Сидни Корман: Поэт, издатель и голос американской поэзии.

American poet, translator and editor
Cid (Sidney) Corman (June 29, 1924 – March 12, 2004) was an American poet, translator and editor, most notably of Origin, who was a key figure in the history of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century.

In 1951, Corman began Origin in response to the failure of a magazine that Creeley had planned. The magazine typically featured one writer per issue and ran, with breaks, until the mid 1980s. Poets featured included Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Denise Levertov, William Bronk, Theodore Enslin, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Clive Faust (Australian Poet), Gary Snyder, Lorine Niedecker, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Paul Blackburn and Frank Samperi. The magazine also led to the establishment of Origin Press, which published books by a similar range of poets as well as by Corman himself and which remains currently active. In 1954, Corman won a Fulbright Fellowship grant (with an endorsement from Marianne Moore) and moved to France, where he studied for a time at the Sorbonne. He then moved to Italy to teach English in a small town called Matera. By this time, Corman had published a number of small books, but his Italian experiences were to provide the materials for his first major work, Sun Rock Man (1962). He also experimented with oral poetry, recording improvised poems on tape. These tapes were later to influence the talk poems of David Antin, one of the key developments in the emergence of performance poetry. At this time he produced the first English translations of Paul Celan, even though he didn't have the poet's approval.

In 1958, Corman got a teaching job in Kyoto through the auspices of Will Petersen or, according to one account, poet Gary Snyder. Here he continued to write and to run Origin and in 1959 he published Snyder's first book, Riprap. He remained in Japan until 1960, when he returned to the States for two years. Back in Japan he married Konishi Shizumi, a Japanese TV news editor. Corman began to translate Japanese poetry, particularly work by Bashō and Kusano Shimpei. The Cormans spent the years 1980 to 1982 in Boston, where they unsuccessfully tried to establish a number of small businesses. They returned to Kyoto, where they remained, running CC's Coffee Shop in Kyoto, "offering poetry and western style patisserie".

Corman has been associated with the Beats, Black Mountain poets and Objectivists, mainly through his championing as an editor, publisher and critic. However, he remained independent of all groups and fashions throughout his career. Michael Carlson, who contributed to Origins and corresponded with Corman starting in the 1980s, described Corman's correspondence this way: "In the days before email his words came by return post, aerogrammes densely typed to take advantage of every inch of space, or postcards printed in his fine hand. They were encouraging, gossipy, and always challenging; he expected everyone to match his commitment to poetry as a way of life. But they also digressed into other shared enthusiasms: in my case his love of baseball and sumo wrestling, and often into the difficulties of making a living in expensive Japan." He was a prolific poet until his final illness, publishing more than 100 books and pamphlets. In 1990, he published the first two volumes of poems entitled, OF, running to some 1500 poems. These are mostly new works, not a selection of previously published poems. Volume 3, with a further 750 poems appeared in 1998. Volumes 4 and 5 were published as a single book in 2015 to complete the work. Several collections of wide ranging essays have been published. His translations (or co translations) include Bashō's Back Roads to Far Towns, Things by Francis Ponge, poems by Paul Celan and collections of haiku. Cid Corman did not speak, read, or write Japanese, even though his co translation with Susumu Kamaike of Bashō's Oku No Hosomichi (see above) is considered to be one of the most accurate in tone in the English language. Corman also felt himself able to translate from classical Chinese without so much as a minimal understanding of the language. One of Corman's last appearances in the United States was at the 2003 centennial symposium and celebration in southern Wisconsin that honored his friend and fellow poet, Lorine Niedecker. At the time, Corman spoke warmly about his connection to the Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin poet (playing the only known audio tape of Niedecker reading from her works). Niedecker had died in 1970, shortly after Corman had visited her. As he told friends and admirers during the 2003 gathering, Corman had not returned to the Black Hawk Island haunts of Niedecker since that first (and only) visit with Niedecker. He died in Kyoto, Japan on March 12, 2004 after being hospitalized for a cardiac condition since January 2004.