The Price of Experience

The title of Clayton Eshleman's The Price of Experience comes from "Night the Second" of William Blake's The Four Zoas. This work is a literary anatomy, including two long poems ("The Moistinsplendor," written on LSD in NYC 1967 and "An Anatomy of the Night," a summational vision completed in 2011); "Adhesive Love," an essay based on Whitman's distinctions between "adhesive" and "amatory" love; three New York City stories; a memoir of selling vacuum cleaners door to door as a teenager in Indianapolis; a poetry and prose journal kept during a 1985 trip to Brittany; essays on Paul Blackburn, César Vallejo, Pierre Joris and Aimé Césaire; three sections of "Noticings" from Sulfur magazine; reviews of works by Lee Hickman, Charles Olson, Adrienne Rich, Chaim Soutine, and Leon Golub; eleven lectures on the Upper Paleolithic painted caves of southwestern France; notes on Carolee Schneemann, apprenticehood, the Medusa, Rodin and Steven Antinoff's "Spiritual Atheism;" four interviews and a conversation with Robert Kelly; prose poems inspired by the work of Daumier and Laura Solorzano; a translation of Henri Michaux's poem "Movements;" and "Erratics," a chance-assembled collection of sightings, aphorisms, tiny poems, and quotations.