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Oct. 25, 2002

Visiting English Professor to Make Presentations at ULM

The University of Louisiana at Monroe College of Arts and Sciences, in conjunction with the ULM English Department and Friends of the Library, hosts Clayton Eshleman at ULM. Eshleman is a poet, translator, essayist, editor and educator. He will be at ULM on Monday, Oct. 28th at 6:00 p.m. to read from his translations of Cesar Vallejo. Eshleman will also give two presentations on Tuesday, Oct. 29. At 3:00 p.m. he will show his slide lecture, "Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld", and at 6:30 p.m. he will read from his own work. All presentations will be held on the 7th floor of the ULM Library.

Eshleman's poetry has been published by Black Sparrow Press for 32 years, 13 volumes all in all. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA Fellowship in poetry, as well as an NEH grant for research on Ice Age Cave Imagery, a poetic investigation he has been working on since 1974. Since 1986, he has been a Professor in the English Department at Eastern Michigan University.

Eshleman is the primary American translator of Cesar Vallejo, Aime Cesaire, and Antonin Artaud. He received the National Book Award for his co-translation of Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry. His co-translation of Aime Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land has been hailed by Cesaire scholars as a landmark achievement.

In the winter of 2002 Wesleyan University Press published Companion Spider, a collection of essays and interviews, about which Adrienne Rich wrote in her Forword: "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 modern American poet since Robert Duncan or Muriel Rukeyser."

From 1967-1973, Eshleman edited Caterpillar magazine; from 1981-2000, he edited Sulfur magazine. Sulfur received thirteen grants from the NEA. About Sulfur, J. Laughlin of New Directions wrote: "Sulfur must be the most important literary magazine which has explored and extended the boundaries of poetry."

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