Clayton Eshleman
CLAYTON ESHLEMAN is the author of numerous books of poetry, including, in 2008, The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader, Clayton Eshleman / The Essential Poetry 1960-2015 and most recently Penetralia (all from Black Widow). Eshleman has published sixteen collections of translations, including Watchfiends & Rack Screams by Antonin Artaud (Exact Change, 1995), The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo with a Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa (University of California Press, 2007), and Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry (co-translated with Annette Smith, University of California Press, 1983). Most recently, Wesleyan Press brought out a 900 page bilingual edition of The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire, co-translated with A. James Arnold Eshleman also founded and edited two of the most innovative poetry journals of the later part of the 20th century: Caterpillar (20 issues, 1967-1973) and Sulfur (46 issues, 1981-2000). Doubleday-Anchor published A Caterpillar Anthology in 1971 and Wesleyan in November 2015 published a 700 page Sulfur Anthology. His website is www.claytoneshleman.com
A Clayton Eshleman Reader (Black Widow Press, 2008) and his translation
of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo (University of California Press,
2007). “Pollock Pouring,” which is based on Pollock’s 1949 #1, will appear
in Anticline, to be published by Black Widow in 2010.
and faulty
interior, with the clocks stacked in my kidneys,
with my face of a radish
draining tears into a tile sea.
And I do not want to come to terms with this vaunted
faculty, with these mer and men maids
calving right below consciousness.
analyzed by minorities who have, in my lifetime,
refused to remain anonymous—
"Until the missing story of ourselves is told,
nothing besides told can suffice us;
we shall go on quietly craving it."