In the course ofassembling Poems for the Millennium,volume three, I was engaged in two – at least two – companion works. This wasn’t at all strange but fit, maybe tooneatly, into a view that I like to put forward – that the composition of largestructures like the Millennium volumes is inseparable from my other activitiesas a poet and that this would hold true for other poets engaged in what RobertDuncan, I believe it was, spoke of as the construction of a “grand collage” andas “a poetry of all poetries,” a type of work practiced in one form or anotherby many a modern or postmodern poet/artist. Looking back at my earlier works, the first of theanthology/assemblages, Technicians of theSacred (1968), was paralleled by first experiments with “total translation”as a form of composition from oral sources, but also by the beginnings of Poland/1931 as an exploration, I wrote,“of ancestral sources of my own in a world of Jewish mystics, thieves &madmen.” The followup, Shaking the Pumpkin (1972), an anthology of American Indian texts,was also a catalyst for A Seneca Journal,while A Big Jewish Book (1977)continued the work of Poland/1931 andled to first experiments with gematriaand other forms of traditional aleatory procedures. In the same vein I wouldn’t separate Revolution of the Word (1974) as itsAmerican counterpart from That DadaStrain, both celebrations of our Dada and modernist predecessors.
Romanticism, as Jeffrey Robinson and I came at it, was acatalyst for us as well, much as it was for those who came before us. In Robinson’s case, though his primary life’swork has been as a devoted and innovative scholar of British Romanticism, hehas accompanied the scholarship as such with an ongoing series of originalpoetry texts drawn or collaged (“spliced”) from the work of poets, bothRomantics and Moderns/Postmoderns, who were central to his studies andenthusiasms. For myself what I hadto overcome was my own prejudice against fixed forms – shared with many in my generation – in orderto see anew the challenges to form and content that were set in motion by theRomantics and a number of others who had preceded them. As a matter ofnomenclature Jeffrey Robinson and I began to talk between us about“experimental romanticism,” although I’m not sure that phrase came into theactual writing. With that as our target, experimentand transformation appeared both in aspects of Romantic writing that werelargely subterranean and, even more surprisingly I thought, at the heart andcore of the Romantic project. An aspect of this, from my side at least, wasthat the Romantics and those we called the postRomantics began to feel likecontemporaries, less magisterial figures and more like fellow poets with whomwe could enter into a free and easy discourse. In large part, if this doesn’tsound too arcane or abstract, we rode on Jeffrey Robinson’s recovery of the“fancy,” salvaging it from Coleridge’s otherwise brilliant and long-lived dichotomyof fancy and imagination. The two terms – fancy and imagination – haveotherwise been historically synonymous, whereas Coleridge made imagination notjust the shaping spirit but a binding spirit that reconciled and thereby frozedeep conflicts of image and idea, in relation to which “the fancy” might now beviewed as a liberatory force – for play and invention – the field parexcellence of the experimental and visionary. I would then think of imaginationqua fancy less in Coleridge’s sense as reconciliation and closure than inKeats’s definition of “negative capability” followed immediately by hiscriticism of Coleridge” “Several things dovetailed in my mind and at once itstruck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literatureand which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability,that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,without an irritable reaching after fact and reason – Coleridge for instancewould let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium ofmystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.” OrWhitman in an equally famous passage: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then Icontradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” That being said, Iwould as well speak of imagination as of fancy, the good-of-it being, always,in the meanings, not in the nomenclature, and in any case, an inheritance fromthe Romantics with whom it all started.
I thought ofall this again in the process of working through a series of poems that I wascomposing alongside the major work of construction or assemblage that Robinsonand I were engaged in. The series inquestion (fifty poems in all) was my response to Goya’s Caprichos, a work of imagination or fancy that we included in Poems for the Millennium, both as atouchstone of an emerging Romanticism and as a forerunner of the expressionistand surrealist side of a modernism yet to be. The images that Goya gave me helped, as with other forms of ekphrasticwriting, to launch a succession of my own images and fancies, an interactionacross space and time that I’ve often tried to practice. In the opening poem, for example, I beginwith Goya’s well-known self portrait, a figure slumped over a table on whichare written the words “El sueñode la razon produce monstrous.” From that and from the bats and owls that flyaround him comes the following, not a literal account of Goya’s image but ajourney into places where the Fancy leads me on my own:
The Sleep of Reason
forClayton EshlemanWordsimprinted on a sign
byGoya glowing
whiteagainst a surface
nearlywhite:
the sleep of reason
that produces monsters.
Heis sitting on a chair
hishead slumped
restingon his arms
oron the marble table,
pencilset aside,
hisnight coat open
thighsexposed.
Allthings that fly at night
flypast him.
Wingsthat brush an ear,
anear concealed,
amemory beginning
inthe house of sleep.
Hisis a world where owls
livein palm trees,
wherea shadow in the sky
islike a magpie,
white& black are colors
onlyin the mind,
thecat you didn’t murder
springsto life,
awhistle whirling in a cup,
gone& foregone,
achasm bright with eyes.
Thereis a cave in Spain
afecal underworld,
wherebats are swarming
amongbulls,
theblackness ending in a wall
hishands rub up against,
ablind man in a painted world,
amok& monstrous
bangingon a rock.
In the course of which I became aware, as I should have earlier, that caprichos as a term was most commonlytranslated as “fancy” or “fancies”, which after Coleridge at least wouldeffectively conceal what Goya was unleashing here. Yet it is precisely in his “caprichos” thatGoya shows us the fancy as “a power, not a work … a struggle, not a thought,”as Federico García Lorca wrote of that related or perhaps identical power hecalled duende. In Lorca’s case too the word in question wentback to an earlier source that belied the characteristics that he ascribed toit – a hobgoblin or imp to start with and a driving force among those Flamencosingers and dancers from whom he took it. Dramatized by Lorca as engaged in a fierce creative struggle (chthonic,even demonic, in his telling) it also released, as he described it, a sense ofunprecedented formal and visionary transformations: "The duende's arrivalalways means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknownfeelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like amiracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm."
It is this force or something very close to itthat Jeffrey Robinson captures in his aforementioned description of “fancy”with perhaps a greater emphasis on the transformative or experimental side ofthe process, as well as the playfulness of the original folk presences that inno way diminish the power of what’s at work or play here. The search on this side of Romanticism isless toward resolution, then, and more toward struggle and conflict, with aresultant liberatory thrust (theadjective is Robinson’s), a newfound openness of form and thought. In the process Goya’s caprichos operate atwhite heat, burning away appearances to let new worlds emerge, kept hiddenotherwise by “mind-forged manacles” in Blake’s words and inherited conventionsof the “really real.” For me at leastthe convergence of Blake and Goya is essential to their time and to the timesthat lead from them to us. [Tobe continued]
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