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Open Books: Event Archive
February 02, 2007 07:30 PM
CLAYTON ESHLEMAN
Clayton Eshleman has long been a vigorous and influential presence in
American letters. Founder and editor of the famed journals Caterpillar and
Sulfur>, widely respected translator (see below), essayist (most recently
producing Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction
of the Underworld), Mr. Eshleman is also well known as a poet, and he joins
us from his home in Michigan to read from his poetry, including the just
released collection An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire ($15.95 Black Widow
Press). Pulsating with visions, haunted by dreams and ghosts, burning with
outrage at the current administration, and ecstatic with prehistoric
energies, his poems are a sonic and imagistic swirl. His work erases the
boundary between present and past (particularly ancient past), drawing on
the totemic and mythic in all its raw and sometimes unsettling power -- "I'
ve risked wordwreck to excavate / a buried mouth, to release its stumped /
root whirl."
While in Seattle, Clayton Eshleman also will mark the publication of The
Complete Poetry of César Vallejo ($49.95, University of California Press),
which he edited and translated, and which is the culmination of nearly 50
years of his studying, living with, and bringing into lively English the
poems of this astounding writer. Born in Peru in 1892, Vallejo is considered
to be not only one of the greatest poets of South America, but among the
premier poets of the 20th century. Clayton Eshleman's translations of his
inventive poems have been and continue to be much praised. This handsome
bilingual edition, which also includes notes on the work, a chronology, and a memoir by Mr. Eshleman, is an impressive and welcome arrival. On February
1, the University of Washington Spanish and Portuguese Studies Department
will host him for a reading and discussion of the work of Vallejo.
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