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^[1] 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."^[2]

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 principal 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.^[3]