poetry in translation, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakofsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, and St.-John Perse. Mary Ellen Solt introduced him, via correspondence, to Louis Zukofksy, Robert Creeley, Cid Corman, as well as to poets closer to his own generation: Paul Blackburn, Robert Kelly, Jerome Rothenberg, Jackson Mac Low, and David Antin. Eshleman travelled frequently to New York City to meet with these poets in person. Through Paul Blackburn he would meet William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov. Eshleman graduated from Indiana University with a degree in Philosophy in 1958 but reenrolled as a graduate student in English Literature. He supported himself by playing piano in the bar of a steakhouse on weekends. Eshleman published his first poem in the Indiana University English Department student magazine, Folio. The following year, Eshleman took over the editorship of Folio for three issues. Eshleman gave his first reading of his own poetry in New York City at Metro Café in 1960. The reading was organized by Paul Blackburn. Eshleman discovered the poetries of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo in a copy of Dudley Fitts edited Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Poetry (New Directions, 1947) given to him by Bill Paden in 1958. Motivated by his interest in Neruda and Vallejo, Eshleman hitchhiked to Mexico City in order to learn Spanish in the summers of 1959 and 1960. He began translating Neruda's Residencias at this time. In 1961, Eshleman graduated from Indiana University with a Master of Arts degree in Teaching Creative Writing. 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). In the next year, he taught literature and composition to military personnel for two months in Tainan, Taiwan, four months at Tachikawa Air Force Base, outside Tokyo, and two months at the Strategic Air Command (SAC) Base in Seoul, Korea. 1962-1972 Eshleman met Cid Corman in person for the first time in San Francisco while en route to Asia. He met Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger in Tokyo when they were en route to India. 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. He and Barbara would stay there until 1964. While in Kyoto, Eshleman began what he would later describe as his “apprenticeship to poetry” by translating César