Hybrid Hierophanies by Clayton Eshleman
Adrienne Rich has stated: “As a poet and translator, Clayton Eshleman has gone more deeply into his art, its processes and demands, than any modern American poet since Robert Duncan and Muriel Rukeyser.” And Robert Kelly has written: “Nobody is like him in his struggle. At times he makes the wildness of most poetry seem merely effete. I know of no poet who has fed so richly from the thingliness of the world beneath his feet, none who so resists the glamour of beliefs. He is a shaman without a single superstition.”
Adrienne Rich has stated: “As a poet and translator, Clayton Eshleman has gone more deeply into his art, its processes and demands, than any modern American poet since Robert Duncan and Muriel Rukeyser.” And Robert Kelly has written: “Nobody is like him in his struggle. At times he makes the wildness of most poetry seem merely effete. I know of no poet who has fed so richly from the thingliness of the world beneath his feet, none who so resists the glamour of beliefs. He is a shaman without a single superstition.”
Adrienne Rich has stated: “As a poet and translator, Clayton Eshleman has gone more deeply into his art, its processes and demands, than any modern American poet since Robert Duncan and Muriel Rukeyser.” And Robert Kelly has written: “Nobody is like him in his struggle. At times he makes the wildness of most poetry seem merely effete. I know of no poet who has fed so richly from the thingliness of the world beneath his feet, none who so resists the glamour of beliefs. He is a shaman without a single superstition.”
from HYBRID HIEROPHANIES:
Theseus, a tiny male spider, enters a tri-level construction:
look down through the poem, you can see the labyrinth.
Look down through the labyrinth, you can see the spider-centered web.
Coatlicue
Sub-incision Bud Powell
César Vallejo
The bird-headed shaman
These nouns are also nodes in a constellation called
Clayton’s Tjurunga. The struts are threads
in a web. There is life blood flowing through
these threads. Coatlicue flows into Bud Powell,
César Vallejo into sub-incision.
The bird-headed shaman
is slanted under a disemboweled bison.
His erection tells me he is in flight. He drops
his bird-headed stick as he penetrates
bison paradise.
The red sandstone hand lamp
abandoned below this scene
is engraved with vulvate chevrons—did it once flame
from a primal sub-incision?
This is the oldest part of this tjurunga, its grip.
Clayton Eshleman’s most recently-published books are Clayton Eshleman / The Essential Poetry 1960-2015 (Black Widow Press) and A Sulfur Anthology (Wesleyan University Press). Hybrid Hierophanies will be included in Penetralia to be published by Black Widow Press in 2017. Eshleman’s website is: www.claytoneshleman.com. Adrienne Rich has stated: “As a poet and translator, Clayton Eshleman has gone more deeply into his art, its processes and demands, than any modern American poet since Robert Duncan and Muriel Rukeyser.” And Robert Kelly has written: “Nobody is like him in his struggle. At times he makes the wildness of most poetry seem merely effete. I know of no poet who has fed so richly from the thingliness of the world beneath his feet, none who so resists the glamour of beliefs. He is a shaman without a single superstition.”
Book Information:
· Paperback: 28 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN:978-1-60964-252-5