words as objects, embodied with both literal and non-literal properties, Niedecker strayed from the Objectivists in that she was also influenced by French surrealism. Where a poet like Zukofsky tended to strive for clarity in his language, to coincide with perception, Niedecker preferred abstraction, replicating the convulsive movements of the mind in her poetry rather than the poem being a mode for clarification. Although, she always refrained from the poem being a vehicle for subjective expressionism and instead, to have qualities closer in relation to the dream state prior to being reduced to the personal.

The influence of the surrealists is particularly noticeable in Niedecker’s first poems, working from images that are encased within a loose syntax and illogical transitions. A strong resemblance with John Ashbery. However, in the 1940’s she began writing short poems that displayed Asian poetry as a significant influence and continued to do so until the end of her life. Niedecker also made a commitment of not allowing her poetry to be removed from her folk roots, as she was raised in Wisconsin and chose to remain there for her adult life-- almost entirely removed from the literary establishment. And a poet can never write outside of their personal local, which always becomes material for content. For Niedecker this included the natural world, Wisconsin's marshes, the dramatic changes in seasons known to the regions about the Great Lakes (along with one main street through town where sits a bank, a church, a bar and a neon sign). What resulted was a unique blend of poetry that was entirely modern and urban in its construction while also grounded in the cycles of the earth and with a faint background of back road Americana.

Your erudition
the elegant flower
of which

my blue chicory
at scrub end
of campus ditch

illuminates

[Dance of Spring (Song of the Birds); Joseph Stella, 1924]

John Cage on sound, Duchamp, Kant, pleasure, traffic and silence.

"Specifically, a writer of music." The composite of notes proceeded with assumed qualities in a definite proportion. But, as dreamed, they controlled the nature of plants, bodies, etc., and the elements of the notes became not easy to separate. And, on the large muscle of the back, which passes from the spine to the head, they were settling longitudinally, like the wings of certain insects, where in the large opening of the roof in the ancient house stood the air.

--Louis Zukofsky

[Dancer; T'Ang dynasty]

Android, loving beggar, dive to the poor
As your love would even without head to you,
Graze like machined wheels, green, from off this stone
And preying on each terrified chest, lost
Say, I am old as the globe, the moon, it
Is my old shoe, yours, be free as the leaves.

Fly, mantis, on the poor, arise like leaves
The armies of the poor, strength: stone on stone
And build the new world in your eyes, Save it!

--from "Mantis" (LZ)

William Carlos Williams on Zukofsky's second book of poems, Anew: "This book is brilliant through an over-all consciousness of its own warmth, its own despairs, its own excellence in the writing. It is happy, happy of a welcoming warmth. That is one of its subtlest and most obvious successes -- its serenity in love. For by knowing how to write Zukofsky has found it possible again to express love. You cannot express anything unless you invent how to express it. A poem is not a freudian 'escape' (what childlishness) but an adult release to knowledge, in the most practical, engineering manner."

This science is then like gathering flowers of the
...........weed
One who works with me calls birdseed
That are tiny and many on one stem
They shed to the touch tho on a par
...........with the large flower
That picked will find a vase.
I see many things at one time
...........the harder the conepts get,
Or nothing
Which is a forever become me over forty years.
I am like another, and another, who has
...........finished learning
And has just begun to learn.
If I turn pages back
A child may as well be staring with me
Wondering at the meaning
I turn to last
Perhaps.

--from No. 12

Zukofsky’s first book of short poems, 55 Poems, was published in 1941 and has two of his more well known works, Poem beginning “The”, an early collage work where each line is composed from another literary reference, and “Mantis”, a poem which outlines Zukofsky’s approach to poetics. These are the most difficult poems in the collection, but in the age of the internet, it only takes about a three minute search to locate some solid analyses of each to help you get into a reading.

The rest of 55 Poems are fairly straightforward, the first group actually being my favorite where each small poem portrays an aspect of a city along the East coast-- presumably Manhattan, and then incorporated into artistic ideas. The effect is being both on a physical and poetical tour, which is particularly effective in that while the individual poems are open-ended, typically the poem that follows carries on an idea or image from the previous. With this, the focus is upon the meandering connections rather than conclusions, as how you might conceptualize a bike ride or when exploring a new city. Two examples:

13
We are crossing the bridge now,
I can feel it by the sound
The wheels make over the waters.
To-night we cannot see
From the windows. But there are lights
Of two shores. And if you open the door
The water-wind blows in the brume
Which covers us.

14
Only water--

We seek of the water
The water’s love!

Shall we go again
Breast to water-breast,

Gather the fish-substance,
The shining fire,
The phosphor-subtlety?

We sing who were many in the South,
At each live river mouth
Sparse-lighted, carried along!

And I can’t resist this gem:

2
Not much more than being,
Thoughts of isolate, beautiful
Being at evening, to expect
…………………..at a river front:

A shaft dims
With a turning wheel;

Men work on a jetty
By a broken wagon;

Leopard, glowing-spotted,
…….The summer river--
Under:……The Dragon:

Louis Zukofsky, born in 1904 to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, is identified as one of the Objectivists in the 1930’s, a poetic movement which developed a poetic style that placed emphasis upon a poet’s direct observation of the world for the purposes of then recreating the perception through the poem in such a way that emphasized the poem existing as an object itself, as similar to what had been observed. Selection of details being paramount, then replicated in the poem in such a way that the components of syntax and lines could bring further clarification to the subject matter.

The lines of this new song are nothing
But a tune making the nothing full
Stonelike become more hard than silent
The tune’s image holding in the line.

This resulted in a dense poetry void of extraneous words in order to stress the importance of the materials incorporated. Appropriately, sincerity is valued over irony and the movement is closer aligned with classicism rather than romanticism. A comparison could also be made to the poetic forms of Asia, largely because of the ideograms which form Asian languages having similarities to the Objectivist quality of poems as ‘objects’.

In the past I have not read Zukofsky because of his classical foundation (my aesthetic tastes more aligned with the romantics) and because of his being identified as being “obscure”, described once by Guy Davenport as a “poet’s poet's poet”. However, because of my enjoying other Objectivists (mainly George Oppen) and their successors (Williams, Creeley, Snyder, Gizzi) and having a taste for Asian poetics, I gave Zukofsky a try. Fortunately, I picked up his collection of short poems, entitled “ALL”, rather than his other major work, “A”, the content of which is based on social and political issues and often written in formal verse. In contrast, his shorter poems are freer in form and more personal, if not in subject matter than to fulfill a basic desire to understand his relation to the world through an Orphic voice.

While these have qualities attributable to romanticism, Zukofsky remains focused upon the importance of clarity, "The emotional quality of good poetry is founded on exact observation". As a result, Apollo remains his guide, to both accurately depict the physical world-- creating some incredibly vivid scenes through precise word choice and imagery, whether natural or urban-- and to forge through the fire, anvil, stone of poetic craft a representation for his philsophical ideal of micro-macro totality, the compiled instances of Aristotelian light, drawing attention to the inseparable and ongoing relations between the part and the whole and forming the basis for what Zukofsky believes constitutes the creative responsibility of love, implications extending from the individuality of life and into economic and social systems.

To be and not to understand.
To understand nothing
and be content
to watch the light against
leaf-shadowed ground.
To accept the ground.
To go to it as a question.
To open up the day inside the day,
a bubble holding air
bending the vista to it.
To be inside this thing,
outside in the grass place,
out in the day
inside another thing.

--from Stung; Peter Gizzi

"after Altamira, all is decadence" --Pablo Picasso

[Venus of Lespugue, ca. 23,000 BCE, mammoth ivory, ca. 7 1/2]

Out of a curdling imposion,
out of a caldron of generational fat,
the Venus of Lespugue rises
and is caught at the waist by
--is it mother flesh
she is ascending through?
As if she would completely pop out, a maiden.
The I look again: she is docile,
her bowed head dove-like
over a bulbous
double stomach, forearms flaccid.
Buffie Johnson noticed the arms were wing-like,
that Lespugue has tail feathers.
One senses that Lespugue is a frozen instant
where woman breaking into a bird
breaking into a woman were seized and held,
the pupa of each.
The daughter rises out of the mother core,
bird-shaman invested.
Footless Lespugue--
held upside down, from the back
her pressed-leg-stumps become a head,
buttocks enormous breasts

--from Matrix Blower; Clayton Eshleman

Today, wilderness and nature at large have become increasingly insular. Mother nature has become man's problem child-- we must now take care of her. And the nuclear bomb is not the only repository for contemporary terror. In 2002, Adrienne Rich wrote me: "I think that modernity itself drives people into terror and hence into presumed certitudes of tribalism, fundamentalism, their concomitant patriarchalism, and even suicidalism."

--Clayton Eshleman

from Transformational Gradations
--C. E.

My innate Indiana tendency is
to tiptoe on a razorblade
and feel the Presbyterian tingle
masochistically up my spine.

Poetry has been to compel the razored toe tip blade
to hybridize,
to allow an underwold
uprush to fruit through the root twine.

So, who is here at 6 a.m. this morning?

Persephone, kneeling on a pomegranate half,
Eros seated on her shoulder.
I read their hand signs to mean: "Flow! Conceive!
The scission of the Mother into mother and daughter
is to be found in the abyss of the seed!"

I stooped to study the Dionysian upsurge
spreading octopodally through my brain...

[...

...]

Not "Here Lies," he wrote,
but "Here Lives," happy to feel the soil
pulse his soot shaft, that cypress affirmation,
overplus of arising
with which the beloved gleams up.

Ever since I discovered the poetry of Cesar Vallejo in the late 1950s, I have intuited that poetry is at a very early stage in its potential unfolding. The depth of "I" has only been superficially explored. Ego consciosness is inadequate to write innovative poetry. Rather than the Freudian hierarchical model, a kind of totem pole consisting of super-ego, ego, and unconscious, I would propose the antiphonal swing of the bicameral mind, which in a contemporary way, relates to shaminism, the most archaic mental travel. While the idea of poetry as a spiral flow, with simultaneous interpenetrations of what we call perception, intuition, feeling, and imagination, is too demanding for most writers, I think it may be one key in enabling a poet to write a poetry that is responsible for all of his experience. (425)

--Clayton Eshleman

Note where your first line has taken you,
how each image appears to encyst another,
so that the poem is a mental cave under formation,
the political as the grit in the image water push,
anatomies reconstituting as thresholds,
chalice-shaped cul-de-sacs, the mind anchored and
willy-nilly. Stay aware of the 850 million starving--
such may help keep you honest when the self-censor
purrs: shut up. Unbuckle his tongue from
the door on your heart, show the world gash
but keep it in your own veins.

from 'Unbuckled Tongue'; Clayton Eshleman

While Clayton Eshleman draws upon surrealist poetry for aesthetic models and fields of psychology grounded in archetypical mythology to support his poetic content-- Vallejo, William Blake and Carl Jung as recognizable influences-- it will be Eshleman's delving into the Paleolithic imagination that will be seen as his main contribution to American poetry. He was born, raised and educated in Indiana, with all of the constraints attributable to the culture of America's Mid-West, but when he traveled to the Lascaux and Combarelle caves in France in the 1970’s, regions notable for prehistoric artworks etched into their interior walls, his poetry began to embody a “pretradition that includes the earliest nights and days of soul-making”. Thus, a new poetic Self born.

A process not at all unlike the birth of early humankind. When Cro-Magnon entered the caves, as an act laden with sexual significance when understood that they believed in some respect that they were entering back into the Mother’s womb, as into a primordial pre-birth state, and began to symbolically represent, replicate, the outside world through drawings, their artistic process, bodies and animals could be dismembered, fitted back together, whether anatomically correct or incorrect, and subsequently endowed with new significance and relations, thus allowing for humankind's participation with the act of creation as opposed to being a mere component of creation. When doing so, it was within a physical space understood to be from where life originated, and when exiting the caves, they didn’t just believe they were being reborn because at some level they actually were-- as through the artistic rituals their conceptual awareness of life acquired dimensions previously unavailable.

What does this have to do with poetry? Eshleman’s poetic material draws upon the constant visceral procession of life and death, which is a shared material substance with our Paleolithic ancestors, even if placed into a modern setting (at a restaurant, looking out a window, current politics) and he often pieces the components of these processes together into new configurations. Not unlike cave paintings. However, this is still all surface as the more significant connection is from the actual use and creation of metaphors and images:

…to be human is to realize that one is a metaphor, and to be a metaphor is to be grotesque (initially of the grotto)…. we stand on a depth in [Homer and Shakespeare] that was struck hundreds of generations before them by those Upper Paleolithic men, women, and children who made the truly incredible breakthrough from no image of the world to an image. The cathedrals and churches in which humankind passively sits today… were, before being in effect turned inside out, active underground “sanctuaries” or “incubational pits.” There people created the first electrifying outlines of animals while performing rites of passage, commemorations of the dead, rituals to insure fertility, and just messing around. At the point imaginative depth is evoked, soul becomes involved. (362)

Note the "and just messing around". A non-utilitarian emphasis placed upon the creation of these images, even if they can at times provide psychological insight. Which is important because while on one hand understanding the world as metaphor does objectify the world, with the creative act not being ‘use’ oriented, there is instead an emphasis upon a shared interplay with the processes of creation, which allows us to both be part of and at the same time losing ourselves to the “pattern’s mastery”, then only later incorporating the personal issues connected with life and death. Maybe a potentiality can be glimpsed though, but only afterward. Appropriately, Eshleman‘s poetry is based upon surrealism and associations, as opposed to classical forms or logic, often incorporating the physical body and the frictions resulting from our immaterial psyche.

This current collection, The Grindstone of Rapport: A Clayton Eshleman Reader, is over 600 pages long and divided up in thirds for samples from Eshleman’s volumes of poetry; a collection of his essays on poetics and the research involved with the Cro-Magnon era, as well as the psychological and mythological schools he relies upon; and, concludes with a diverse section of translations, the focus being other surrealist poets whose artistic visions Eshleman shares, such as Neruda, Vallejo, Artaud, Aime Césaire, and other poets who are not as well known. In all, the collection is a terrific book for enjoying a lesser known, but powerfully developed, American poet while also providing access to material to assist in broadening one’s personal understanding of contemporary poetics.