Companion Spider: Essays

346 Pages·2002·6.378 MB·English

by  Clayton Eshleman

Companion Apder
Companion Spide r
W E S L E Y AN U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
E S S A YS
Clayton Eshleman
Foreword byAdrienne Rich
MIDDLWTOWNCONNECTI
Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459
Text copyright © 2001 by Clayton Eshleman
Foreword copyright © by Adrienne Rich
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
54321
LIBRARY O F CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATIO N DATA
Eshleman, Clayton.
Companion spider : essays / Clayton Eshleman ; foreword
by Adrienne Rich.
p. cm .
ISBN 0-8195-6482-6 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8195-6483-4
(pbk.: alk. paper)
i. Eshleman, Clayton—Aesthetics. 2. Translating and
interpreting. 3. Poetry—Translating. I. Title
PS3555.s5 c66 2002
4i8'.o2—dc2i 200100421 8
for Lindsay Hill—without whose comradeship
this book could not have been completed.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Foreword by Adrienne Rich i x
I
Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship 3
II
The Gull Wall 7 9
Remarks to a Poetry Workshop 93
The Lorca Working 99
Companion Spider 11 7
III
At the Locks of the Void: Cotranslating Aimé Césaire 13 1
A Tribute to Américo Ferrari 14 7
A Translational Understanding of Trilce #1 15 3
Introduction to Watchfiends & Rack Screams 16 1
Artaud’s True Family, Glimpsed at Pompidou 195
IV
A Note on the Death of Paul Celan 20 3
Two Introductions: Gary Snyder and Michael Palmer 207
viii Contents
Padgett the Collaborator 21 1
Spider Sibyls 22 2
V
The Gospel According to Norton 23 1
Complexities of Witness 24 7
“What Is American About AmericaPoetry?”26 262
The Lawless Germinal Element 26 6
Introduction to the Final Issue of Sulfur Magazine 27 0
VI
From an Interview with Duane Davis for Waste Paper (1993) 28 1
From an Interview with William Harmer for Agenda (19 292
From an Interview with Keith Tuma for Contemporary
Literature (1996) 29 5
Medusa Dossier: Clayton Eshleman (1999) 317
Foreword
There is very little around today, certainly in the literary essay genre,
that possesses the depth and substance of this book.
This is the accumulated prose-work of a poet and translator who has
gone more deeply into his art, its process and demands, than any mod-
ern American poet since Robert Duncan or Muriel Rukeyser. As a poet,
Eshleman has wrestled with his vocation and, in some senses, created
himself through poetry. At the same time, he has offered poetry his in-
spired and tireless service. He is the translator of such essential world
poets as Cesar Vallejo, Aimé Césaire, Antonin Artaud, and Arthur Rim-
baud, and the founder and editor of two important magazines of inno-
vative literature and art, Caterpillar (1967-1973 ) and more recently
Sulfur (1981-2000) . He has written on the self-making and apprentice-
ship of the poet and of poet as translator, as no one else in North Amer-
ica in the later twentieth century. He has written perceptively about vis-
ual art in its relation to contemporary poetics. And he has delivered
stinging critiques of mediocrity and cautiousness in the standardizing
of poetic canons.
Eshleman’s integrit y a s a translato r ha s demande d meticulou s
searching of texts, glossaries, dictionaries, and intense collaborations.
In "The Lorca Working," "At the Locks of the Void," and "Tribute to
Americo Ferrari," among other pieces, he lays open the cartography of
the poet-translator' s work . Anyon e wanting t o stud y live , pulsing
poetry will find these essays illuminating and contagious.
"Novices" and "Remarks to a Poetry Workshop" directly engage the
nascent poet and introduce th e concept o f "apprenticeship"—to the
work of earlier poets, to powerful living poets if possible: an apprentice-
ship that is a deep immersion, a recognition that art is difficult and exi-
gent, an ocean and not a swimming pool, a calling and not a career path.