(Thirty-four essays, interviews, and prose poems by this f...)
Thirty-four essays, interviews, and prose poems by this famous poet and translator explore theories of the contextual fabric of World poetry and describe the development of his own unique poetic vision in a penetrating re-evaluation of the roots of consciousness. This volume includes selections from Eshleman's dialogues with James Hillman as well as introductions from his two most important volumes of poetry. There is also a discussion of the narrative elements in Upper Paleolithic cave art; a provocative essay on the art of translation; and critical appraisals of such poets and artists as Gary Snyder, Leon Golub, William Bronk, Charles Olson, and Allen Ginsberg.
(Companion Spider is the accumulated work of a poet and tr...)
Companion Spider is the accumulated work of a poet and translator who goes more deeply into the art and its process and demands than anyone since Robert Duncan. Clayton Eshleman is one of our most admired and controversial poets, the translator of such great international poets as Cesar Vallejo, Aime Cesaire, and Antonin Artaud, and founder and editor of two important literary magazines, Sulfur and Caterpillar. As such, Eshleman writes about the vocation of poet and of the poet as a translator as no one else in America today; he believes adamantly that art must concern itself with vision, and that poets learn best by an apprenticeship that is a kind of immersion in the work of other poets. Companion Spider opens with a unique eighty-page essay called "Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship" addressed to the poet who is just starting out. Subsequent sections take up the art of translation, poets and their work, and literary magazine editing. The title is drawn from an extraordinary visionary experience which the author had, which becomes a potent metaphor for the creative process. Through the variety of poets and artists to whom he pays homage, Eshleman suggests a community which is not of a single place or time; rather, there is mutual recognition and responsiveness, so that the reader becomes aware of a range of artistic practices s/he might explore
Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld
(For over thirty years, Clayton Eshleman has studied the I...)
For over thirty years, Clayton Eshleman has studied the Ice Age cave art of southwestern France - Juniper Fuse is the culmination of this work. Named after the primitive hand lamp wicks used to light cave walls, the book, in Ronald Gottesman's words, is "a fabulous three-dimensional tapestry of scholarship. Original and intense, it poses serious questions about human nature and its relation to the animal and natural worlds." Juniper Fuse is also a profound examination, in poetry and in prose, of the nature of poetic imagination and personal myth-making. Drawing upon art history and archaeology as well as poetics and personal experience, Eshleman delivers a potent distillation of the "paleoecology" of our minds, a provocative, and wholly passionate, exploration into the nature of consciousness.
Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period
(Including the fabled text “To Have Done with the Judgment...)
Including the fabled text “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” this collection compiles the scatological writings of Artaud's final years Clayton Eshleman's translations are the finest and most authentic which have yet been made from Artaud's writing. Artaud's final work is his strongest and most enduring, and this collection has been wisely selected, and magnificently realized.
(From National Book Award-winning poet/author Clayton Eshl...)
From National Book Award-winning poet/author Clayton Eshleman a wide-ranging new book of poetry, prose poems, and essays. Spanning subjects from the writer's craft to poetic musings on art, this collection follows his recent, widely acclaimed 'Complete poems of Cesar Vallejo' and his books of original poems, 'Alchemist with One Eye on Fire'.
(National Book Award winning poet/essayist/translator Clay...)
National Book Award winning poet/essayist/translator Clayton Eshleman has written well over 30 books and has had hundreds of articles/essays/poems published throughout the world in the 40 years he has been writing. His work is included in many anthologies and his poetry has been translated into a number of other languages. This is the first comprehensive anthology published looking at the whole of his body of work: from translations to poetry to essays and prose poems. Winner of many major awards, including his second Landon Translation Award this year for his translation of Cesar Vallejo: The Complete Poems, Black Widow Press is pleased to bring to fruition this extensive overview of his work.
(Coming through a projection pole into the full tribal ass...)
Coming through a projection pole into the full tribal assembly of self-savagery, Clayton Eshleman activates in The Jointure a brilliant "I-beam" that illuminates the stack of androcentric figures through which his opus is staked to man's collective psychic force. Eshleman’s primordial intention in The Jointure is in contact with the ancestral realm. Among totems honored are Yorunomado, the daemon of Eshleman's first breakthrough poem written in Kyoto, and Xochipilli, the Aztec prince of hallucinogenic plants.
(An Anatomy Of The Night by Clayton Eshleman is a magnific...)
An Anatomy Of The Night by Clayton Eshleman is a magnificent new work by one of America’s foremost poets. In thirty-one parts written between December 2010 and February 2011, Eshleman’s long poem creates a choral effect that masterfully evokes fragments of candid observation shimmering in rhythmic intensity. In bold simplicities, illustrative sensibilities, and lyrical integrity this work is imaginative, intimate, and beautifully controlled. Hauntingly, these poems rip open the space of the long-form poem and create something new and brilliant.
(A large compendium of National Book Award-winning author ...)
A large compendium of National Book Award-winning author Clayton Eshleman's poetry, lectures on ancient cave paintings, a journal, essays, reviews, and interviews. A journey through Eshleman's musings and writings both new and old.
(In Nested Dolls, Clayton Eshleman weaves threads of myth,...)
In Nested Dolls, Clayton Eshleman weaves threads of myth, dream, memory, and imagination through a work etched in what he might call, after Adorno, a late style, wherein affirmation ventures forth in the face of annihilation. These are neutral investigations of abyssal loss, death, and rebirth coiled within one another, explorations of the “reality of the invisible world” and the “labyrinth underlying the poem” offering further episodes in the life of the Minotaur and the Spider that have marked Eshleman’s career as a poet for more than five decades.
(From 1981 to 2000, Sulfur magazine presented an American ...)
From 1981 to 2000, Sulfur magazine presented an American and international overview of innovative writing across forty-six issues, totaling some 11,000 pages and featuring over eight hundred writers and artists, including Norman O. Brown, Jorie Graham, James Hillman, Mina Loy, Ron Padgett, Octavio Paz, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Carlos Williams. Each issue featured a diverse offering of poetry, translations, previously unpublished archival material, visual art, essays, and reviews. Sulfur was a hotbed for critical thinking and commentary, and also provided a home for the work of unknown and younger poets. In the course of its twenty-year run, Sulfur maintained a reputation as the premier publication of alternative and experimental writing.
(That Clayton Eshleman has not ceased from exploration ove...)
That Clayton Eshleman has not ceased from exploration over a career spanning more than 60 years is witnessed by the bulk, range, and diversity of his prior work. Now in his 80's Eshleman presents us with a last collection of his poems-mostly recent, a few older. That he has sought to open up his life and work, to entwine and entangle it with others, through observation and vision, research and scholarship, translation and editing, and collaboration and conversation, all of this reflects Eshleman's life commitment, indeed a commitment to life in writing poetry.
Clayton Eshleman is an American poet, translator, and editor. He founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly-regarded literary magazines, Caterpillar and Sulfur. He is the co-translator of "Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry" and the author of "Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld." Eshleman was a regular reviewer for The Los Angeles Times Book Review, contributing 51 articles on books.
Background
Clayton Eshleman was born on June 1, 1935, in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. He is the only child of Ira Clayton and Gladys Maine (Spenser) Eshleman, both Presbyterians and from midwestern backgrounds. He was brought up to be a racist and to identify only with people who looked like him (he was, for example, forbidden to play with children whose mothers wore slacks away from home).
His mother started him on piano lessons when he was 6, and at about the same time he discovered imagination via comic strips and books. He began to listen to bebop as a teenager (Bud Powell especially), and hang out in Indianapolis blues clubs.
Education
After graduating from Shortridge High School in 1953, Clayton entered Indiana University, as a Music major. He dropped out of music school and, at his father's urging, entered Business School. In 1956 he was expelled due to poor grades and returned to school in 1957 as a Philosophy Major. He got there a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and a Master of Arts in Teaching in English Literature.
Clayton also took some creative writing workshops and American poetry courses.
Clayton Eshleman was an instructor at the University of Maryland in their Far-Eastern Division (Japan, Taiwan, Korea). He taught there literature and composition to armed forces personnel from 1961 to 1962.
Then Eshleman moved to Kyoto to teach English as a second language at Matsushita Electric Corporation in Kobe from 1962 to 1964. He had a job at the American Language Institute at New York University, where Clayton taught for two years (1966-1968).
From 1967 to 2000, Clayton Eshleman founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly-regarded literary magazines of the period. Twenty issues of Caterpillar appeared between 1967 and 1973. Selections from the magazine were collected as "A Caterpillar Anthology" (1971). In 1981, while Dreyfuss Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology, Eshleman founded Sulfur magazine. The forty-sixth and final issue of Sulfur, which received thirteen National Endowment for the Arts grants, was published in 2000, and "The Sulfur Anthology," edited by Eshleman, was published in 2016.
From 1979 to 1986, Eshleman was a regular reviewer for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, contributing fifty-one articles on books by Ashbery, Bishop, Milosz, Montale, Olson, Rilke, Whitman, and many others.
He has also been a full-time translator since the early 1960s. He is the main American translator of César Vallejo (with José Rubia Barcia) and of Aimé Césaire (with Annette Smith). He received the National Book Award in 1979 for his co-translation of "César Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry" (1980), and his translation of "Vallejo's Trilce"(2000) was co-winner of the Academy of American Poets' 2001 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. Eshleman has also translated books by Antonin Artaud, Bernard Bador, Michel Deguy, Vladimir Holan, and Pablo Neruda. With Gyula Kodolanyi, he edited and translated a book-length selection of post-World War II Hungarian poetry, which appeared in Sulfur 21.
He is the author of more than thirty books, and his collections of poetry include "Reciprocal Distillations" (2007), "Archaic Design" (2007), and "An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire" (2006).
He has also published books of essays, prose, and interviews, including "Companion Spider" (2002), "Antiphonal Swing: Selected Prose, 1962-1987" (1989), and "Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship" (1989).
Eshleman's own poetry is noted for its innovative use of myth, psychology, archeology, and surrealism. Using juxtaposition, complex and sinuous syntax, and an eclectic range of reference, Eshleman has carved out a distinct niche in American poetry. Eshleman's poetry has been described as "witty, abrasive, pungently earthy." His poems possess a heavy reliance on juxtaposition and the belief that an essential truth may emerge from the dionysiac combining of art, anthropology, poetry, and historical events.
Interests
Writers
William Blake, César Vallejo, Antonin Artaud, Bud Powell, Chaim Soutine
Connections
On June 17, 1961, Clayton married Barbara Novak. From this marriage a son, Matthew was born.
On April 28, 1970, Eshleman married his second wife, Caryl Reiter.