An alchemist with one eye on fire.

N.O. BROWN: "THE CENTRAL FEATURE OF the human situation is the existence of the unconscious, the existence of a reality of which we are unconscious." Poetry, then, is about the extending of human consciousness, making conscious the unconscious, creating a symbolic consciousness that in its finest moments over-comes all the dualities in which the human world is cruelly and eternally, it seems, enmeshed.

Part of being fully human is to realize that one is a metaphor. To be a metaphor is to be hybrid, or as Arthur Rimbaud put it, to have a "marvelous body." The first poets were those Upper Paleolithic people who, apprehending that their brothers and sisters were separating the animal out of their heads and bodies, and projecting it onto cave walls, attempted to rebond with the animal. These protoshamans depicted themselves with animal and bird heads, creating a grotesque (initially of the grotto) in which there was symbolic communication between the new human and the old animal realms. Under Rimbaud chasing black and white moons during a Paris hashish session is a young Cro-Magnon dreaming of fiery horses zooming in and out of the sky in a cave somewhere in what would become southwestern France thousands of years later.

In the work of certain poets--William Blake, Lautreamont, H.D., Hart Crane, Antonin Artaud, and Allen Ginsberg come immediately to mind--an archaic and symbolic reality is present. In Artaud's case, the shamanic elements are particularly striking. His vision quests to northern Mexico and southwestern Ireland, use of a magic dagger and cane, loss of identity, possession by doubles, appearing to die during electro-shock, glossolalia, spitting, the projection of magical daughters from his own body, and his imaginative resurrection in the Rodez asylum, have more to do with shamanism than with the lives of 19th and 20th century "men of letters." What is devastatingly absent in the Artaud scenario is a supporting community. Artaud is a Kafka man, putting himself through a transfiguring self-initiation to discover, stage by stage (until the final two years of his life) that he was regarded by his fellow men as an obnoxious and dangerous pariah.

We live in the age of the death of eternity, the age of mortal sky, ocean, and earth, with such caves as Lascaux, Niaux, and Chauvet today appearing to be the cemeteries of the Cro-Magnon paradise. From the Tang Dynasty to Modernism, poets, in spite of the never-ending terror of so-called "mother nature," have sought refuge in a vision of the impermanent permanent. In spite of their almost weightless impermanence, they have felt that their writing was underwritten by "something" that would always be, call it gods, eternal recurrence, or the chain of being. Today, wilderness and nature at large have become increasingly insular. Mother nature has become man's problem child--we must now take care of her. And the nuclear bomb is not the only repository for contemporary terror. In 2002, Adrienne Rich wrote me: "I think that modernity itself drives people into terror and hence into presumed certitudes of tribalism, fundamentalism, their concomitant patriarchalism, and even suicidalism (I think of Ariel Sharon as a kind of suicide bomber for his nation, which he is willing to destroy than to accept a non-military solution)."

At the turn of the 20th century, American poetry, with the compelling exceptions of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, was still filled with Victorian decorum and was a poetry of taste, on extremely limited subjects, written almost exclusively by white males. At the millennium, this picture has changed radically: written by African-American, Asian, Chicano, as well as white heterosexual and declared homosexual men and women, American poetry, as a composite force, has become more representative of humanity.

This democratization of poetry must be evaluated in the light of some three hundred undergraduate and graduate university degree programs offering majors in writing poetry and fiction. This system is now producing thousands of talented but unoriginal writers most of whom would not be writing at all if it were not for jobs. Once upon a time, there was a "left bank" and a "right bank" in our poetry: the innovative vs. the traditional. Today the writing scene resembles a blizzard on an archipelago of sites. Not only has the laudable democratization of poetry been compromised by being brick-layered into the academy but with few exceptions there is a lack of strong "signature" and a tacit affirmation of the bourgeois status quo, the politics of no politics.

It is as if a new purgatory, a postmodernist DMZ, has insinuated itself between the poet and the events of the world. This purgatory is multifaceted and loaded with funhouse mirrors. While it is scrambled with lies, distortions, and the unreported, it is also permeated with global information on a scale undreamed of before the Vietnamese War. In the Gulf War, "impersonal force" was presented as a video game, intercut with information-screened press conferences. Today mainstream reportage has suppressed the havoc we are wreaking on Iraq. So one goes on line to view cadavers in Baghdad morgues.

Exposed to the non-information avalanche generated throughout a country whose interventionist tentacles are coiling about all parts of the globe, the tendency of many poets of all ilks (especially those with a job at stake) is to preoccupy themselves with word games, displays of self-sensitivity, or pastiches of entertaining asides. In the official verse culture backed by The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and The New York Times (magazines and newspapers which often engage current events, history and culture from a liberal point of view), poetry reviews and contributions are determined by taste, precious intellectuality, and a conservative old boys club (which includes old girls). X may be exposed but only under certain conditions and in certain decorous ways. There is still something in the Puritan shallows of the American editor that says: do not attempt to investigate. And do not propose material that does not elicit a knee-jerk reaction, but does require a thoughtful (and often not immediate) response.

What might a responsible avant-garde in poetry today include?

1. Radical, investigational writing that is raw, often wayward, in process; poetry as an intervention within culture against static forms of knowledge, schooled conceptions; cliched formulations.

2. Writing that evinces a thoughtful awareness of racism, imperialism, ecological issues, disasters, and wars.

3. Multiple levels of language--the arcane, the idiomatic, the erudite, the vulgar, the scientific; relentless probing; say anything; not just "free speech" but freed speech.

4. Transgression, opening up of the sealed sexual strong rooms; inspection of occult systems for psychic networks; the archaic and the tribal viewed as part of everyone's fate.

5. Treating boundaries like stage scenery.

I look out of my workroom window: redbud tree, neighbor's garage, church parking lot, gray Michigan winter sky. Bland, peaceful. When I first drafted this essay in 2002, I saw an Afghani woman in full body veil sitting on a bridge in Kabul, begging. She was in a Taliban frame, one constructed in large part by the CIA which helped create Osama Bin Laden. After bombed Afghanistan reverted back to warlord-controlled regionalism, as the second act in the same play, "mission accomplished" Iraq had become a cemetery for at least 25,000 of its citizens, under a rain of 500 pound bombs and 127 tons of depleted uranium munitions. What the Bush administration would have Americans believe was a double containment response to the 9/11 assault now appears to have been in planning stages for not only years, but, as a program of global domination (taking over from England, now our junior neo-colonial partner) set forth at the end of World War II.

As a citizen of a country that has supported such terrorists as the Nicaraguan Contras, UNITA in Angola, the Moujahedeen in Afghanistan, Cuban exiles in Miami, and the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Chile, the American poet reaps and suffers the rewards of American terrorism, which are part of his or her specter, his anti-imaginative blockage, whether he acknowledges such or not. All of us are connected to the rubble of Fallujah by a poisoned umbilicus.

Unlike poets in China, Iran, and Nigeria, I can still say anything I want to say (for a while at least). This is not only suspect freedom--it renders my situation absurd. I am like a maniac allowed to wander about screaming fire in a theater of the deaf. Am I a traitor? Certainly not. I am not committed to the overthrow of anyone or anything. I remind myself mostly of a late 19th century alchemist mixing and cooking my potions in a Prague apartment--an alchemist with one eye on fire from what he knows is going on outside his laboratory.

As a middle-class American, I am over-exposed to the front side of our avuncular top-hatted Uncle Sam. Much of the world has a different view of Sam than I do. Iraqis, Serbs, Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Panamanians, for example, see a skeletal backside wired with DU, cluster bombs, dioxin, sarin, napalm (most recently used in Fallujah) and hydrogen cyanide. I know what I see and I keep both sides of Sam's body in mind as I continue to work on myself, to learn, and to love. I show nearly everything that I write to my wife, Caryl. She reads it, tells me what she thinks. Intel ligent and honest, she knows my writing well and sometimes detects its flaws. After we talk, I do more work and make more flaws! This exchange is one of the reasons that at seventy I continue to write. Poetry as a space that two people can enter and relate through. A small world. But no smaller than the human universe, which is a match flicker in cosmic night.

Where is poetry going today? To hell, as usual, not to Christian Hell but to the underworld, to our pre-Christian unconscious, which is pagan and polytheistic. Poetry's perpetual direction is its way of ensouling events, of seeking the doubleness in events, the event's hidden or contradictory meaning. The first poets, facing the incomprehensible division between what would become culture and wilderness, taught themselves how to span it and thus, momentarily, to be whole in a way that human-kind could not be whole before it became aware of its differences from animals.

American poets today, facing the possibly comprehensible mindset of neocon conquest, amorfati, and the need to find out for oneself, must assimilate such vectors and figure out ways to articulate them. If we cannot accomplish this, then our distinction may become that of being the first generation to have lived at a time in which the origins and the end of poetry became discernable.

I continue to regard poetry as a form in which the realities of the spirit can be tested by critical intelligence, a form in which the blackness in the heart of man can be confronted, in which affirmation is only viable when it survives repeated immersions in negation--in short, a form that can be made responsible for all the poet knows about himself and his world.

NOTE

This essay was originally a talk written out for the May 2002 International Poetry Conference in Paris at the Bibliotheque Nationale Mitterrand.

CLAYTON ESHLEMAN is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor. Black Sparrow Press published 13 of his collections between 1968 and 2004, the most recent being My Devotion (2004). In 2003, Wesleyan University Press published his Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld, the fruits of a 25-year investigation of the origins of image-making via the Ice Age painted caves of southwestern France. Recent poems, translations, and prose may be found in Poets & Writers magazine, New American Writing, Hunger, House Organ, and Verse.