{"id":8247,"date":"2012-06-27T10:45:21","date_gmt":"2012-06-27T14:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=8247"},"modified":"2012-06-27T10:45:21","modified_gmt":"2012-06-27T14:45:21","slug":"clayton-eshlemans-anatomy-of-the-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/clayton-eshlemans-anatomy-of-the-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Clayton Eshleman’s Anatomy of the Night"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I have been reading \u2014 & rereading \u2014\u00a0Clayton Eshleman’s An Anatomy of Night<\/em>\u00a0(published \u2014 details here<\/a> \u2014 by Blaze Vox [Books] in 2011) with great, & indeed, increasing pleasure over some weeks now. It is vintage Eshleman, that is, the strength & power of image-making, always his forte, & the muscular & nervous dynamic that organizes & drives these knotted metaphorics forward, have in no way diminished with time \u2014 & combine to make for rich & dense poetry.<\/p>\n

To speak of an Eshlemanian Altenstil<\/em>, literally justified for an author at 75, even one as prolix as CE, is however meant here foremost as a positive comment on the quality of this part of the oeuvre<\/em>, in that the writing seems more leavened & thus \u2014 if not, if never relaxed or loose \u2014 moving away from the extreme density of the earlier work, a density that may at times have worked against his readers \u2014 certainly against younger generations coming to Eshleman\u2019s work for the first time. He\u00a0achieves\u00a0this leavening by inserting \/ collaging \u00a0prose sections, either his comments on, say, the caves’ material the poems are dealing with, or journal-like entries, with citations from his wide\u00a0readings (R\u00f3heim, Hillman, K\u00fchn, Djuna Barnes, etc.) to create a tapestry that both unifies the book, making it more than a simple collection of distinct poems, & creating a weave, a textum<\/em>, in which one strand of the writing reflects on the other, enriching & commenting on the other strand(s). In that sense I see the book \u2014 beyond the sheer pleasure & information it is providing me \u2014 as an\u00a0excellent\u00a0point of entry into CE’s work for novice readers (will in fact use it in my fall creative class exactly in order to bring that\u00a0luminous\u00a0complexity\u00a0to the students).<\/p>\n

If “night” & its mares or dreams are a staple of poetry, in Eshleman’s hands any simple surface ghostliness is dismissed in favor of an in-depth investigation \u2014 a mano a mano<\/em> struggle, often \u2014 of the psychic energies both dreams & insomnia propose. The darkness of night is mother\/sister to the darkness of the prehistoric caves that have been such an essential part of Eshleman’s work, and the skills required for navigating through both spaces are closely linked \u2014 just as the images CE’s psyche throws up in those sister-realms are closely linked to each other while rhyming with other spaces, the actual and psychic basement-cave of the poet’s Indianapolis childhood home. Here is the poem also cited on the back-cover of the book, & that presents a (at least\u00a0momentary) resolution of the demonic hauntings the darknesses of the various nights involve, through the loved woman:<\/p>\n

\u00a0[16]<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Imaginal love<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0incorrigibly infected by violence,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0the damnation strut in the human,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0fuse of extinction\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0formless horizon:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0now the daily telepathy<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I listen to Caryl breathe.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Why cannot her being<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0bless the world?\u00a0\u00a0Bless it to awaken from the doomcraft<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0that is religion\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The dark sloughs its \u201cd\u201d and the ark of dawn,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0first in my heart, then in the fuzzy edge of the window\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0blind,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0reveals Caryl\u2019s recumbent profile.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Blind edge, road of awe, world axis that allows me to<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0contemplate her breathing.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

p.s. Just in in yesterday’s mail is New American Writing # 30<\/em><\/a>, which among much other excellent work prints a powerful 10-page prose work of Eshleman’s called Mandalizing<\/em> that investigates the concept of the “angel” \u2014 so often a clich\u00e9 in poetry before, in, and after Rilke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been reading \u2014 & rereading \u2014\u00a0Clayton Eshleman’s An Anatomy of Night\u00a0(published \u2014 details here \u2014 by Blaze Vox [Books] in 2011) with great, & indeed, increasing pleasure over some weeks now. It...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,91],"tags":[250],"class_list":["post-8247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetics","category-poetry","tag-clayton-eshleman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8247"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8555,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8247\/revisions\/8555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}