Clayton Eshleman

 

25

In ‘Prologue to Origins’ contained in Vol. 1 of Poems for the Millennium the editors state that it is impossible to understand 20th century radical poetries ‘without mapping at the same time some features of the old worlds, brought newly into the present & viewed there as if for the first time ...’ It seems clear to me that in some senses your attempts to plot the origins of the imagination back to Upper Palaeolithic cave imagery represent perhaps the exemplary case of what Rothenberg and Joris were describing. If as they put it ‘the new seeks out the old’, the ‘old’ you went in search of was very old indeed. I wonder how you now view your decades long commitment to this project given that your major work on the ‘origins’ theme, Juniper Fuse has just recently been published? Do you have a sense of closure?