Sulfur (magazine)

"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.

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).

The roster of "Correspondents" included: Charles Bernstein, James Clifford, Clark Coolidge, Jayne Cortez, Marjorie Perloff, Jed Rasula, Jerome Rothenberg, Roberto Tejada, Keith Tuma, Allen S. Weiss, and Marjorie Welish.

[6] In 2008, Jacket magazine published a conversation between Clayton Eshleman, Paul Hoover, and Maxine Chernoff on editing Sulfur and New American Writing.Jacket 36 Wesleyan University Press published A Sulfur Anthology edited by Clayton Eshleman in December 2015.

Charles Bernstein: Much attention has been paid to Sulfur's selection of poetry, which included work from many unknown and new poets as well as old hands.

But equally important was the back section of the magazine, which offered some of the most incisive commentary of the state of the art available, dwarfing the coverage in almost any other venue.

Eliot Weinberger: It's undeniable that everywhere – and especially in the United States, where literary writers generally do not appear in newspapers or mass-circulation periodicals – the ‘little’ magazine kept literature alive in the 20th century.