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Dear Friends,
We want to draw to your attention the publication of two rich and important volumes documenting crucial aspects of the life's work of poet, translator, and editor, Clayton Eshleman, creator of one of the deepest, most powerful, humane, and fearless bodies of poetic work produced in our lifetimes, which, in the confusion and obscurity of the contemporary literary publishing world, might well have escaped your notice.
Clayton Eshleman. The Essential Poetry 1960-2015
, published by our friend and rare-book colleague, Joe Phillips, of Black Widow Press, whose productions in general we heartily commend you, distills from Eshleman's almost 100 published volumes the vital core of his extraordinary oeuvre. It will certainly remain the collection of record until such day, perhaps an improbable day from the standpoint of current values, as a true Collected Works has been published.
In his relentless questioning, dis-mantling, and re-creating of himself, his society and his times, and the "facts" and relations that have been transmitted by unexamined acceptance of the given, unspoken self-interest, and fear-ridden habit - embarking upon a many decades-long quasi-shamanic process of "self"-destruction and rebirth -- he has given us one of the most conscientious poetic engagements of the Post-War era, never flinching before power or received pieties in any of their forms, including the insidious inertias of ordinary and public language, and always seeking to discover, or re-discover, the historically obscured depths of the human soul. Deep myth, Great Time, the primordial humanizing -- "soul-making" -- impulse of art-creation (of whose deepest roots in cave painting Eshleman was a pioneering explorer), the irreducible power and mystery of the feminine, as well as such glorious if now-diminished concepts as "justice" or "freedom": this is the sphere in which Eshleman's visionary and at once highly personal art unfolds, and like such antecedents as Blake, Artaud, Crane, Vallejo, and Césaire, or his "fellow argonauts," Robert Kelly and Jerome Rothenberg, he has continuously forged one of the great poetic experiments of his time.
In the words of Adrienne Rich, Eshleman has
"gone more deeply into his art, its process and demands, than any modern American poet since Robert Duncan or Muriel Rukeyser."
In addition to his renowned work as poet and translator, Eshleman was also among the most sensitive, adventurous, and prescient editors of his time, presiding over two of the greatest avant-garde literary journals in the history of American publishing, Caterpillar (1967-1973) and Sulfur (1981-2000). The present expansive selection from the pages of Sulfur recreates the heady atmosphere of a time of literary hope and ambition and, in retrospect, may well incorporate the apogee of the era preceding the decline of print culture and the most instructive antidote to the consequences of that decline.
Clayton has asked us to inform buyers of either or both of the present offerings, that he would be very happy to sign or inscribe them for you, in which case you are welcome to communicate directly with him about logistics at
[email protected]. Further information about these and other works can be found at
www.claytoneshleman.com.
Sincerely,
John Wronoski
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