Number 298
Fall 2006

Eight Fire Sources
CLAYTON ESHLEMAN
Copyright © 2006 Poetry Flash

On the morning of July 20, 1965, at the University of California Poetry Conference at Berkeley, Robert Duncan introduced Charles Olson’s lecture, “Causal Mythology.” After mentioning several living poets that he felt compelled to study—Pound, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and Levertov, Duncan remarked:

We are all jackdaws to varying degrees, and Duncan was one of the first to proudly acknowledge such. And the evocation of Prometheus, and the poet as thief of fire, is also accurate and timely. However, I believe that originality is still possible in art, including poetry. Those who openly admit to their plunder, as Duncan did, surely also have some tricks up their sleeves: behind such humble acknowledgements of being beholden to X or Y is a sense of poetic character convinced of the uniqueness of its expression.
Here are eight of my fire sources. They focus on the formidable imaginations that I discovered soon after discovering poetry in the late 1950s at Indiana University, and my subsequent apprenticeship to the art in Kyoto, Japan in the early 1960s. This compilation can be read as an addenda to “Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship,” collected in Companion Spider (Wesleyan University Press, 2002). An earlier version of this essay appeared in Poet’s Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art (Barnwood Press, Muncie, Indiana, 2005, ed. Peter Davis). The essay in its present form will appear in Archaic Design (Black Widow Press, Boston, 2007).

“Tea for Two,” by Bud Powell

I started glancing at Downbeat magazine around 1951 when I was sixteen years old. I taped two quarters to an order form and mailed it off for a 45 RPM recording with Lennie Tristano’s “I Surrender Dear” on the other side.
Piano as an orchestra of sound waterfalling through “Tea for Two” changes, with the skeleton of the melody baring its trivia from moment to moment. I listened to it again and again, trying to grasp the difference between the song line and what Powell was doing to it. Melody versus improvisation; what someone else had written versus what Powell was doing to and with it. Somehow an idea vaguely made its way through: you don’t have to play somebody else’s melody—you can improvise (how?), make up your own tune! WOW—really? You mean, I don’t have to repeat my parents? I don’t have to ‘play their melody’ for the rest of my life?
The alternative—being myself—was a stupendous enigma that took me another six years to approach. I had to get completely bored with all the possibilities my given life had prepared me for before I could make a grab at something that challenged me to change my life. My mother had started me on piano lessons when I was six, and I had played fairly consistently from then on, first classical music, then a stab at jazz. But that was part of the given life, even if it were an art form, so it had to go too.
Later I realized that Powell had taken the trivial in music (as Art Tatum often did, as in “I’ll See You In My Dreams”) and transformed it into an imaginative structure. William Carlos Williams I found out had done something similar in poetry.
While reading the Sunday Comics on the living-room floor was my first encounter, as a boy, with imagination, Powell was my first encounter, as an adolescent, with the figure of the artist.
In The Gull Wall (1975), I wrote a poem which brooded about Powell’s tragic life and about what he had offered me, which, in the writing of the poem, cut back to the neighborhood piano teacher lessons my mother had started me on:

Bud Powell locked in his Paris bathroom so he wouldn’t wander. Sipping his lunch from the cat saucer on the floor. I see him curled there, nursing his litter, his great swollen dugs, his sleepy Buddha face looks down through the lotus pond, sees the damned, astral miles below, amongst them a little unmoving Clayton Jr., placed by his mother on a bed of keys. Powell compassionately extended his tongue, licked my laid out senses.

The Collected Poems of Hart Crane

I bought a copy of the 1933 edition in Robert Wilson’s Phoenix Bookstore, on Cornelia Street in NYC, 1960. On the same trip in from Indiana I also met Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg, and Paul Blackburn.
Like Pablo Neruda, Crane brought home metaphor to me, but on a more complex, concentrated and challenging level than the sensuous, Surreal Chilean. At first I went for the ‘easy’ poems in White Buildings, like “My Grandmother’s Love Letters,” with its “loose girdle of soft rain,” and paper “brown and soft… liable to melt as snow.” I was amazed by the unexpected juxtapositions in Crane, such as one finds in the first stanza of “Praise for an Urn”:

The placement of “Gargantua” before “laughter” taught me something about balancing a line. And to find “the crematory lobby” in the fourth stanza suddenly contextualized “urn” and made the poem poignantly real. Small matters, perhaps, but “divine particulars,” or building blocks, for a poetry in which every word must count.
Poems like “Lachrymae Christi” and “The Wine Menagerie” stopped me in my tracks in a similar way that “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” by Blake had. I was being asked to stretch to accommodate an uncommon sense of things that I intuitively felt was not nonsense or pointless obscurity. Crane invented a term, “the logic of metaphor,” to identify the way metaphor can lead to metaphor to create a narrative that is utterly imaginative. His metaphoric shifts recall improvisational moves in bebop or stroke in a De Kooning painting of the 1960s. Reading Crane is like watching colored fragments in a turned kaleidoscope slip into new symmetries, then rearrange again.
Over the years, Hart Crane has become a poet companion and from time to time I have been moved to either address him in a poem or to project his addressing me. On one hand, he is a tragic autodidact who never learned self-regulation and destroyed himself in revenge against those who would not acknowledge or support his genius. On the other hand, he is, at his best, the most charged of the major twentieth century American poets. Had he been able to sustain his relationship with Peggy Baird in Mexico in 1931, he might have been able to derail his brutal, masochistic homosexuality. In such poems, written near the end of his life, as “The Circumstance,” and “Havana Rose,” a voice freed of traditional verse begins to emerge.
No poet to my knowledge has ever speared memory as Crane did in “Passages”:

And I have never forgotten for a moment, the last two lines of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”:

The Complete Writings of William Blake

I purchased the Nonesuch Press edition in Kyoto, February 1963, and a few months later scribbled on the title page: “The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem in 1963 can be read as the Bible in 1863; the Bible still makes sense but has lost energy in time.” I suppose I was attempting to say that Blake’s “Prophetic Books” were, for our era, the book of life.
When I wasn’t translating César Vallejo’s Poemas humanos in those days, I was attempting to make my way through all of Blake. His work hit me in gusts and putting it all together—holding Milton: A Poem, say, as a single work, in mind—was impossible. So I read Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry to discover that it was as difficult, in its own way, as Blake himself! I found a used facsimile edition of The Book of Urizen in a bookstore, and while reading it one afternoon, I passed out, to wake up an hour or so later, flat on the tatami, the book still in my hand.
Blake is the most bold of poets and possessed a confidence powerful enough to keep him at his work while facing humiliating neglect. Who else might have written:

I have travel’d through Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion. I have conquer’d, and shall Go on Conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my Course among the Stars of God & the Abysses of the Accuser. Or: To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination, To bathe in the Waters of Life, to wash off the Not Human, I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration, To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Savior, To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration, To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion’s covering, To take off his filthy garments & clothe him with Imagination, To cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration…

Blake is also very insightful, especially as a young writer when his thought was not entangled, as it was in his later years, with accommodating the Christian system. I doubt if anyone else alive in his London of the late eighteenth century had the following thoughts regarding feminine sexuality and what men had made of it:

Murder is Hindering Another. Theft is Hindering Another. Backbiting, Undermining, Circumventing, & whatever is Negative is Vice. But the origin of this mistake in Lavater & his contemporaries is, They suppose that Woman’s Love is Sin; in consequence all the Loves & Graces with them are Sins. And: What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire. What is it women in men do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

Sections from Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End, #2, 4, and 12. “Yashima,” a Noh play by Zeami, #3. Robert Kelly’s “The Exchanges,” #5. Michael McClure’s “The Held Back Pain,” #6. Twenty-four Poems by Rocco Scotellaro, #7. “A letter, of sorts,” by Gael Turnbull, #7. Giacomo Leopardi’s “L’Infinito,” #8. Seven Poems by Eugenio Montale, #9. Excerpts from “The Day Book,” by Robert Duncan, #10. René Char’s “The Lace of Montmirail,” #11. Jean-Paul de Dadelsen’s “Bach in Autumn,” #11. Basho’s “Oku-no-hosomichi” (“Back Roads to Far Towns”), #14.

All of the translations mentioned above were done by Corman himself, or in the case of Zeami and Basho, with a co-translator. Watching Cid edit and translate, and then reading each issue as it came out, was like having a seminar with these writers. This was my introduction to what Robert Duncan would, a few years later, identify as a “symposium of the whole.” origin became the model for both of my magazines, Caterpillar (1967-1973) and Sulfur (1981-2000). Much of what appeared in this series of origin still holds up for me as lively and vital. In the 1960s, Corman had achieved an editorial perspective that made all of the contributions in a single issue coalesce and inter-relate.


Basho’s Back Roads to Far Towns

The Cid Corman/Kamaike Susuma translation of Basho’s last and most impressive hike journal (in which poet and companion walked some 1,500 miles) was published in origin #14, second series, July 1964. It was published in handsome book format by Mushinsha-Grossman in 1968. To the best that I can tell, it is the finest translation of haiku (and haibun, as the prose accompanying haiku is called) that has ever been done in English.
In his Introduction, Corman writes:

Wallace Stevens once wrote in Adagia that “Poetry is the scholar’s art.” As I read it, he means that poetry is the literary art that should hold the greatest appeal to scholars. Poets can also be scholars without lessening the intuitive drive it takes to write substantial poetry. Basho is a sterling example of the spiritual poet/scholar. He did his homework on the lore and history concerning the sites and temples he planned to visit. The narrative drift of the haibun is like a parachute weighted with a haiku body under it. Or to put it another way: it is a pleasure to visit and describe precisely what one has seen (haibun); it is more challenging, after doing so, to sense the essence of the seen, to sound it in the tiny crucible of a haiku. Here is Basho’s May 27th entry, haibun followed by haiku:

In 1991, Sam Hamill published a translation of this journal of Basho’s, entitled Narrow Road to the Interior (Shambala Centaur Editions). He translated the above poem as follows:

Corman/Kamaike: language as enactment, the reader interprets. Hamill: language as interpretation, the reader abandoned. Corman/Kamaike are deft where Hamill is pleonastic and inaccurate (crickets don’t sing; cicadas don’t cry). In a haiku-like poem of his own, Corman writes:

Professor of English, Emeritus, at Eastern Michigan University, Clayton Eshleman was a founding editor of the influential journals Caterpillar and Sulfur. He’s published some fifteen volumes of poetry, recently the unique prose and poetry meditation, Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction on the Underworld (Wesleyan, 2003), and My Devotion (Black Sparrow Books, 2004). He’s also published ten books of translation, including César Vallejo’s Complete Posthumous Poetry, winner of the National Book Award, and the new Conductors of the Pit, an anthology of translations including Artaud, Holan, Césaire, Vallejo, Rimbaud, Breton, Neruda, and others. The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition of Cesar Vallejo (University of California Press) is forthcoming in December.