“It (making a poem) is about the extending of human consciousness, making conscious the unconscious, creating a symbolic consciousness that in its finest moments overcomes the dualities in which the human world is cruelly and eternally, it seems, enmeshed.”
Clayton Eshleman, interview
Jacket magazine 2008
Eshelman’s ‘it’ is the act of poetry. The extension of human consciousness is a bold claim for poetry, scant words written on thin paper. We are a ‘languaged’ species. Language is our gift and our hallmark. Language allows us to take a reflective and imaginative position, standing outside the world while in the world, looking back at the world from inside.
As the philosopher Martin Heidegger claimed:
“We dwell in the house of language.”
The practical use of language is informing, a method of moving information from person to person. This is the language of everyday communication. A sentence is a freight train, each word a boxcar carrying a payload of data from one mind to another. Language makes things happen, gets things done. “Please pass the salt” results in a salt shaker placed in your hand. This transaction does not require interpretation. The words work directly.
But language has another purpose – disclosing. Language brings out into open consciousness that which has been obscure. This use language serves a poetic purpose. Words are a way of un-covering, re-vealing, un-concealing, dis-covering a deep strata of human experience which through poetry is brought into light. Making poetry is remembering what we have not forgotten, what we have never known. Poetry is the process of refining experience, whole experience: sensual, emotional, rational. Poetry has the power to make significant that which has been seen as insignificant or has not been seen at all.
Dualism is a philosophical model of reality that sees things as separate and antagonistic. Dualism, failing to see the deep interconnection of everything, gives us a distorted and harshly competitive view of the world.
The poetic eye looks. The poetic eye sees. The poetic act lifts into light. When we look, see, and lift, we begin to recognize distinctions and differences not seen before. A new foreground comes into view. A new image and insight is differentiated from the blur of background. But also, all the interconnections hidden within the obvious differences become recognizable.
A poem requires both the poet and the reader to pay attention, to see connections and relationships not noticed before. In this way we become more conscious of the finely woven rich tapestry of the world.
Clayton Eshleman (b. 1935) is an American poet, translator and teacher. His most important work is Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld, an exploration of cave painting and the Paleolithic imagination.
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