from The Seattle Review, Summer 2007
Clayton Eshleman's recent publications include: An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (Black Widow Press, 2006) and his translation of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (University of California Press, 2007). Archaic Design, a new collection of essays, interviews, prose poems, and notes,will be published by Black Widow Press in October, 2007. This interview was conducted in January, 2007.
John Olson: In the preface to An Alchemist With One Eye On Fire, you remark that poetry "is about the extending of human consciousness, making conscious the unconscious, creating a symbolic consciousness that in its finest moments overcomes all the dualities in which the human world is cruelly and eternally, it seems, enmeshed." This is a provocative statement. It suggests that poetry is something more than a cognitive titillation, more than intellectual candy, but a powerful agency, a transcendent force. D.H. Lawrence describes this phenomenon as "the soul and the mind and the body surging at once, nothing left out." You would think people would hunger for poetry as they do food and sex, yet very few appear able to make this connection; it is as if there were some sort of stranglehold on people's consciousness. Artaud goes so far as to suggest it takes something as catastrophic as a bubonic plague to wreak havoc and delirium and break down social order so that those who survive are able, at last, to discover a much more intense experience of life. I was wondering if you could identify some of the obstacles we face now; at the beginning of the 21st century, and how someone attempting to write poetry of this nature might best go about it.
Clayton Eshleman: The opening part of your paragraph evokes Wyndham Lewis' little essay of 1926, called "Art and the Unknown." In it he makes a distinction between cleared and uncleared space. He likens consciousness to cleared space. He doesn't say much about uncleared space other than to identify it with "the unknown." I think we could call it the subconscious as well as the unconscious. From Lewis' viewpoint, artists who work in cleared space produce entertainment and education. "The total addition made to the cleared space is the measure of greatness as an artist—at the time the addition is made," he writes.
I would say that very few people can appreciate art in their time that is clearing new space. I don't see how this will ever change.
A further question might be: does this make any difference?
People do not "hunger for poetry," as you put it, because reading poetry that is not a form of entertainment takes a lot of effort. Billy Collins vs. Robert Kelly. A real poem is a half poem, the second half of which is completed by the reader.
Regarding Artaud and the plague: Artaud wrote: "The plague takes images which are asleep, a hidden disorder, and suddenly pushes them towards the most extreme gestures; and theatre too takes gestures and pushes them to their final point: like the plague, it remakes the chain between what is and what is not, between the hidden potential of the possible and that which exists in materialized nature."
In response to your last sentence several things come to mind:
As always, humanity is attempting to attain a state of pre-birth, with the new virtual world replacing paradise.
Such words as Democracy, Justice, Human Rights, and yes, Terrorism, have been turned inside out, and have become just more slag, junk, which of course evokes shooting up—politicians and even well-meaning citizens shooting themselves up with Terrorism.
God is the Lie which opens the horror-gate of permission; I fear that many of those who contest global warming or are indifferent to it have either conscious or unconscious evangelical desires for the end of the world.
There is no "best" way to go about writing poetry today.
JO: Rimbaud's solution to liberating the mind from western civilization's stranglehold was to make oneself a visionary by way of a "1ong, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses," ostensibly with alcohol and drugs.
This seems a little drastic, and not particularily healthy. Are there other ways?
Meditation, for instance, or Native American sweat lodge ceremonies? Is it possible to make oneself a seer without recourse to Wild Turkey, psilocybin or absinthe? Do you think Wordsworth was on to something when he said "the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants... to endeavor to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which a writer can be engaged"? I find this an encouraging statement, but futile, if you can't open people's eyes to the light shining through the words of a line like "Noh-ghosts on a bridge between worlds," or "these chess words, slippery with blood, / they are my pistons, my petrol, the fits of memory scrawled in a hulk log."
CE: The roots of poetry are buried in proto-shamanism, which I suspect is of Upper Paleolithic antiquity. The shaman, as a novice, must rid himself of his given body, for a new and magical body, which is capable of mental travel. The main difference here between shamans, say, in 19th century Siberia, and poets in America today, is that the shamans were central to their communities, they belonged in a way no American writer, even those with huge audiences, belong today. Whatever one must do to make the move from the given life to a creative one—well, that is up to each of us. The poetry scene today is flooded with young, talented, unoriginal writers who are trying to write significant poetry based on their given lives; they adhere to the given because most are part of the educational system, and thus they belong to their parents, and are without what I would call a viable self-initiation.
JO: What does Rimbaud mean by "I is an other?"
CE: Rimbaud is extraordinary in several ways: as a teenager he immediately made use of everything he was learning about poetry, and determined that to present common experience (based on the given life) in a special wrapping was a mockery of true poetry. True poetry involved altering the nature of reality, and to do this, one had, for starters, to discover the nature (or antinature, really) of one's inner world—the other or unknown person partially hidden in dreams, impulses, the realm of the subconscious.
Rimbaud thus became obsessed with self-transformation in somewhat the same spirit that Indian and Eskimo medicine men and women, or shamans, are. Note the difference between writing "I is another," as Rimbaud did, and "I am another." "I am another" suggests that my customary "I" is still present, and that it has something mysterious about it. "I is another" (or "I is somebody else") suggests that "I" is an unidentified actor, or personality, about whom my ordinary (given) "I" knows very little. Furthermore, Rimbaud states that the soul must be made monstrous. In less febrile words, the subconscious must be made available to consciousness. Fasten your seat belts.
The most important word in Rimbaud's "program" that you quote is "systematic" (or to my reading, "rational"). A "rational disordering" (or "derangement") is programmatic, an apprenticeship, in which the novice sets up some near-impossible hoops to jump through. In 1962, in Kyoto, Japan, I committed myself, as my apprenticeship to the art of poetry, to a translation of Cesar Vallejo's Poemas humanos. That was my "rational disordering," or the crowbar I used to break up the floorboards over my sealed, irrational strong-room.
JO: What does Andre Breton mean by "Existence is elsewhere?"
CE: I do not know the context in which Breton made that remark. But I will take a stab at an answer. Existence is not in the here and now, but in an "alternative world" that can be tapped in dreams and through visions. I would prefer to replace "existence" with "being," in Breton's remark, since the latter, for me, pertains more accurately to dreams and visions than existence does. The existent is the core of our materiality, of life itself, and facing the virtual/Monsanto takeover, it is more precious than ever. I wonder what Breton thought of the paintings of Chaim Soutine, which are a testimony to the precious, un-elsewhere beauty and grotesqueness of the existent.
JO: If you could be a tool, what kind of tool would you be?
CE: Since I allow myself to be, in part, manipulated by my subconscious when writing poetry, I suppose that I am a "tool" in that sense.
I would also like to be a tool in a surgeon's hand saving someone's life.
JO: In Les Chants de Maldoror, Isidore Ducasse (a.k.a. Comte de Lautréamont), Ducasse states "It is rather difficult to distinguish buffoonery from melancholy, life itself being a comical drama or dramatic comedy." I see a lot of humor in your work, often mixed in with some rather horrific observations of modern life. I was wondering if you could comment on this.
CE: Comic strips in newspapers and comic books were my introduction to imagination and literature as a child growing up in Indianapolis in the 1940s. So that is probably one source of the humor in my poetry, though not the most important, which, as I understand it, relates to Mikhail Bakhtin's sense of "grotesque realism." That is, for me, events are often hybrid, as are people, and emotions, packed with the serious, the absurd, the horrifying, and the ridiculous. Another way to say this would be (from my poem "Cemeteries of Paradise"):
To get at the round,
the jagged round of any situation,
how we fence with the udders of snow!
JO: Writing on the sublime, Edmonde Burke argued that in nature, dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the imagination to inspire the grander passions than those which are more clear and determinate. Would you agree with this?
CE: The sublime, or the lofty, implies an underlying depth, which includes loss, bottomlessness, and our inability to encompass the soul. Burke's observation may drift all the way back to the Ice Age caves, where grotesque figures scratched onto the wall occurred as a result of the combined pressure of sensory isolation, darkness, stone, and the feeling that certain "entities" were present.
This is not to knock clarity which, when earned, when arrived at against the unending impasses of ignorance that surround us, can be, to jump ahead with your questions, "the pearl of great price."
Burke may also have had dreams in mind, or opium visions in which vast, murky, architectural abyss-scapes are said to appear.
Grandeur is tricky. The lofty can also be infested with haughtiness and bogus solemnity.
JO: The idea of a regenerative abyss, a redemptive darkness, is a critical factor in your writing. Could you further elaborate on this?
CE: I would first mention metaphor first, always, very old and of the root of the hybrid figures to be found in the Ice Age caves. When someone gouged the outlines of a horse head in limestone and then gouged a vulva (same size as the horse head) across the neck of the horse (at, we think, around 30,000 B.P.), we have the Upper Paleolithic equivalent of Allen Ginsberg's "hydrogen jukebox" (which also qualifies as an image, in Reverdy's sense of it).
What is the abyss? It is the Deep each one of us carries around inside. But how did this Deep get there? One possibility is out of the seemingly infinitely elastic crisis of therio-expulsion, our separating the animal out of our to-be human heads. I feel this "act" is tied into the origin of image-making.
Out of non-being, being.
Shadow matters.
Abyss as the unconscious, the primordial cornucopia, paradise and Pandora's Box.
JO: In 1974, you made your first trip to the caves of the Dordogne to view prehistoric cave art. You have been returning almost annually to these caves since then. These journeys have played a crucial role in shaping your poetic philosophy. You once remarked that "going into the earth for my poetry" was performed in the belief "that there is a light and intelligence there that I am to penetrate, a new sort of den, not the lair I was dropped in." I believe "that lair" was an upbringing, by German parents, in Indiana, was it not?
CE: My figure of the imagination, Yorunomado, told me at the end of the poem "Coils," (in the book, Coils, 1973): "From this point on... / your work leads on into the earth." I think that last line points directly into Caryl's and my "discovery" of the Ice Age underworld in 1974.
By the way, I want to insert this: Caryl is my editor, and my work would not be what it is without her attention over the years.
I forget where "the lair I was dropped in" comes from, but it is certainly a sardonic comment about being brought up in Indianapolis by, for the most part, clueless parents. German? I don't know. I have never had any interest in genealogy. I was told my mother had Spanish blood, and once, I recall, as a child, I was told by an uncle on my father's side that the Eshlemans embarked from Amsterdam at the beginning of the 19th century. But I don't know how they got to Amsterdam, so I could be, on my father's side, German, Dutch, Swiss, or Austrian. "Eshleman" can be spelled many ways, and ours is one of the least common spellings.
JO: In Dream and Underworld, James Hillman states: 'To know the psyche at its basic depths, for a true depth psychology, one must go to the underworld." Where might we find that underworld? How do we access it? It appears to be the mental equivalent of the prehistoric art in the caves of the Dordogne. How do we get there? Is a poem the equivalent of animal fat & burning wick?
CE: Your question brings back some material that has come up before. The underworld is a pre-pagan concept and not, in its visionary sense, related to hell. In The Odyssey, in Book XIII, it is a place of instruction, where the seeker, via sacrifice, acquires visionary information. I think that the earliest underworlds, undoubtedly the decorated, or ensouled, Upper Paleolithic caves, carried the initial vibrations of paradise. This is an extraordinary thing to think about. In deep, anti-natural recesses, filled with rock foliage, which looked organic, but which was not, our ancestors realized, for the first time, that an alternative "world" existed. They probably had no "idea" of what it was. But they recognized it, and, in effect, created it out of their recognition. Extraordinary! I think of such caves today as the cemeteries of paradise.
The Greek word for the Pit was abaton, which the Jews called Abaddon. There is a swirl of meanings here, for this place was also an earth-womb which Barbara G. Walker tells us novice priests went down into for long "periods of incubation, pantomiming death, burial, and rebirth from the womb of Mother Earth."
How do we access it today? In my book Juniper Fuse, I quote a long passage from an essay by Barbara MacLeod who in the 1970s did some long (48 hour) sits in deep caves in Belize and Guatemala. She had some experiences that illuminate your question.
Allen Ginsberg had contact with the underworld via ingesting yagé. Others have fasted, or gone on vision quests in the wilderness.
I don't sense the poem as the equivalent of an Upper Paleolithic hand-lamp, though if you think of certain incised, carved hand-lamps as proto-tjurungas, I guess you would be in the archaic vicinity of a poem!
JO: Contemporary artists such as Francis Bacon, Nora Jaffe, Chaim Soutine, John Register and Willem de Kooning have all had an influence on you. What in particular has drawn you to the work of these artists?
CE: I am interested in what I see in paintings as well as what the paintings see in me. For many years I have tried, facing works of art, to inhabit a "between" in which a reciprocal distillation could occur. I have been drawn to all of the people you mention, and many others, for specific reasons, and I suppose the best response I can make to this question is to refer the reader to the poems I have written that engage aspects of their work.
Soutine probably had the greatest impact on me, of the people you mention: I discovered one of his "Hanging Fowl" in a Japanese museum in 1963 and it is still as vivid in my imagination today as it was then.
Nora Jaffe, a kind of abstract erotic formalist, was a dear friend who died of lung cancer in 1994: I have two major, from my point of view, pieces on her, "Nora's Roar" and "Nora's Transmission."
I adore Bacon's portraits and have written about the semen, blood, and soot that seem to be impacted in them, or whirling about and through them, in "Spirits of the Head."
John Register's concept of "The waiting room for The Beyond," worked out in paintings that seem hyper-realistic but are also eerily dream-like, made a lasting impression.
As for de Kooning: his abstract canvases, upon scrutiny, often seem alive with what I'd call image babies, or near-images (such as one discovers in Henri Michaux's drawings). I like to work with these in language, to try to find constructions that are equally dense and mysterious.
JO: In "Blue Fire," James Hillman states that "a goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price." What is the pearl of great price?
CE: A poem without subject,
all parts of which surprise and interlock, a poem with twenty centers,
all muscular and avid, each word dense, full in itself, a nest,
a sound of wood crackling in the fireplace, a shiver without skin,
each word an outpost, a courier, monkey words
feeling the earthquake coming before I do...
(from "Combined Object" in An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire)
About the Author
John Olson is the author of five books of prose poems, including The Night I Dropped Shakespeare On The Cat, Oxbow Kazoo, Free Stream Velocity, Eggs & Mirrors, and Logo Lagoon. Backscatter, a selection of new and selected work, is due out in early 2008 from Black Widow Press. He is the recipient of The Stranger's 2004 genius award for literature, and has twice received the Fund for Poetry Award.
Seattle, Washington
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Copyright © 2007 by The Seattle Review
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
