there is ongoing research into dom manipulaton in clojurescript - Conrad Barski presented one approach[1] at Conj 2012 where the dom is mirrored in clojurescript data structures, and then 'synced' with the dom - so that way the imperative ickyness is tucked away in the sync method - it remains to be seen if that can be made fast enough until we get a native persistent interface to the dom.
