Clayton Eshleman's eleven books of poetry have been published by Black Sparrow Press since 1968. In 1991, Black Sparrow also published Paul Christensen's book-length study of Eshleman's poetry, Minding the Underworld: Clayton Eshleman and Late Postmodernism. Martha Sattler's Clayton Eshleman: A Descriptive Bibliography (McFarland & Company) appeared in 1988.
Between 1979 and 1986 Eshleman was a regular reviewer for The Los Angeles Times Book Review, contributing fifty-one articles on books by Rilke, Whitman, Bishop, Olson, Milosz, Montale, Ashbery, and many others.
He has also been a full-time translator since the early 1960's. He is the main American translator of César Vallejo (with José Rubia Barcia) and of Aimé Césaire (with Annette Smith). He has also translated books by Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy and Bernard Bador. With Gyula Kodolanyi, he edited and translated a book-length selection of post-W.W.II Hungarian poetry which appeared in Sulfur #21.
Between 1967 and the present, Eshleman has founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly-regarded literary magazines of the period. Twenty issues of Caterpillar appeared between 1967 and 1973. The magazine was anthologized by Doubleday-Anchor in 1971 as A Caterpillar Anthology. In 1981, while Dreyfuss Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology, Eshleman founded Sulfur magazine, of which thirty-nine issues have appeared to date. Sulfur, which has received 13 National Endowment for the Arts grants, is now based at Eastern Michigan University , where Eshleman has been a Professor in the English Department since 1986.
Over four hundred magazines, including Antaeus, origin, The Partisan Review, Evergreen Review, Grand Street, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review and New Directions Annual have published his writing. His poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, most recently in American Poetry Since 1950 (Marsilo), and Postmodernism in American Poetry (Norton). Since the late 1960's he has read his poetry and translations in over three hundred American, European, and Latin American universities, including two readings at the Library of Congress.
He is the recipient of The National Book Award in 1979 for his cotranslation of César Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and several research Fellowships from Eastern Michigan University.