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From an Interview with William Harmer For Agenda (1994) AGENDA: Your poetry seems to deal with animalnature on one hand and the human capacity for reason on the other. Can you comment on this? ESHLEMAN: I think that animal nature is exactlywhat humankind lost in the process of discovering what we might call today the autonomous imagination, or art. In this sense, the beginning of art is a kind of animal undressing, and this loss, as it were, is embedded, at a very deep layer, in the nature of art. In fact, I'd say that the loss of animal spontaneity , which must be involved with the animal'sunawareness of its own death, is felt by poets in the abyssalspacebetween desire and the imaginative fulfillment of desire. What you refer to as "animal nature" in my poetry I'd call the extent to which my own image-making is tied into my ceaseless hauntedness over the out-prisoning of my animal nature, which I feel that I have only been able to contact, as a person, in extreme , emotional agitation, such as fear, or sexualorgasm. I am haunted by this image: that in lovemaking as one approaches orgasm, it is as if one is inching up a wall surrounding paradise,and the sensation is that at the moment of orgasm one will be catapulted over the wall andBE HOME—but as most of us know, this never happens. Man and woman penetrate this sacred precinct, and I can honestly saythat I have felt it rush through me—but paradise,as home without outside, is, even when it is closest, at an imaginative remove, and while we can imagine it via other imaginations, the abyss between desire and the fulfillment of desire seems to be bottomless. Of course certain people have cleverways of denying the absoluteness of this abyss, putting bars over it, or wallpapering the bars, or splitting its size between heaven and hell, and so This interview appeared in the Ann Arbor alternativenews monthly, Agenda, #197, December 1994. From an Interview 'with William Harmer 293 on, but I think that the poet must be the one (and here I am thinking of all artists as poets) who lives this abyss and who is not afraid to allow it to show through his imagination. AGENDA: In the first poem in your new collection, Under World Arrest, you write: Begin with this: the world has no origin. We encircle the moment, lovers who, encircling each other, steep in the fantasy: now we know the meaning of life. Would you care to comment on these lines? ESHLEMAN: The paradox: one is always beginning anew, yet one is never at origin. We are haunted—that word again—by our seeking to be originators, to be instrumental, make things happen, to be asvitalas van Gogh, say,in his twelve-candled hat under the starry infinite drawing the infinite into his own tiny grid so that it might implode in me, the viewer—and which, of course, asviewer I want to assimilate, compost , lose it in my own energy, turn that moment he has offered me into my own. Thus art goes on and on, a vast daisy-chain, each artist willynilly linked to others in something that is probably deeper than sexual connection. At this point, critics such as Harold Bloom tell us we are all helplessly belated. Origin is something that happened out of sight blinded from mind. I find this kind of thinking to be one dimensional, and only critical, in that its intention appears to be to trap me and shut down my workshop. If my poetry is only a faint, faint evocation of some original imaginative leap, why bother to write at all? So, going back to the poem whose opening lines you have quoted, I prefer to get rid of origin at thesame time that I work with its splintered resplendence. One may sense the truth of a moment, but "the meaning of life" is at once so absurd, painful, joyous, and strange as to be ineffable. And if, for a moment, we take origin and belatedness seriously, we realize that perhaps Cro-Magnon alone was original. We are all, Dante and Shakespeare included, in a towering juggernaut of pickabacks, standing on the shoulders of those who made the incredible breakthrough from no image of the world to an image. I just recalled that Carl Jung once defined the meaning of life as a good companion, and that I...

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