All Announcements

Wishing Clayton Eshleman a Happy 80th Birthday!

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Today we wish Clayton Eshleman a happy 80th birthday!

Eshleman has been at the heart of American poetry since the early 1960s. His poems, critical essays, and translations of noteworthy poets as diverse as César Vallejo, Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy, Henri Michaux, and Bernard Bador have earned him international acclaim. Widely anthologized, his work has appeared in over 400 magazines and newspapers and translated into eight languages. He has given readings and lectured to audiences at universities and other venues around the world.

His work is widely known and lauded. Eshleman has been honored with many awards and honors, including a National Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Landon Translation Prizes from the Academy of American Poets, and a Hemingway Translation Grant. In 1994, he was a fellow at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, where he wrote a 50 page poem on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. In 2007 University of California Press published his translation of Vallejo’s verse, The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, a work on which he spent spent over forty years.

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Tour director Nancee Clark (Ringling Brother School of Art and Design), Robert Creeley, and Clayton Eshleman.

From 1996 to 2008, Eshleman and his wife Caryl led yearly tours to the Ice Age painted caves of southwestern France, sponsored by the Ringling School of Art and Design, in Sarasota, Florida. These tours featured thoughtful guest lecturers such as Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, and novelist Wade Davis. Eshleman utilized his research of Ice Age Cave Art from the past 30 years and lectured on six of the some three hundred decorated caves. His book Juniper Fuse is based on this research and experience; it is, as Ronald Gottesman calls it, “a fabulous three-dimensional tapestry of scholarship. Original and intense, it poses serious questions about human nature and its relation to the animal and natural worlds.”

Introducing A Sulfur Anthology

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Eshleman was also the founder and editor of two of the most important literary journalism the latter half of the 20th century: Caterpillar (1967–1973, 20 issues) and Sulfur (1981–2000, 46 issues). Sulfur magazine presented an overview of innovative writing from around the world. Forty-six issues were published, 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, William Carlos Williams, and many more. 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. His wife Caryl was the managing editor for the magazine’s entire run. A Sulfur Anthology, containing a generous selection of highlights from the journal’s nearly twenty year run, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in December 2015

The Essential Poetry (1960–2015)

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The Essential Poetry (1960–2015) is due out this summer, from Black Widow Press. This definitive collection spans the entirety of Eshleman’s poetic output. It is an essential reference work for Eshleman readers.

Previously Published Collections and Translations

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Wesleyan University Press has previously published two works by Eshleman. Companion Spider is a book of essays on poetics, translation, and publishing; and Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld is a groundbreaking collection of poetry and prose that is the culmination of Eshleman’s twenty-five years of research into the origins of image-making via the Ice Age painted caves of southwestern France. 

Concerning Juniper Fuse, Gary Snyder wrote:
“Archeologists and artists have written on southwestern European cave art, but none have given us a book like this. Clayton Eshleman has explored and inspected almost all of the great cave art of southwestern Europe including many caves that are not open to the public and require special permission. Now with visionary imagination, informed poetic speculation, deep insight, breathtaking leaps of mind, Eshleman draws out the underground of myth, psychology, prehistory, and the first turn of the human mind toward the modern. Juniper Fuse opens us up to our ancient selves: we might be weirder (and also better) than we thought.”

In the foreword of Companion Spider, Adrienne Rich wrote:
“Clayton Eshleman has gone more deeply into his art, its process and demands, than any modern American poet since Robert Duncan and Muriel Rukeyser. As a poet, Eshleman has wrestled with his vocation and, in some senses, created himself through poetry. He has written on the self-making and apprenticeship of the poet and of the poet as translator as no one else in North America in the later twentieth century. He has written perceptively about visual art in its relationship to contemporary poetics. And he has delivered stinging critiques of mediocrity and cautiousness in the standardizing of poetic canons.”

 

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Eshleman’s work as a translator includes three volumes of Aimé Césaire’s poetry published by Wesleyan. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, translated with Annette Smith, and 1939 Original Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, translated with A. James Arnold, are both available, as bilingual editions. Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition, also translated with A. James Arnold, is the first bilingual edition of the work.

We commend Clayton Eshleman for his impressive contributions to poetry and translation, and wish him the best on this 80th birthday!

 

Announcing “Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle” from Gina Athena Ulysse

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Mainstream news coverage of the catastrophic earthquake of January 12, 2010, reproduced longstanding narratives of Haiti and stereotypes of Haitians. Cognizant that this Haiti, as it exists in the public sphere, is a rhetorically and graphically incarcerated one, the feminist anthropologist and performance artist Gina Athena Ulysse embarked on a writing spree that lasted over two years. As an ethnographer and a member of the diaspora, Ulysse delivers critical cultural analysis of geopolitics and daily life in a series of dispatches, op-eds and articles on post-quake Haiti. Her complex yet singular aim in Why Haiti Needs New Narratives is to make sense of how the nation and its subjects continue to negotiate sovereignty and being in a world where, according to a Haitian saying, tout moun se moun, men tout moun pa menm (All people are human, but all humans are not the same). This collection contains thirty pieces, most of which were previously published on Haitian Times, Huffington Post, Ms Magazine, Ms Blog, NACLA, and other print and online venues. The book is trilingual (English, Kreyòl, and French) and includes a foreword by award-winning author and historian Robin D. G. Kelley.

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Gina Athena Ulysse is an associate professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University. Born in Haiti, she has lived in the United States for over thirty years. A performance artist, multimedia artist, and anthropologist, she is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica. Robin D. G. Kelley is the Distinguished Professor of History and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History at UCLA.

“Five years after the earthquake that razed Haiti, feminist anthropologist Ulysse reclaims the cultural narrative of her homeland from its simplification and distortion by mainstream news coverage. In her trilingual (English, Kreyòl, French) collection of op-eds, essays, reviews and news articles…Ulysse rejects the colonial framework through which Haiti is often viewed and reasserts the validity of its sovereignty.”
–Ms. Magazine, Spring 2015

The Driftless Connecticut Series is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/driftless.

Praise for Why Haiti Needs New Narratives:

“Ulysse’s clear, powerful writing rips through the stereotypes to reveal a portrait of Haiti in politics and art that will change the way you think about that nation’s culture, and your own.”
—Jonathan M. Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

“This is a beautifully written and profoundly important work of engaged anthropology. Gina Ulysse steps bravely into the public domain bringing a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of things Haitian to a large group of general readers as well as to a broad audience of scholars. Publication of this book marks a kind of “coming of age” for anthropological bloggers and public anthropology.”
—Paul Stoller, author of Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World

“Gina Athena Ulysse’s compilation, Why Haiti needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle, is the gut-felt testimony of an insider/outsider that resounds as a thunderclap in the desert. Trapped in the alienating context of sterile academia, neoliberal political economy, populations displaced, shock therapy and general geopolitical shifts, the author’s gift of polysemy opens horizons. Through thought, action, word, poetry, song . . . flow yet unbounded prospects.”
—Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, professor, Université d’Etat d’Haïti

“Taking us through entangled and liberating possibilities, Gina Ulysse introduces us to Haiti, the kingdom of this world. Embedded in the interstices of words and other aesthetic sensibilities that summon the past into the present, the powerful promise of a people is revealed. Ashe.”
—Arlene Torres, coeditor of Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean

“The sense of urgency that pervades these essays is palpable. Similar to her performances, Ulysse rings the alarm, fills the room in our head with deafening sound, a one-woman aftershock.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, from the foreword

 

Announcing the “Selected Writings of César Vallejo”

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For the first time in English, readers can now evaluate the extraordinary breadth of César Vallejo’s diverse oeuvre that, in addition to poetry, includes magazine and newspaper articles, chronicles, political reports, fictions, plays, letters, and notebooks. Edited by the translator Joseph Mulligan, Selected Writings follows Vallejo down his many winding roads, from Santiago de Chuco in highland Peru, to the coastal cities of Trujillo and Lima, on to Paris, Madrid, Moscow, and Leningrad. This repeated border-crossing also plays out on the textual level, as Vallejo wrote prolifically across genres and, in many cases, created poetic space in extra-literary modes. Informed by a vast body of scholarly research, this compendium synthesizes a restored literary corpus and—in bold translations that embrace the idiosyncratic spirit of the author’s writing—puts forth a new representation of this essential figure of twentieth-century Latin American literature as an indispensable alternative to the European avant-garde. Compiling well known versions with over eighty percent of the text presented in English translation for the first time, Selected Writings is both a trove of and tribute to Vallejo’s multifaceted work. Includes translations by the editor and Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Suzanne Jill Levine, Nicole Peyrafitte, Michael Lee Rattigan, William Rowe, Eliot Weinberger, and Jason Weiss.

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César Vallejo (1892–1938) was born in the Peruvian Andes and, after publishing some of the most radical Latin American poetry of the twentieth century, moved to Europe, where he diversified his writing practice to encompass theater, fiction, and reportage. As an outspoken alternative to the European avant-garde, Vallejo stands as one of the most authentic and multifaceted creators to write in the Castilian language.

Joseph Mulligan is a professional translator and scholar. He has translated Against Professional Secrets by César Vallejo, The Antiquarian by Gustavo Faverón Patriau, and a selection of Sahrawi poetry included in Poems for the Millennium Volume IV: The University of California Book of North African Poetry. He lives in Rochester, New York.

Publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

Praise for the Selected Writings of César Vallejo:

“Selected Writings is extraordinary in its choice of texts and the quality of translations.  Mulligan brings scholarship on Vallejo to a new level of expertise while making that knowledge accessible to a wider audience.”
—Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Boston College

“César Vallejo is rightly known as a major twentieth century poet. Thanks to Joseph Mulligan’s impressive edition, English readers will appreciate Vallejo’s poetry in the context of his essays, journalism, letters, and explorations of other literary genres.”
—Efrain Kristal, UCLA

“With his ferocious radicalism and bridge-burning experimentalism, the Peruvian César Vallejo played avant-garde to the avant-garde in the first decades of the past century. Until now, American readers of poetry have been aware of that, but many might have ignored the fact that Vallejo was a powerfully revolutionary thinker of the aesthetics of literature, the aesthetics of art, and the aesthetics of politics. This wonderful selection of his poems, letters, essays, plays, and journalistic writings, with the erudite and thoughtful commentary that Joseph Mulligan has put into the elaboration of this volume, give us a brilliant and inviting open door to access the inner workings of the convulsive, dark, agonistic, magically creative mind of one of the most radical renovators of literature in the twentieth century. A book that will change the rules of the Vallejo game forever.”
—Gustavo Faverón Patriau, author of The Antiquarian

From the book:

“All political catechism, even the best of the best, is a record, a cliché, a dead object, when compared to the creative sensibility of the artist. This political action is fine in the second-rate hands of a look-alike or knock-off artist, but not in the hands of a creator. It would be good [. . .] to locate the moxie, but history offers no examples of an artist who has successfully created a great work based on polls or political parties that he supports or opposes. In general, theories hamper and hinder creation.

Before shouting on the streets or getting locked in jail, in a tacit and silent heroic act the artist must create the great deep political aqueducts of humankind that become visible and flourish only over centuries, precisely, in those ideologies and social phenomena that later echo in the mouths of the men of action, apostles, and opinion leaders we mentioned earlier.

If the artist refuses to create what we might call political clouds in the human wilderness, reducing his work to the secondary role of propaganda or the barricade itself, to whom might that great spiritual thaumaturgy fall?”

From “Artists Facing Politics” [Mundial (Lima), no. 394, December 31, 1927]

#tbt: The Burr-Hamilton Duel

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Interview in Weehawken: The Burr-Hamilton Duel as Told in the Original Documents was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1960. It didn’t end well for Hamilton.

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Wesleyan continues to publish books of local history today, and distributes books for The Acorn Club of Connecticut, whose mission is to gather and publish significant primary source materials. Recent books from The Acorn Club include A Connecticut Yankee in Lincoln’s Cabinet: Navy Secretary Gideon Welles Chronicles the Civil War, The Peopling of New Connecticut: From the Land of Steady Habits to the Western Reserve, and Original Discontents: Commentaries on the Creation of Connecticut’s Constitution of 1818. 

If you are interested in early American history, you will want to check out Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London. Its author, Eric Lehman, draws upon a variety of perspectives, from the traitor himself to his former comrades like Jonathan Trumbull and Silas Deane, to the murdered Colonel Ledyard, to rethinking Benedict Arnold’s destructive acts.

#tbt: Hilda Raz, “From Your Mouth to God’s Ear”

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Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is Hilda Raz’s “From Your Mouth to God’s Ear” from her 1997 collection, Divine Honors—the winner of the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry in 2002.

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From Your Mouth to God’s Ear

Off the cliff, into air, the mother shout
blackberry-jam thick, stirred down
into a soothing lick on the needle-pricked
thumb, from God’s mouth to your ear:
Stay out! The clouds won’t, that’s for sure:
the rabbit, no voice and frozen on the lawn,
won’t for long. And you’ll have nothing to say
again, as usual. For sure.
Wasn’t that old story about a man spinning
straw into gold a lie? Oh? He did it for a girl.

 

HILDA RAZ is the author of five poetry books, most recently All Odd and Splendid (Wesleyan, 2008). She has also edited five books of poetry, essays, and fiction. She co-authored, with her son Aaron Raz Link, the memoir What Becomes You. Her work has been published in journals and magazines including The Women’s Review of Books, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and Southern Review; and anthologized in such volumes as 75 Poems On Retirement, the Poets Book of Days, and the Anthology of Contemporary American Women Poets. She is the Glenna Luschei Endowed Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner, a literary quarterly that has been in continuous publication since 1927, as well as a professor in the English Department at the University of Nebraska.

Announcing “The Lives of Robert Ryan” by J.R. Jones

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The Lives of Robert Ryan provides an inside look at the gifted, complex, intensely private man whom Martin Scorsese called “one of the greatest actors in the history of American film.” The son of a Chicago construction executive with strong ties to the Democratic machine, Ryan became a star after World War II on the strength of his menacing performance as an anti-Semitic murderer in the film noir Crossfire. Over the next quarter century he created a gallery of brooding, neurotic, and violent characters in such movies as Bad Day at Black Rock, Billy Budd, The Dirty Dozen, and The Wild Bunch.

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His riveting performances expose the darkest impulses of the American psyche during the Cold War. At the same time, Ryan’s marriage to a liberal Quaker and his own sense of conscience launched him into a tireless career of peace and civil rights activism that stood in direct contrast to his screen persona. Drawing on unpublished writings and revealing interviews, film critic J.R. Jones deftly explores the many contradictory facets of Robert Ryan’s public and private lives, and how these lives intertwined in one of the most compelling actors of a generation.

For more information on Robert Ryan, visit the book’s website.

J.R. Jones is an award-winning film critic and editor for the Chicago Reader. His writing has appeared in New York Press, Kenyon Review, Da Capo Best Music Writing, and Noir City. He lives in Chicago.

Catch a screening of The Set-Up at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, including a Q&A with the author and Lisa Ryan, daughter of Robert Ryan. Purchase your book and film ticket in advance and save $2 off the cover price, courtesy of The Book Cellar.

You can also catch J.R. Jones at Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Lit Festival in June.

Enjoy clips from Robert Ryan films, below.

Praise for The Lives of Robert Ryan:

“As self-effacing yet as solid and as ethically engaged as Robert Ryan himself, J.R. Jones offers a comprehensive and sensitive chronicle of one of the giants of American movie acting.”
—Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Movie Wars

“Too many critical biographies lurch back and forth between biography and criticism. Jones weaves the criticism in the biographical fabric, and the finished product has a very friendly mien—The Lives of Robert Ryan is a book you will want to spend time with.”
—Kent Jones, author of Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism

“J.R. Jones’s meticulous, revealing book on Robert Ryan places the actor’s life and career against the turbulent politics of the Cold War and the Red Scare in Hollywood. Jones is especially adept at moving between the life and the work, the films and their contexts. He introduces political history throughout, in ways that are both relevant and revelatory.”
—Foster Hirsch, author of The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

“The Lives of Robert Ryan is a well-written, insightful biography on an important Hollywood actor who is finally getting the attention he deserves. Ryan was a fearless liberal who embraced controversial causes during a time when most Hollywood stars remained apolitical. Even many film scholars are unaware of this aspect of Ryan’s career. This biography emphasizes it.”
—Richard B. Jewell, author of RKO Radio Pictures: A Titan is Born

 

Publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

#tbt: Brenda Hillman, “world/axis”

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Today’s Throw Back Thursday poem is, “world/axis” from Brenda Hillman’s 1997 collection Loose Sugar. Brenda Hillman is an activist, writer, and teacher. She has published nine collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press, including Pieces of Air in the Epic, winner of a William Carlos Williams Award; Practical Water, for which she won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry; and the International Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire. 

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world/axis

That she would come to meet you
as if to solve the enigma of your being…

The feminine might bend the light–

             (It could involve seeming
              recognized or sought–)

The visitor comes,
not an invention but
an axis of something already invented–

(even memory is sometimes an invention
as are dreams)

–her left arm curved like a galaxy.

Others sang disarmingly among the stars.

 

 

You can learn more about Brenda Hillman at this Reader’s Companion or at her author website. 

Win a free copy of The Glory Gets, by Honorée Jeffers!

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Enter a Rafflecopter giveaway to win a FREE copy of Honorée Fanonne Jeffer’s The Glory Gets!

In her three previous, award-winning collections of blues poetry, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has explored themes of African American history, Southern culture, and intergenerational trauma. Now, in her fourth and most accomplished collection, Jeffers turns to the task of seeking and reconciling the blues and its three movements—identification, exploration, and resolution—with wisdom. Poems in The Glory Gets ask, “What happens on the road to wisdom? What now in this bewildering place?” Using the metaphor of “gets”—the concessional returns of living—Jeffers travels this fraught yet exhilarating journey, employing unexpected improvisations while navigating womanhood. The spirit and spirituality of her muse, the late poet Lucille Clifton, guide the poet through the treacherous territories other women have encountered and survived yet kept secret from their daughters. An online reader’s companion will be available at http://honoreejeffers.site.wesleyan.edu.

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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of three previous books of poetry: The Gospel of Barbecue, Outlandish Blues, and Red Clay Suite. Her poems have appeared widely in anthologies and journals such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Kenyon Review, and Iowa Review. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, and this is her fourth book of poetry.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

Praise for The Glory Gets:

“This book is a miracle. The wisdom and the courage in these poems cuts straight into me. Jeffers is wrestling with what I thought I’d learned to put over there and call History, and she brings it back over here where I stand. It is alive. It watches me. How much of what we are and what we run from is caught—held, trapped, but also illuminated—by that gaze? These poems make clear how much we turn our backs to, trying to forget. This poet sings it beautifully and brutally back into being.”
—Tracy K. Smith, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Life on Mars

“In The Glory Gets, Jeffers reminds us that very often ‘catharsis is not healing.’ Her poems—about lynching, lost love, racism, the challenges of being a black woman—are never simple, formless rants or indulgent confessionals, but witty, intelligent and sophisticated examinations of very complex issues. The collection is a wonderful wisdom book that is openly vulnerable, uncertain, and yet full of remarkable grace.”
—Kwame Dawes, author of Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems

“There is a clear emotional progression in The Glory Gets that expresses the poet’s gifts at their full power. Reading these poems, we travel from the historical trauma to the manifestation of that trauma in our relationships. This progression shows a new complexity in Jeffers’s oeuvre.”
—A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste

 

From the book:

Birthright

After you are cleaned of your slick outfit,
you will scar down the seam of your mind
and grow tight-packed stones beneath your skin.
Nothing dissolves. No one will explain.
Daily you will search for real meaning
in constant death and sundry nonsense
but no meaning will take place—damn it.
You might give in and commence to pray
and God might visit and drink your tea,

but The Holy One won’t stay for long—
you won’t see whether this mystery
wears a flowered dress or tailored pants.
Your mother will give you her big pot
to stir, though you didn’t ask for that.
She will tell you cooking heavy meals
will bring you immeasurable joy.
You will know she’s telling you a lie.
You will cut your woman’s eyes at her—

your enemy, another woman,
another convict, one more conflict.
You will hate her for pushing you through
her narrow door into a cramped room.
You will grow wise: your mother was born
only the day before you were born—
and no woman ever really dies.
You will thank her for her cooking pot—
gratitude, another betrayal.

#tbt: Elizabeth Willis, “Near and More Near”

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Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is “Near and More Near” from Elizabeth Willis’s 2006 collection Meteoric Flowers.

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Near and More Near

We’re so close to the ocean I can taste it, like the volcanic in
Picasso. A hand can fit perfectly over a mouth. I know about the
thighbone, but what’s this connected to? A skirt trailing off into
scorpion silver at the edge of L.A. Compare this with the habits
of the wife of Bath, her passing breezes, the stolen pear, tallied for
change, tailed to the last, her little Spanish clock. This star plane
is mechanical, it’s having us on. What long teeth you have.

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ELIZABETH WILLIS is the author of Address, Meteoric Flowers, Turneresque, and The Human Abstract. She is Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University. She has a new book, Alive: New and Selected Poems (NYRB Poets), out this spring.