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 Each issue featured a diverse offering of poetry, translations, previously unpublished archival material, visual art, essays, and reviews.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.

CLAYTON ESHLEMAN is an American poet, translator, and editor. He is a professor emeritus at Eastern Michigan University.

 

[in order per CE]

“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

“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

 

Publication of this book is funded by the

Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund

at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

 

From Sulfur #27, “Zero” by Milton Kessler:

The Ch-ing Emperor’s troupe of buried horses

The visor-blinded horses of the jousts

The pompadoured bronze horses of the Renaissance

The Elgin horses roped and dragged from Athens

The Generalissimo’s mount in Freedom Square

The noble cheval burst by English archers

The cannon deaf cavalry of Bull Run

The Imam’s Arabians writhing on the cross of Allah

The dive-bombed horse with tongue of broken glass

Seigfried’s horror horse with Panzer lancer

Horses were never interested in war

War no longer interested in horses

The investment stallions seeding twitched mares

The ground horse catfood of the dispossessed

The cast horses in the Mafia stables

The shiver brained coursers wearing buttercups

The cossack horses higher than whole villages

The porcelain dancers of the Lippizaner

The Indian ponies trained to die like savages

The slipping horsefeet of Alexander Nevsky

The heart-horned horses of the picadores

The cigarette horses branded sex and death

The pinup stallions of gold college girls

The cowboy’s true horse on the lonely range

The dawn is the head of a sacrificed horse

 

December

536 pp., 6 x 9”

Unjacketed Cloth, $85.00 x

978-0-8195-7394-0

 

Paper, $27.95

978-0-8195-7531-9

 

eBook, $21.99 Y

978-0-8195-7532-6

Can the English language live up to Mallarmé?

 

“It is perhaps because Mallarmé is so important to modernism and twentieth-century and contemporary Continental Philosophy that English-language versions of the poet’s work end up inert and academic. The following questions therefore preoccupied us for some time before our labors began: Why can’t the English language live up to the demands of Mallarmé’s art? Can we make these poems live, in English, without betraying them? Can we practice the art of translation as the art of writing poetry? Or the art of reading? Azure is the record of our exploration of these questions through collaborative translation, intensive reading, and our commitment to the process of writing. Mallarmé poses formidable challenges to his translators, his readers, and to poets. We found ourselves meeting these challenges with a challenge of our own. Our primary aim was to create translations that worked as contemporary poems and that linked translation to the reading and writing of poetry. We hope to revive an interest in Mallarmé the poet that rivals the interest in Mallarmé the thinker of poetry. “
— from the Translators’ Note

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) wrote extensively on themes of reality and his desire to turn from it. He married form and content in revolutionary ways that departed from the more tightly controlled French tradition. When translators Bronson-Bartlett and Fernandez observed the absence of Mallarmé from young poets’ reading lists, they sought to rebirth Mallarmé for a new generation. Included in this volume are more than forty of Mallarmé’s poems from the 1899 Deman edition—the editon believed to be most consistent with Mallarmé’s true intentions; “A Cast of Dice”;  and excerpts from an unfinished Livre (book)—translated to English here for the first time.

Stéphane Mallarmé was a poet and critic who influenced Symbolism, Decadence, and other late nineteenth-century aesthetic movements, Mallarmé’s weekly salons were part of the heart of Parisian intellectual life and drew writers such as Yeats, Rilke, and Valéry. Blake Bronson-Bartlett earned his BA in English and French from Hunter College and his PhD in English from the University of Iowa. He is a professor in English at the University of Iowa, and has published essays, interpretations, and translations in a variety of journals. Robert Fernandez earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is an assistant professor of poetry and writing at the University of Nebraska and has published several poetry books, including Scarecrow (2016) and Pink Reef (2013.)

 

“These vivid and utterly convincing translations reopen the poems to controversy, nuance, and innovation. They refresh the poet’s reputation as a sovereign enigma.”
—Donald Revell, author of Tantivy

“The best translation is a hundred translations, and Mallarmé, as one of the inaugural monsters of Modernism, needs at least that many even to begin to reveal his complexities. This new one is exceptionally welcome, as it is a poets’ Mallarmé, built of what earlier translators have left out. Bronson-Bartlett and Fernandez give particular freedom to Mallarmé’s radical music as well as to his essential strangeness. The inclusion of a sizable section of Mallarmé’s work-in-eternal-progress, the ‘Livre,’ never before translated into English, makes a substantial contribution to Mallarmé studies, as does their excellent introduction. Not only a must for Mallarmé enthusiasts, but also simply a grippingly great read!”
—Cole Swensen

 

“Salut”

Then nothing, bright spray, hymnal holiday,
To show us but this skin;
Dead ahead, impacted sirens
Roll perversely: a log of bodies

We set our course, O rangy
Friends, I already at aft,
You at the glinting fore which breaks
The sea’s membrane of flashes and shivers

A honeyed drunkenness sends me
Fearless into foundering
Forward with poise to toast

Solitude, reef, star
These which gathered, drew resonant
And plumped the naked canvas of our craft

 

December
180 pp., 6 x 9”
Unjacketed Cloth, $40.00
978-0-8195-7579-1
Paper, $17.95
978-0-8195-7580-7
eBook, $13.99 Y
978-0-8195-7581-4