Sulfur (magazine)

Sulfur: A Literary Tri-Annual of the Whole Art was an influential, small literary magazine founded by American poet and award-winning translator Clayton Eshleman in 1981 while he was Dreyfuss Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology.

The name Sulfur references sulphur, a butterfly with orange and yellow wings, bordered in black, as well as the element sulfur in particular in its role in alchemical processes of combustion and transformation. By referencing a butterfly in the title, Eshleman linked the magazine with Caterpillar a previous magazine he founded and edited from 1967 to 1973. By linking the magazine with alchemy, Eshleman was also associating it with Jungian interpretations of alchemical symbols. In a note on the term published in Sulfur 24, Eshleman evoked "imagination as an instrument of change."

Sulfur appeared three times a year from 1981 to 1987 and two times a year from 1988 until its final double issue number 45 / 46 in Spring 2000. Its roughly 11,000 pages included writing and visual art from some 800 contributors, 200 of which were not from the United States.

In addition to poetry and prose by American poets, Eshleman pursued five other principle areas of focus for the magazine: 1. Translations of contemporary foreign-language poets and new translations of untranslated older works. 2. Archival materials by earlier Anglophone writers. 3. Including writings by unknown, typically younger writers in every issue. 4. Commentary including poetics, notes, and book reviews, occasionally polemical in nature. 5. Resource materials including writing from outside of poetry per se.

The magazine was founded following a discussion between Eshleman, Robert Kelly and Jerome Rothenberg. "Sulfur unswervingly presented itself as an alternative to what some of us call 'official verse culture' (backed by The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Nation, and nearly all trade publishing houses, to the exclusion of contrasting viewpoints)," Eshleman said in an interview when the magazine closed.

The magazine was funded by sales and subscriptions as well as grants from academic and public institutions. The Humanities Division of the California Institute of Technology funded the magazine from 1981 to 1983. The UCLA Extension Writers Program funded issues 10 through 15, from 1984 to 1986. From 1986 to 2000, the English Department at Eastern Michigan University provided limited office support, a part-time graduate assistant, and course release time for Eshleman (then a professor of poetry there). Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts from the mid-1980s until 1996, alongside sales and subscriptions, covered expenses during that period.

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