Cid (Sidney) Corman (June 29, 1924 – March 12, 2004) was a poet, translator, and editor. He was especially known for editing the magazine Origin and played an important role in the history of American poetry during the second half of the 20th century.

Life

Corman was born in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston and grew up nearby in Dorchester. His parents were both from Ukraine. From a young age, he loved reading and showed talent for drawing and calligraphy. He attended Boston Latin School and in 1941 entered Tufts University, where he earned Phi Beta Kappa honors and wrote his first poems. He was not required to serve in World War II due to medical reasons and graduated in 1945.

Corman studied for his Master's degree at the University of Michigan, where he won the Hopwood poetry award, but left before finishing because he was two credits away from completing the degree. After a short time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he traveled across the United States and returned to Boston in 1948.

Career

Corman's first book, Subluna, was privately printed in 1944. He held poetry events in public libraries and, with the help of his high-school friend Nat Hentoff, he started the country's first poetry radio program.

In 1952, Corman wrote: "I began my weekly broadcasts, called This Is Poetry, from WMEX (1510 kc.) in Boston. The program usually included a fifteen-minute reading of modern poetry on Saturday evenings at 7:30. However, I sometimes read from Moby Dick and stories by Dylan Thomas, Robert Creeley, and Joyce."

This program included readings by Robert Creeley, Stephen Spender, Theodore Roethke, and many other poets from Boston and visiting poets. He also spent time at the Yaddo artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs. Around this time, Corman changed his name from Sydney Corman to "Cid." As Corman explained, this name change, like Walt Whitman’s change from Walter to Walt, showed his focus on writing for the common person.

During this time, Corman wrote many poems and published more than 500 poems in about 100 magazines by 1954. He considered this period a training time, and none of these poems were published in books.

In 1951, Corman started a magazine called Origin after another magazine planned by Creeley failed. The magazine usually featured one writer per issue and continued, with breaks, until the mid-1980s. Poets included in Origin were Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Denise Levertov, William Bronk, Theodore Enslin, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Clive Faust (an Australian poet), Gary Snyder, Lorine Niedecker, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Paul Blackburn, and Frank Samperi. The magazine also led to the creation of Origin Press, which published books by these poets and by Corman himself. Origin Press is still active today.

In 1954, Corman received a Fulbright Fellowship grant (with support from Marianne Moore) and moved to France, where he studied at the Sorbonne. Later, he moved to Italy to teach English in a town called Matera. By this time, Corman had published several small books, but his experiences in Italy inspired his first major work, Sun Rock Man (1962). He also tried oral poetry, recording poems on tape. These recordings later influenced the work of David Antin, a key figure in performance poetry.

At this time, Corman produced the first English translations of Paul Celan, even though Celan did not approve of the translations.

In 1958, Corman got a teaching job in Kyoto through the help of Will Petersen or, according to one account, poet Gary Snyder. There, he continued writing and running Origin. In 1959, he published Snyder’s first book, Riprap. He stayed in Japan until 1960, when he returned to the United States for two years. After returning to Japan, he married Konishi Shizumi, a Japanese TV news editor. Corman began translating Japanese poetry, especially work by Bashō and Kusano Shimpei.

The Cormans lived in Boston from 1980 to 1982, where they tried to start small businesses but were not successful. They returned to Kyoto, where they ran a coffee shop called CC’s Coffee Shop, "offering poetry and western-style pastries."

Corman was connected to the Beats, Black Mountain poets, and Objectivists mainly through his work as an editor, publisher, and critic. However, he stayed independent of all groups and trends throughout his career.

Michael Carlson, who worked with Origin and wrote to Corman starting in the 1980s, described their letters this way: "Before email, his letters came by mail, typed on small paper to use every space. They were encouraging, full of gossip, and always challenging. He expected everyone to share his dedication to poetry as a way of life. They also talked about other shared interests, like baseball and sumo wrestling, and the challenges of living in expensive Japan."

Corman continued writing poetry until his final illness, publishing more than 100 books and pamphlets. In 1990, he published the first two volumes of poems called OF, containing about 1,500 poems. These were mostly new works, not a collection of older poems. A third volume with 750 more poems was published in 1998. Volumes 4 and 5 were published together in 2015 to complete the series. Several essay collections were also published. His translations (or co-translations) included Bashō’s Back Roads to Far Towns, poems by Francis Ponge, 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 is considered one of the most accurate English translations. Corman also translated poems from classical Chinese without knowing the language well.

One of Corman’s last appearances in the United States was at a 2003 celebration in southern Wisconsin honoring his friend and fellow poet, Lorine Niedecker. At the event, he shared a recording of Niedecker reading her work. Niedecker had died in 1970, shortly after Corman visited her. He told friends that he had not returned to the places Niedecker visited since that first and only visit.

Corman died in Kyoto, Japan, on March 12, 2004, after being hospitalized for a heart condition since January 2004.