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A vital compendium of poetic vision
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 Each issue featured a diverse offering of poetry, translations, previously unpublished archival material, visual art, essays, and reviews.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. This was due in no small measure to its impressive masthead of contributing editors and correspondents: Marjorie Perloff, James Clifford, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Keith Tuma, Allen Weiss, Jed Rasula, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, Jayne Cortez, Marjorie Welish, Jerome Rothenberg, Eliot Weinberger, managing editor Caryl Eshleman, and founding editor Clayton Eshleman.
A Sulfur Anthology offers readers an expanded view of artistic activity at the century's end. It's also a luminous document of international poetic vision. Many of the contributions have never been published outside of Sulfur, making this an indispensible collection of poetry in translation, and poetry in the world.
Publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
Introduction
ISSUE #1
Ezra Pound: from an unpublished draft of Canto LXXXIV
James Hillman: Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis
Charles Stein: from a Book of Confusions
ISSUE #2
Jerome Rothenberg: Harold Bloom, The Critic as Exterminating Angel
Clayton Eshleman: The Seeds of Narrative in Paleolithic Art
ISSUE #3
Robert Duncan: In Blood's Domaine
Michel Deguy: "I call muse the seesaw of the sky…" [Tr. C. Eshleman]
Cid Corman on Paul Celan ISSUE #4
Paul Blackburn: Mediterráneo: a litoral
ISSUE #5
Michel Leiris: Who is Aimé Césaire? [Tr. A.J. Arnold]
Aimé Césaire: Lost Body [Tr. C. Eshleman & A. Smith]
ISSUE #6
Ronald Johnson: Ark 39
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven: A Dozen Cocktails
ISSUE #7
Octavio Paz: Maithuna [Tr. E. Weinberger]
Gary Snyder: Uluru Wild Fig Song
Antonin Artaud: Letter to Peter Watson [Tr. C. Eshleman, B. Bador, D. Maclagan]
William Carlos Williams: Sketch for a Primer of Present Day Poetics
ISSUE #8
Edmond Jabès: The Book Belongs to the Reader [Tr. R. Waldrop]
Alejandra Pizarnik: Fundamental Stone [Tr. S. Pensak]
ISSUE #10
Charles Bernstein: William Carlos Williams meets the MLA
James Clifford: Dada Data
ISSUE #11
Paul Celan: The Second Cycle of Zeitgehoft [Tr. P. Joris]
ISSUE #12
Vladimir Holan: from A Night with Hamlet [Tr C. Eshleman, F. Galan, M. Heim]
Jackson Mac Low: Pieces O' Six VII
Eliot Weinberger: The Dream of India
ISSUE #13
August Kleinzahler: Two Poems
Ron Padgett: Three Poems
Clayton Eshleman: Response to Mary Kinzie
ISSUE #14
Basil Bunting: An Open Letter to Louis Zukofsky
Clark Coolidge: LA in Time
ISSUE #15
Michel Leiris: Stones for a Possible Alberto Giacometti [Tr. L. Davis]
Peter Redgrove: from The Mudlark Poems
Jed Rasula: The Man Named East and Other Poems by Peter Redgrove
ISSUE #16
Rae Armantrout: Sense
James Hillman & Clayton Eshleman: On Psychology & Poetry
Ron Silliman: from OZ
Marjorie Perloff: Of Canons & Contempories
ISSUE #17
Jackson Mac Low: Pieces O' Six XXIV
Eliot Weinberger: What Were the Questions?
Robert Gluck: HTLV-3
ISSUE #19
Charles Simic: Collard Greens and Black-Eye Peas
ISSUE #20
Michael Palmer: Sun
Philip Lamantia: Unachieved
Gary Snyder: Walking the New York Bedrock Alive in the Sea of Information
ISSUE #21
Jerome Rothenberg: Poland/1987
Miklós Radnóti: Seventh Eclogue [Tr. by C. Eshleman and G. Kodolanyi]
Sandor Csoóri: The Visitor's Memories [Tr. C. Eshleman and G. Kodolanyi]
Wolfgang Giegerich: Deliverance from the Stream of Events: Okeanos and the Circulation of the Blood
Clark Coolidge: from At Egypt
ISSUE #22
Coral Bracho: On the Facets: The Flashing [Tr. T. Hoeksema]
Ana Mendieta: A Selection of Statements and Notes
B. Ruby Rich: Ana Mendieta: A Postscript
ISSUE #23
Gerrit Lansing: In Erasmus Darwin's Generous Light
ISSUE #24
Sulfur : imagination as an instrument of change
ISSUE #25
Charles Olson: "The chain of memory is resurrection…"
Myung Mi Kim: Under Flag
Martha Ronk: The Object of Desire
José Lezama Lima: Confluences [Tr. James Irby]
Norman O. Brown: Metamorphosis III: Narcissus
ISSUE #26
Karen Kelley: The Red Snake She Woke
Marjorie Welish: Scalpel in Hand
René Char: Four Poems [Tr. G. Sobin]
Allen S. Weiss: In the Devil's Kitchen: The Dolls of Michel Nedjar
ISSUE #27
Milton Kessler: Zero
Mina Loy: Notes on Religion [Ed. K. Tuma]
Elaine Equi: Generic
George Oppen: The Philosophy of the Astonished [Ed. R.B. Duplessis]
ISSUE #28
Barbara Mor: from Oil
Forrest Gander: Land Surveyor
ISSUE #29
Barbara Guest: Dissonance Royal Traveler
Ron Padgett: Prose Poem
Andrea Zanzotto: Distrust Throat, Body, Movements, Theatre [Tr. P. Verdicchio]
James Clifford: Incidents of Tourism in Chiapas and Yucatan
ISSUE #30
Amiri Baraka: When Miles Split!
Rainer Maria Rilke: Testament [Tr. P. Joris]
ISSUE #31
Jayne Cortez: Two Poems
Paul Violi: Sideshow
Hugh Seidman: Four Poems
ISSUE #32
Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Draft 17: Unnamed
Clayton Eshleman: Short Story
Aaron Shurin: A Door
Will Alexander: Albania & the Death of Enver Hoxha
ISSUE #33
Larry Eigner: The hours, keepers of Heaven
Robert Kelly: Pasts
ISSUE #35
Andrew Joron: Peculiar Roots have Reason's Eyes
Jed Rasula: Gendering the Muse
ISSUE #36
Eliot Weinberger: Naked Mole Rats
Linh Dinh: Three Poems
ISSUE #37
Robin Blaser: Nomad
ISSUE #38
Gustaf Sobin: Late Bronze, Early Iron: a Journey Book
ISSUE #39
Michael McClure: from Ape Man
W.B. Keckler: Aboriginal (Number Two)
Rachel Blau du Plessis: Barbara Guest's Recent Work
Jorie Graham: Le Manteau de Pascal
ISSUE #40
Adrienne Rich: Char
John Olson: Two Poems
Wang Ping: Flash of Selfish Consciousness
ISSUE #41
Dale Pendell: Amrta: The Neuropharmacology of Nirvana
Pierre Joris: from Animals to the Point
Vitezslav Nezval: The Lesser Rose Garden [Tr. J. Rothenberg and M. Sovak]
ISSUE #42
Andrew Joron: Spine to Spin, Spoke to Speak
Guillaume Apollinaire: A Phantom of Clouds [Tr. R. Padgett]
ISSUE #43
André Breton: Three Poems [Tr. M Polizzotti]
ISSUE #44
Lisa Robertson: Essay on the Origin of Our Languages
ISSUE #45/46
Kenneth Irby: (tulip etudes)
Robert Kelly: The Sound of the Center
Contributor Notes
CLAYTON ESHLEMAN is an American poet, translator, and editor. He is a professor emeritus at Eastern Michigan University. Select back issues of Sulfur are available from the author's website.
"By the time Caterpillar ended in 1973, I was living in London, and I felt its demise like a serious blow. Eshleman returned with a vengeance, creating Sulfur, seven years later. ... Sulfur became the essential magazine I went to ... The anthology ... is a superb 650-page walk through the 46 issues of Sulfur. A treasure trove."
~Pierre Joris, Jacket 2
"A Sulfur Anthology presents an essential selection from the now legendary journal of the Whole Art, but it's no mere greatest hits collection: experimental and unruly, it's a kaleidoscopic assemblage of poetry and poetics, archival materials, translations, critical commentary and essays, shocking in range and diversity; an open site for an all too unique communal inquiry into poetry, from its sources in psychology and history to its furthest possibilities of expression, intimate and political. Sulfur was a touchstone for two generations of poets; reading A Sulfur Anthology reminds me what the fuss was all about. But more than that, A Sulfur Anthology is bursting with news that stays news: a retrospective volume with its sights on the far horizon."
~Stuart Kendall, California College of the Arts
"Sulfur must certainly be the most important literary magazine that has explored and extended the boundaries of poetry. Clayton Eshleman has a nose for smelling out what is going to happen next in the ceaseless evolution of living art."
~James Laughlin
"In an era of literary conservatism and sectarianism, the broad commitment of Sulfur to both literary excellence and a broad interdisciplinary, unbought humanistic engagement with the art of poetry has been invaluable. Its critical articles have been the sharpest going over the last several years."
~Gary Snyder
"Begun in 1980 and finished by 2000, Sulfur marked with self-conscious brilliance the culmination cycle for the postwar literary magazine wave that had commenced in 1950 with Cid Corman's Origin. As an editor, Clayton Eshleman has continuously refined our understanding of poetry by means of intellectual engagement and real commitment to implicating the poet's artistry in the crucially extensive context of community, cosmos, history, myth, politics, and psyche. Truly, his lifelong dedication to assembling forms of international modernism, statements from depth psychology, texts of innovative poetry, and translations of world poetry is unsurpassed. Hence A Sulfur Anthology is guaranteed to further the refinement process that Eshleman initiated in 1980. From Ezra Pound to Barbara Mor, from Aimé Césaire to Rae Armantrout, from Robert Duncan to Ron Silliman, from Antonin Artaud to Amiri Baraka, from Mina Loy to Linh Dihn, from René Char to Paul Celan, and much more—this anthology radiates a monumental pulse that recounts all the turning points needed for readers in the twenty-first century to understand that Sulfur persists as the most indispensable literary magazine authorized by the Imagination."
~Kenneth Warren, author of Captain Poetry's Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980–2012
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