Clayton Eshleman (June 1, 1935 – January 29 or 30, 2021) was an American poet, translator and editor, noted in particular for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave painting and the Paleolithic imagination. Eshleman's work has been awarded with the National Book Award for Translation, the Landon Translation prize from the Academy of American Poets (twice), a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy, among other awards and honors."Chronology" in Stuart Kendall, ed. Clayton Eshleman: The Whole Art (Black Widow Press, 2014).
Biography
1935–1962 Clayton Eshleman was born on June 1, 1935, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is the son of Ira Clayton Eshleman (1895–1971) and Gladys Maine (Spenser) Eshleman (1898–1970). The poet's father was employed as a time-and-motion study efficiency engineer at Kingan and Company, a slaughterhouse and meat-packer. The family lived in the 1800 block of North Delaware Street. As a child the poet was forbidden from playing with children whose parents drank alcohol, with children of different races or religions, or whose mothers wore pants outside of the home.
Eshleman was exposed to the arts as a child through piano lessons and drawing classes focused on comic strips. In high school, Eshleman played football, ran track and wrestled. He worked as a lifeguard during the summer.
In 1951, Eshleman discovered jazz music, attracted in particular to the music of Bud Powell and Lennie Tristano. He began to spend time in jazz clubs and to play jazz alongside classical music. In 1953, Eshleman enrolled in Indiana University, majoring in music, but was not devoted to his studies. He pledged to the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. The hazing he endured during pledge week would become a significant topic in his poetry.
Pursuing his interest in jazz, Eshleman travelled to Los Angeles in the summer of 1954. He parked cars for a living and studied jazz piano with Marty Paitch and Richie Powell, the younger brother of Bud Powell. Returning to Indiana University in the fall, Eshleman changed his major to Business. His academic performance suffered. Put on academic probation for low grades, he was expelled for having too many parking tickets, but able to return to school the following year, this time as a Philosophy major.
Eshleman discovered poetry in creative writing classes at Indiana University. He studied 20th century American poetry with Samuel Yellin and Josephine Piercy. Jack and Ruth Hirschman introduced him to world poetry in translation, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakofsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, and St.-John Perse. Mary Ellen Solt introduced him, via correspondence, to Louis Zukofksy, Robert Creeley, and Cid Corman, as well as to poets closer to his own generation: Paul Blackburn, Robert Kelly, Jerome Rothenberg, Jackson Mac Low, and David Antin. Eshleman travelled frequently to New York City to meet with these poets in person. Through Paul Blackburn he would meet William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov.
Eshleman graduated from Indiana University with a degree in philosophy in 1958 but reenrolled as a graduate student in English Literature. He supported himself by playing piano in the bar of a steakhouse on weekends. Eshleman published his first poem in the Indiana University English Department student magazine, Folio. The following year, Eshleman took over the editorship of Folio for three issues. Eshleman gave his first reading of his own poetry in New York City at Metro Café in 1960. The reading was organized by Paul Blackburn.
Eshleman discovered the poetries of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo in a copy of the Dudley Fitts edited Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Poetry (New Directions, 1947) given to him by Bill Paden in 1958. Motivated by his interest in Neruda and Vallejo, Eshleman hitchhiked to Mexico City in order to learn Spanish in the summers of 1959 and 1960. He began translating Neruda's Residencias at this time.
In 1961, Eshleman graduated from Indiana University with a Master of Arts degree in Teaching Creative Writing. That summer he married Barbara Novak and took a job teaching English for the University of Maryland, College Park, Far-Eastern Division (Japan, Taiwan, Korea). In the next year, he taught literature and composition to military personnel for two months in Tainan, Taiwan, four months at Tachikawa Air Force Base, outside Tokyo, and two months at the Strategic Air Command (SAC) Base in Seoul, Korea.
1962–1972 Eshleman met Cid Corman in person for the first time in San Francisco while en route to Asia. He met Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger in Tokyo when they were en route to India. Following Snyder's suggestion, in the spring of 1962, Eshleman moved to Kyoto to teach English as a second language at Matsushita Electric Corporation in Kobe. He and Barbara would stay there until 1964.
While in Kyoto, Eshleman began what he would later describe as his “apprenticeship to poetry” by translating César Vallejo's Poemas humanos. Simultaneously he begins writing “The Tsuruginomiya Regeneration”: what would ultimately become a 350-page sequence of poems, eventually reedited and published as his book Coils (1973). Alongside his writing and translation, Eshleman studied William Blake, Northrop Frye's book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, the I Ching, and world mythology. After working for several weeks outside under a persimmon tree inhabited by a large red, green and yellow spider, which subsequently disappeared, Eshleman had a visionary experience involving a spider which he interpreted as a totemic gift confirming his vocation as a poet.
During this period in Kyoto, Eshleman was close to several fellow artists and poets: Will Peterson, Gary Snyder, and Cid Corman, who was then editing the second series of Origin. His correspondents during the period include Paul Blackburn, W.S. Merwin, Jerome Rothenberg, and Robert Kelly. He published his first books during this period as well: Mexico and North and Residence on Earth, a translation of Neruda Residencias.
In 1964, the Eshlemans returned to Indiana for one year before moving, when Barbara was several months pregnant, to the Miraflores section of Lima, Peru, where Eshleman hoped to gain access to César Vallejo's manuscripts for the Poemas humanos, then in the possession of Vallejo's widow, Georgette. Georgette would ultimately deny him access to the manuscripts. Eshleman's initial translation of the Human Poems would not be published until 1968, when it was released by Grove Press.
Eshleman's experiences walking through the slums of Lima awakened his political conscience. At this time, he was also hired by the North American Peruvian Institute to edit a bilingual literary magazine, funded by the institute. He gave the collection the title Quena (in reference to a Quechuan flute). Writers and intellectuals in Lima assumed the magazine was cover for United States government espionage work. The magazine was suppressed by the Institute for political reasons prior to the publication of its first issue.
Eshleman's son, Matthew Craig Eshleman was born in Peru in 1966. Barbara Eshleman suffered nearly fatal complications from the birth. Thereafter the Eshlemans returned to Indiana briefly before moving to New York City in the summer of 1966. They separated in New York City that fall.
Over the next couple of years, Eshleman taught at the American Language Institute at New York University while participating actively in New York literary and artistic life.
Caterpillar magazine In 1966 and 1967, he published a series of books under the Caterpillar Books imprint. These include titles by Aimé Césaire (in Eshleman's co-translation with Denis Kelly), Cid Corman, Paul Blackburn, Frank Samperi, David Antin, D. Alexander, Robert Vas Dias, Jackson Mac Low, and himself. In 1967, he founded and began editing Caterpillar magazine, which he would publish quarterly through 1970, and periodically thereafter, through 1973. The magazine was supported by grants from the Council of Literary Magazines and the National Translation Center as well as sales, advertisement, and donations. Caterpillar was of major significance for poets writing in the postmodern tradition during those years.
Eshleman was also active in the anti-war movement, particularly as an organizer and participant in the “Angry Arts” protest group. He was arrested and jailed for demonstration at St. Patrick's Cathedral. He also participated in a series of readings in Milwaukee and Seattle with Robert Bly, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders and others to raise money for draft resisters.
Eshleman cultivated a wide circle of new and on-going friendships during these years, including Frank Samperi, Diane Wakoski, Adrienne Rich, Nora Jaffe, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Carolee Schneeman, James Tenney, Michael Heller, and Hugh Seidman, among others. Diane Wakoski introduced him to John Martin the publisher of Black Sparrow Press in 1968. Martin would become the principal publisher of Eshleman's writing beginning with the publication of “Cantaloups and Splendour” in 1968.
In 1967, Eshleman began Reichian psychotherapy therapy with Dr. Sidney Handelman, completing the analysis in 1969.
Eshleman met Caryl Reiter on New Year's Eve 1968. She would become his second wife. In 1970, the poet's mother died. His father died the following year.
In 1970, Clayton and Caryl moved from New York to Sherman Oaks, California. Shortly thereafter Eshleman joined the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he organized a reading series and taught seminars on contemporary poetry, William Blake, Wilhelm Reich, T.S. Eliot, and Hart Crane. Close friendships were formed during these years with Stan Brakhage, Robin Blaser, John and Barbara Martin, as well as with Robert Kelly, who was then teaching nearby at the California Institute of Technology.
In 1972, Eshleman met José Rubia and Eva Barcia. He and José Rubia Barcia began co-translating César Vallejo's España, aparta de mí este cáliz that year and shortly thereafter working on a new translation of the Human Poems. Eshleman also began translating Antonin Artaud at this time.
Under the influence of Mikhail Bakhtin's book Rabelais and His World, Eshleman began to re-organize “The Tsuruginomiya Regeneration” manuscript material into the book he published in 1973 as Coils. The publication brings closure to a project begun more than ten years earlier, in Kyoto. Eshleman also published the final issue of Caterpillar in 1973.
1973–1986 During the summer of 1973, the Eshlemans moved to France for one year. He and Caryl sublet an apartment in Montmartre and taught courses in American poetry at the American College in Paris.