Mysterex: The Spider's Web - John Esam's Sixties

2009-09-19T04:10:00.000-07:00

Mysterex: The Spider's Web - John Esam's Sixties

I was only at long range, and later connected, with that culture through Nick Saunders and friends (Alternative London etc) but in 1972 came across Residu 2 , which I still have, and an edition of Image, now lost. John Esam's "Yellow Ancestor" section of the poem cycle "Orpheus/Eurydice" was read to me in Sri Lanka by Mike Wilson (later to become Sivakalki Swami, q.v. on the web). Mike was a cameraman known to many mentioned in your blog, a friend of Arthur C Clarke, and the man who shot a lot of the ape sequence in 2001. I understand Dan Richter (poet, dancer, mime) in addition to chreographing the primate sequence played the part of the Moonwatcher ape who throws the bone-tool into the air where it transmutes as the entire history of human technology expressed in the space station waltzing through the cosmos to the music of the Blue Danube.

That poem became a theme in my life for the next few years. I still love it and show it to people who have never heard of John Esam. In the mid seventies I had a girlfriend who turned out to have met John in a launderette in London but have never really heard of him since. I did in 1978 meet an anthropologist - Joan ? (sorry name forgotten) who had a big folder that John E had left with her, containing all (?) his poetry which she lent me and which I've often wished I copied. Since then I've managed to get just one other section of "Orpherus/Eurydice" beyond a section in Residu 2 and the second section in something called 'The Mongol Review' which was a magazine within a magazine, bound into the back of that edition of Residu.

I'm very happy to know he's alive and hopefully thriving ... perhaps even still writing. Thanks for this blog.

MalcolmStewart

Mysterex: The Spider's Web - John Esam's Sixties