Word: poeme
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...very meaning of 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...
Even Latin Americans who challenged his political views found it hard to quarrel with the honor. In such works as the surrealistic poem cycle Residence on Earth, and the massive Canto General, an epic on the origin of the Amer icas, he proved himself to be the continent's most creative and authentic literary voice. In one of its best-known sections, The United Fruit Co., he mockingly writes of "Jehovah" parceling out the universe to "Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other entities," while the United Fruit Co. "reserved for itself: the heartland/ And coasts...
...much reprinted poem called The Satraps, said to have been written by Neruda shortly before the coup, was released by a Cuban news agency staffer in Buenos Aires. The verse, which describes President Nixon and Junta Leader Augusto Pinochet as "hyenas ravening/ Our history," is a hoax. Apparently Buenos Aires leftists "updated" a Neruda poem from the 1950s, changing the names of Latin American Dictators Trujillo, Somoza and Carias to Nixon, Frei (Allende's predecessor as president) and Pinochet...
...From saying 'We must do something about Hitler,'" observed Randall Jarrell, "Auden has begun to say 'We must realize that we are Hitler.' " Though Auden published his finest single poem in 1962 (In Praise of Limestone) and for the past twenty years poured out accomplished verse, as well as streams of essays, prefaces, and translations and libretti, the easy generalization has been endured that later Auden is a poor, doddering shadow of early Auden. History may reverse the judgment...