Put on academic probation for low grades, he was expelled for having too many parking tickets, but able to return to school the following year, this time as a Philosophy major.
Jack and Ruth Hirschman introduced him to world poetry in translation, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakofsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, and St.-John Perse.
That summer he married Barbara Novak and took a job teaching English for the University of Maryland, College Park, Far-Eastern Division (Japan, Taiwan, Korea).
Following Snyder's suggestion, in the spring of 1962, Eshleman moved to Kyoto to teach English as a second language at Matsushita Electric Corporation in Kobe.
Simultaneously he begins writing “The Tsuruginomiya Regeneration”: what would ultimately become a 350-page sequence of poems, eventually reedited and published as his book Coils (1973).
During this period in Kyoto, Eshleman was close to several fellow artists and poets: Will Peterson, Gary Snyder, and Cid Corman, who was then editing the second series of Origin.
These include titles by Aimé Césaire (in Eshleman's co-translation with Denis Kelly), Cid Corman, Paul Blackburn, Frank Samperi, David Antin, D. Alexander, Robert Vas Dias, Jackson Mac Low, and himself.
Eshleman cultivated a wide circle of new and on-going friendships during these years, including Frank Samperi, Diane Wakoski, Adrienne Rich, Nora Jaffe, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Carolee Schneeman, James Tenney, Michael Heller, and Hugh Seidman, among others.
Shortly thereafter Eshleman joined the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he organized a reading series and taught seminars on contemporary poetry, William Blake, Wilhelm Reich, T.S.
Close friendships were formed during these years with Stan Brakhage, Robin Blaser, John and Barbara Martin, as well as with Robert Kelly, who was then teaching nearby at the California Institute of Technology.
He and José Rubia Barcia began co-translating César Vallejo's España, aparta de mí este cáliz that year and shortly thereafter working on a new translation of the Human Poems.
The project became a central area of his writing and research over the next three decades, resulting in the publication of his major work Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld in 2003.
The tour continued irregularly, ultimately gaining sponsorship from the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, through 2008.
In 1979, he was appointed Dreyfuss Poet-in-Residence and lecturer in creative writing at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena; a position he held through 1984.
Thereafter he taught part-time as a visiting lecturer in creative writing through University of California campuses in San Diego, Riverside, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara.
This work was supported by a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and, in 1981, it won the Witter Bynner award from the Poetry Society of America.
In 1982, he and Caryl began publishing short pieces of travel writing in magazines and newspapers including Destinations, Diversions, The Chicago Tribune, Frequent Flyer, and Pan Am Clipper.
While in Budapest, Eshleman co-translated a short anthology of contemporary Hungarian poetry with Gyula Kodolanyi, which he subsequently published in Sulfur 22.
Over the next fifteen years, Eshleman would share his work at colleges and university and poetry conferences around the North America and Europe, travelling widely and often spending several months of each year as poet-in-residence or guest faculty at a wide variety of institutions, including, among many others, Naropa Institute, or traveling in Europe for his on-going research on the Paleolithic painted caves.
With his retirement from full-time teaching, Eshleman continued to travel widely throughout the United States and Europe to present his work at colleges and universities as well as poetry-related public events.
In 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008, the Eshlemans again led tours of the painted caves of France, sponsored by the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida.
That year he also spoke at the Latin American House in Paris and at a poetry conference at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
In 2005, Soft Skull released a substantially revised and extended second edition of Conductors of the Pit: Poetry Written in Extremis in Translation.
Additional recent translations include Curdled Skulls (2010), selected poems by Bernard Bador, and Endure (2011), poetry by Bei Dao co-translated with Lucas Klein.
Later volumes of Eshleman's original poetry included My Devotion (2004), An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (2006), Reciprocal Distillations (2007), Anticline (2010), and An Anatomy of the Night (2011).
The Grindstone of Rapport: A Clayton Eshleman Reader (2008) collects six hundred pages of poetry, prose, and translations from 45 years of writing.
In 2011, Wesleyan University Press released Eshleman's co-translation, with A. James Arnold, of Aimé Césaire's Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition.
He and José Rubia Barcia jointly prepared The Complete Posthumous Poetry of César Vallejo (1978) and won the U.S. National Book Award in category Translation.
[5] He has also translated books by Aimé Césaire (with Annette Smith), Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy and Bernard Bador.
[6] Sometimes he is mentioned in the company of the "ethno-poeticists" associated with Jerome Rothenberg, including: Armand Schwerner, Rochelle Owens, Kenneth Irby, Robert Kelly, Jed Rasula, Gustaf Sobin, and John Taggart.