Word: eshleman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Katherine Eshleman...
...Clayton Eshleman is the more classically visionary poet. Coils is a long involuting self-exploration reviewing the ten years in which the poet's vision was conceived and, through the labors of his imagination, finally born. William Blake is the poem's guiding light, almost its midwife, but its inspiration lay in the words of the Mexican poet, Cesar Vallejo: "Then where is the cry of this other flank if, to estimate it as a whole, it breaks now from the bed of man." Eshleman saw through this line that the poetic imagination must be given birth, that "artistic bearing...
...creates in Coils a mystical web of symbolic beings. There is Yorunomado, a figure of his imagination, which converses with Los, Blake personified. Niemonjima is the unknown desire for woman, and Mokpo is the heterosexual dogma, the "tool of social manipulation." Together these forces weave throughout Eshleman's life to create a harsh, painful poetic landscape...
...Yorunomado, "Night-window," speaks for the poem's sadness. It goes back to a concept from Blake's contemporary Kant of a windowpane between man and his world. There is always that doubt in man's ability to know either the objective thing-in-itself or the transcendent reality. Eshleman, like Blake, believes that the modern malaise of psychic disintegration may recover through a process of reintegration, but his poetry is more abstract than Blake's. He is more conscious of the poetic process itself...
This narcissism often intrudes upon the poem's evolution and Eshleman's own imaginative rebirth. But finally, the birth takes form, in the shape of a butterfly...