The Birth of Visionary Worlds

I HAVE become wary of opinions expressed in print about poetry. Words like these, set down in blocked type, have too much a sense of cold solidity about them. They give opinions rooted in one's own life an overburdening finality, and they ignore a dialogue essential to any genuine appreciation. Working apolegetically within these limitations, I would like to talk about two poets who have explored the contemporary meditative idiom and come up with radically different visions. Both are "visionary poets." That is, they create another world--a modern myth--only vaguely connected to this one, based on their personal consciousness and experience.

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 and fruition were physical as well as mental."

He 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.

The 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:

We are all made up, happy in the reality of our illusion, dressed as it were in the poem, the poem is the only dress we wear!

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:

The soft chrysalis spit a lovely golden slit, her slimy infant shape weak at first clung to her husk, slowly an iris her wet obsidian-tipped wings unfolded turquoise & gold, scarlet & deep green, wavered then taking off a ripple running thru the whole of creation lifting into the glowing azure sky over the intense Okumura Garden where I stood amazed watching my image separate from me

THE POETRY of W.S. Merwin is stillborn, shaped in the silence of introspection. It never comes out of its cocoon, but chooses instead to remain inside and reveal the intensity of inner vision. One poem, "On Each Journey," describes the feelings you have reading Merwin:

As on each journey there is a silence that goes with it to its end let us go with each other though the sun with its choirs of distancerises between us though it were to hang there the past like a day that would burn unmoved forever and only we went on each alone each with nothing but a silence

Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment conveys a less overwhelming sense of urgency than Coils. These poems express a muted joy, but it is an unpeopled land. Merwin sees in things a clear reflection of the material world; he doesn't doubt man's ability to know the "thing-in-itself." But the transcendent reality is not always happy. This is particularly evident in a poem called "Glass":

One day you look in the mirror and it's open and inside the place where the eyes were is a long road grey as water and on it someone is running away a little figure in a long pale coat and you can't move you can't call it's too late for that who was it you ask

In his dark enclosure, Merwin has created a very precise use of image and metaphor. This is particularly true of his pastorals, such as "Early One Summer":

these are days when the beetles hurry through dry grass hiding pieces of light they have stolen

His vision is a very personal one; he doesn't dwell on the medium, but goes past it almost to the point of a silent conversation with the reader. Merwin is one of the few poets who, by reaching into his own inner loneliness, can reach across his words to the aloneness that is in all of us.