[beambot]

I'm fairly versed in functional programming and LISP (having grokked PG's "On Lisp"). (Un)fortunately, I have yet to touch Java -- it always conjured images of C/C++, and that was sufficient to keep me at arm's length (I'm a python robotics hacker day-to-day).

My question: How requisite is Java know-how to using Clojure?

[kaffiene]

You need to know what's in the Java libraries if you want to write to the Java libraries. If your code is all self contained, then you don't. So - open a Swing JFrame and you need to know where that is in the API and how to call it.