Clayton. Eshleman

CHROMATIC LESIONS

Wind swept impermanence of this endless winch.

Myriad mouths of beings multiplied, dulcified, zithered through history.

Wingless butterflies less lost than I am
under the caterpillar treads redesigning my face pilgrimage.

                                                        Yet this autumn is beautiful,
and beautiful the loss underscored by sunlight and safe night sleep.

I have sealed my own destructiveness, cauterized its principle feelers.

Why can’t I accept that Hitler one way or another is stirring much of
the unseen porridge, not cunning Adoph
but the crocodile levity in men—
laugh-in howl-out against which I sniffle
fixed in my high chair
listening to grandpa read a letter from the ex-Russian renter
writing the Eshleman family about the horrors of the siege of Leningrad.

Everything is and has never been a milling, amorphous terribilita
searching for desire in which to curl.

I have learned to see
in the faces of the dead

a jug of rose-white chickadee explodes 

Robert Kelly

 

Inclusions

The amber in chamber
glows against the wall
opposed to the window.

Sit where I can see you.
Your hair. The chair
painted yellow
(like that van Gogh
empty bedroom)
long ago looks
golden now. You now.

You now. You know
how things have turned
into shadows of us,
thousands of years to
take on our shapes.
I love this room,
it understands my eyes.


 

---

Deep image and Ethnopoetics

The Deep Image and Ethnopoetics

IN THE LATE ’50S AND EARLY ’60S, another group important to the New American Poetry was emerging, primarily in New York. They were a sort of “in-between” generation—younger than most of the poets in the Allen anthology but older than the second-generation New York School or the Language poets. This group began publishing in magazines such as Some/thing, Poems from the Floating World, Trobar, Matter, and Caterpillar. Poets most closely allied with this group include Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, Clayton Eshleman, Diane Wakoski, David Antin, Paul Blackburn, Frank Samperi, Armand Schwerner, and George Economou.

The basic sense of deep image poetry, as distinct from Imagism, was, according to Robert Kelly, to “generate a kind of poetry not necessarily dominated by the images, but in which it is the rhythm of images which forms the dominant movement of the poem.” [8] Jerome Rothenberg would later describe the “deep image” as “a power, among several, by which the poem is sighted & brought close.” Investigations into deep image existed alongside and resonated with work in translation, performance, and an awareness of earlier avant-gardes and poetry from “those anonymous tribal & subterranean predecessors.”

Consequently, these poets were keenly aware of the need to build on the insights and discoveries of Dada and Surrealism. Ethnopoetics developed, in part, out of a growing awareness “that we weren’t just doing something new (which we were) but were getting back in our own terms to fundamental ways of seeing & languaging from which we (the larger ‘we’ of the Western enterprise) had long been cut off.” [9] Thus, ethnopoetics is a recognition of the “primitive” as a way to ease ourselves into the future. Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics, “a first journal of the world’s tribal poetries,” edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock, published five numbers in its first series (1970–73) and continued forward with a second series in 1975. Several of the issues contained phonograph records, including readings by Jaime de Angelo, Jackson Mac Low, and Anne Waldman.

New Wilderness Letter (edited primarily by Jerome Rothenberg but with the help of co- and guest editors) extended the ethnopoetics project into an exploration of the relation between old and new forms of art-making across the full spectrum of arts. One of the most interesting issues was New Wilderness Letter 11 (1982), entitied The Book, Spiritual Instrument, which Rothenberg coedited with anthropologist/poet David Guss. A significant contribution to the ethnopoetic project is to be found in the collection of anthologies edited by Rothenberg, including Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, America: a Prophecy (with George Quasha), and A Big Jewish Book.

 

Robert Kelly

 Pierre Joris, Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly

Dream debris
 

And when there's nothing left there's you
you cast a shadow that makes me.
The dreadful two of us again, mother
and son, father and daughter, broken
down the middle like an old barn,
christ, owls and woodchucks live therein
and all the bad birds celebrate their spring
 
but it's australia down in here, a metal
language and faces with big pores
staring straight into the sun, where money lives
shaped like a golden phallus. But not
a man's cock. Some other kind, girl dong
or cloud prick or the pointy shadow of the moon
so bright we gasp and say The Sun,
that's where it comes from, that mist is me,
 
(the sun is the shadow of the moon.
meaning is the shadow of desire.)
 
That light suffusing mist is thee, pardner,
hot-hipped and sore all about 
from Aphrodite's lucidest negotiations.
All flesh wants you because your mind.

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?

Galway Kinnell

 

Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond (excerpt)

The old watch: their 
thick eyes 
puff and foreclose by the moon.The young, heads 
trailed by the beginnings of necks, 
shiver, 
in the guarantee they shall be bodies. 

In the frog pond 
the vapor trail of a SAC bomber creeps, 

I hear its drone, drifting, high up 
in immaculate ozone.

Robert Bly

No one grumbles among the oyster clans,
And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.
Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want
Heaven to be, and God to come, again.
There is no end to our grumbling; we want
Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.
But the heron standing on one leg in the bog
Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.

Robert Bly

The Night Abraham Called to the Stars

Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: "You are my Lord!"
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,

He cried, ""You are my Lord!" How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.

We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.

And no one can convince us that mud is not 
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life

Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.

My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.

Galway Kinnell

 Alabama, 1965

The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye To His Poetry Students

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me
snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting
you were beautiful; goodbye,
Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain
brown envelopes for the return of your very
Clinical Sonnet; goodbye, manufacturer
of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues
give the fullest treatment in literature yet
to the sagging-breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,
who wrote, "Being German my hero is Hitler,"
instead of "Sincerely yours," at the end of long,
neat-scripted letter demolishing
the pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way
of cheering myself up, as I licked
the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,
the game I had
of trying to guess which one of you, this time,
had poisoned his glue. I did care.
I did read each poem entire.
I did say what I thought was the truth
in the mildest words I know. And now,
in this poem, or chopped prose, not any better,
I realize, than those troubled lines
I kept sending back to you,
I have to say I am relieved it is over:
at the end I could feel only pity
for that urge toward more life
your poems kept smothering in words, the smell
of which, days later, would tingle
in your nostrils as new, God-given impulses
to write.

Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmarks again
of shattered towns-Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell-
their loneliness
given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

James Wright

Autumn Begins In Martin's Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium, 
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, 
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, 
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, 
Dreaming of heroes. 

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. 
Their women cluck like starved pullets, 
Dying for love. 

Therefore, 
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful 
At the beginning of October, 
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

James Wright

Beginning

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.   

The dark wheat listens.

Be still.

Now.

There they are, the moon’s young, trying

Their wings.

Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow

Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone

Wholly, into the air.

I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe

Or move.

I listen.

The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,

And I lean toward mine.

 

James Wright

 

Having Lost My Sons, I Confront The Wreckage Of The Moon: Christmas, 1960.

After dark 

Near the South Dakota border, 

The moon is out hunting, everywhere, 

Delivering fire, 

And walking down hallways 

Of a diamond. 

Bundled away under wings 

And dark faces. 

Behind a tree, 

It ights on the ruins 

Of a white city

Frost, frost. 

Where are they gone 

Who lived there? 

I am sick 

Of it, and I go on

Living, alone, alone, 

Past the charred silos, past the hidden graves 

Of Chippewas and Norwegians. 

This cold winter 

Moon spills the inhuman fire 

Of jewels 

Into my hands. 

Dead riches, dead hands, the moon 

Darkens, 

And I am lost in the beautiful white ruins 

Of America.

Ron Silliman remembering Clayton Eshelman

Allen De Loach, Tom Picard, Ron Silliman, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley

I was just 22 when Clayton Eshleman first accepted my work for Caterpillar, encouraged no doubt by Robert Kelly. It was an important appearance for me, leading pretty directly to Jerry Rothenberg's suggestion that I gather some poets (no one had settled as yet on the term language) for Alcheringa and eventually to my editing In the American Tree. I also appeared four times in Sulfur.

I was quite aware of Clayton's reputation as a volatile young man, especially around issues of food & drink, and I had more than one opportunity to watch him send a dish or, more often, the wine back if it had not proved suitable. But he was a passionate defender of restaurants he liked and more than once he directed me to an excellent repast.

Once, when I was the director of development at the California Institute of Integral Studies in SF in the early 80's, Clayton called me mid-morning to say that he was in town and to ask if I wanted to go to lunch. I told him that the president of the school was taking his leadership team out for a business-meeting lunch (there was a reason but that part I've long since forgotten). Clayton wanted a recommendation for where to eat and you could have heard me wince over the land line. But I recommended a couple of places around the Haight that I liked, especially a yuppiesh California cuisine not-quite-fern-bar on Stanyan up the hill from where Bob Perelman and I had run the Tassajara Baker poetry series post-Grand Piano.

To my horror, when it came time for the Institute's team to head out for lunch, John Broomfield, the prez, announced that we were all going to go to that same restaurant. Sure enough, as we walked in there were Clayton & Caryl across the room mid-way through their meal. I went over to say hello, afraid to ask how the food was, then scooted back to the party from the 'Tute.

As Clayton & Caryl got up to leave, Clayton gave me the thumb & forefinger in a circle sign to let me know he'd enjoyed the food. I remember feeling like I'd pulled the sword from the stone.

d alexander, who helped me when I was starting Tottel's, used to tell a story that when he had published Clayton in his own journal, odda talla, a woman showed up at his place in New York with a gun wanting to discuss it. Clayton claimed that that never happened and that d loved a good story. [d, by the way, was his full first name and there was a story for that as well.]

On another occasion, Krishna and I had just dropped Colin off at a summer camp and gone to stay at a B&B in the Poconos that was mostly empty. There was a Brazilian building crew that was staying in the main lodge while they worked on some mansion nearby and we were told of a couple that was in one of the out buildings along a pond. We were instructed on what to do if we saw bears, but we went into town and had a nice dinner and went back to our room. The Brazilians were partying downstairs but they didn't speak much English and my Portuguese is aspirational at best.

The next morning we met the other couple, around our age, who were down from Staten Island. After we ate breakfast I excused myself to go off and write for an hour or so and when I returned to the main cafe Krishna was still chatting with them and had explained that I was off writing poetry. The woman looked at me and said, "Oh, do you know Clayton Eshelman?" She was Caryl's sister! We spent the rest of the morning listening to their Clayton stories (being "dragged" through the caves of France, an experience I would have given a leg for).

Jackson Mac Low, Armand Schwerner, Clayton, David Antin, Ronald Johnson -- so many of the poets who emerged in the 1960s right after the New American Poetry appeared -- are gone now. When Coyote's Journal (edited by Jim Koller with help in the early issues from Johnson & Ed van Aelstyn, every one of them gone as well), the magazine that seemed most central to my imagination of what poetry might be, went dark circa 1970, Caterpillar became THE journal, bringing everyone from Carolee Scheeman (having sex right on the cover with images from Fuses) to an issue devoted to Jack Spicer which (with Manroot in SF doing the same) kept his name alive in the long first decade after his death. Clayton was famously an impossible person, but his complete commitment to being exactly who he was gave him the courage to have a huge impact on American letters. If I remember right, Caterpillar is where Adrienne Rich chose to publish "Diving into the Wreck," the poem by which she freed herself from the polite restraints of the Lowell Group. Clayton published George Stanley DECADES before other US publications took notice. I was one of many who benefited from knowing Clayton & he was nothing but generous towards me. I won't forget him.

Ron Silliman

Galway Kinnell

St. Francis And The Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.