William Carlos Williams Papers

The William Carlos Williams Papers (YCAL MSS 116) have recently been reorganized and fully described and are open for research at the Beinecke Library.

The William Carlos Williams Papers document the life and work of poet, prose writer, dramatist, and physician William Carlos Williams. The papers consist of correspondence, writings, photographs, medical records, artwork, newspaper clippings and printed material, and personal papers. The papers primarily document Williams’s life as a prolific writer, including drafts of prose, poetry, drama, lectures and readings; and correspondence and writings of others that reveal his mentorship of aspiring poets and his friendships with other literary figures. The papers also reveal his personal life as a husband, father and close friend to many writers.

Correspondence and writings comprise the bulk of the papers. The correspondence series documents his close friendships, professional pursuits, and opinions on modern poetry. Writings include drafts of poems, prose, drama and other writings that reveal his creative process. The papers also contain photographs, including snapshots and portraits taken of Williams, family and friends; John C. Thirlwall’s research material for The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams; and photocopies of Williams’s correspondence and writings held by other institutions. Personal papers, medical records, and two works of art make up the smallest portion of the papers.

A full description of the collection can be found online: William Carlos Williams Papers. William Carlos Williams’s published work can be located by searching Orbis, the library catalog.

Images: Photographs from the William Carlos Williams Papers; these and other images are available in the Beinecke’s Digital Library

Delmore Schwartz Papers

The Yale Collection of American Literature is pleased to welcome scholars and students to consult the Delmore Schwartz Papers (YCAL MSS 334), which have recently been fully organized and described.

Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) was a writer, editor, and teacher. In addition to his writing, he served as poetry editor of the Partisan Review and later the New Republic. He taught at Harvard University, Bennington College, Kenyon College, Princeton University, and Syracuse University. Among his published works are In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, Shenandoah, Genesis: Book I, Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems, Summer Knowledge: Selected Poems (1938-1958), and Successful Love and Other Stories.

In 1937, shortly after graduating from New York University, Schwartz published an acclaimed short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” in the first issue of Partisan Review. Schwartz wrote poetry, short stories and essays, criticism, and plays throughout his life but he never established himself as the writer that early praise seemed to promise. Schwartz married and divorced Gertrude Buckman and Elizabeth Pollett. Throughout his life Schwartz suffered from acute depression, alcoholism, and drug abuse. He was born and died in New York City.

The Delmore Schwartz Papers span the years 1906-1975 and include writings, notebooks, correspondence, photographs, personal papers and effects, drawings, clippings, and printed material. Writings and notebooks comprise the bulk of the papers. Writings include drafts of poems, stories, essays, reviews, criticism, lectures, and other writings. Notebooks span two decades and document Schwartz’s increasingly troubled mind and frantic writings, containing a hybrid of writing drafts and personal diary entries.

The papers also include correspondence with friends and colleagues, revealing his intimate but often troubled friendships, professional relationships, and two marriages. Personal and professional papers of Schwartz contain records of his divorce from Elizabeth Pollet, teaching files and financial materials, drawings, collected clippings, and other papers. The papers also contain photographs of Schwartz, his family and friends, and literary events. (MW)

A complete description of the collection is available online: Guide to the Delmore Schwartz Papers YCAL MSS 334 (http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.schwartz)

Image: Photograph of Delmore Schwartz

Poetry Reading: Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey, Poetry Reading
Wednesday, November 18, 4:00 p.m.
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact:nancy.kuhl@yale.edu

Please join us for a reading by poet Natasha Trethewey on Wednesday, November 18, 4:00 p.m., at the Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street.

Natasha Trethewey is the 2009 James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at the Beinecke Library; she is the author of Domestic Work (selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet), Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She is Professor of English at Emory University where she holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.

The James Weldon Johnson Fellowship in African American Studies was established at the Beinecke Library in 2008. This fellowship is designed to permit outstanding scholars to devote a full academic term in residence at Yale University to conduct research and writing in connection with the James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Beinecke Library.

Founded in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten, the James Weldon Johnson Memorial collection stands as a memorial to Dr. James Weldon Johnson and celebrates the accomplishments of African American writers and artists, beginning with those of the Harlem Renaissance. Grace Nail Johnson contributed her husband’s papers, leading the way for gifts of papers from Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White and Poppy Cannon White, Dorothy Peterson, Chester Himes, and Langston Hughes. The collection also contains the papers of Richard Wright and Jean Toomer, as well as smaller groups of manuscripts and correspondence of such writers as Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman.

Peter Gizzi at Yale

Poet Peter Gizzi will visit Yale University on November 5th and 6th. On the evening of Thursday, the 5th, Gizzi will read in the Graduate Poets Reading Series; on the afternoon of Friday, November  6th, he will meet with the Working Group in Contemporary Poetry. Details of both event follow. Peter Gizzi is one of the most talented experimental lyric poets of his generation.  His books include The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other poems 1987-92.  His many honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and a Guggenheim Fellowship.   He is also the editor of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer and, with Kevin Killian, of My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer.  Currently he teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Gizzi’s Reading: Grad Poets Reading Series, 7:00 pm, Thursday, November 5th, Linsly-Chittenden Rm. 317. Books will be available to purchase, courtesy of the Yale University Bookstore. This event has been generously sponsored by the Yale Graduate and Professional Student Senate, the Dean’s Fund and the Yale Review.

WGCP Meeting with Peter Gizzi:   3 pm, Friday, November 6th, Whitney Humanities Center Rm 116. The group will discuss The Outernational and additional readings (http://wgcp.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/gizzi-outernational), focusing on the questions outlined here: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/2009-October/000229.html.

Flare

a new artists’ book by Thomas Nozkowski and Cole Swensen
co-published by Yale University Art Gallery &
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

The Beinecke Library is pleased to announce the publication of Flare, the culminating project of the 2007–2008 collaborative Artist and Poet in Residence Program sponsored by the Yale University Art Gallery & Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The book includes new poems by Cole Swensen and new prints by Thomas Nozkowski. The poet and illustrator visited Yale together on several occasions to work on this project, influencing one another’s artistic process and the completed work; the book reflects the makers’ creative conversation and collaboration. Original prints from Flare are currently  on view in the exhibition Continuous Present at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Flare can be ordered from Yale University Press: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300162400.

Thomas Nozkowski currently lives and works in New York. Cole Swensen is the author of over ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French.

Reading: New Poems by Rudyard Kipling

Some New Poems by Rudyard Kipling
By Thomas Pinney, current Beinecke Visiting Fellow
Monday, October 26, 2009, 3:00 pm
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall Street, Room 38
Free and open to the public

Mr. Pinney will read a selection of poems by Rudyard Kipling that have never been published, or, if published, never collected; he will provide an informal commentary on each poem.

Mr. Pinney received his PhD in English from Yale in 1960 and taught here for a year before going to Pomona College, Claremont, California, where he taught for the next 35 years.  He is now retired and has returned to Yale on a Beinecke Visiting Fellowship for the month of October to work on a complete edition of the poems of Rudyard Kipling.

Images: William Strang, Kipling with Puppets, [1989].

More information: Rebecca Martz, Public Relations Coordinator, 203 432-2969

Monkeys’ Moon

VIEW Monkeys’ Moon from the Beinecke Library website: Monkeys’ Moon and Pool Films

In 2008, the Beinecke Library acquired a copy of Monkeys’ Moon, one of several short films made by Pool Productions, a film company made up of the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and writers Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher (Winifred Ellerman). Though production stills of the film were known, the film itself was thought to be lost.  Eighty years after it was made, this six minute film has been fully restored and digitized; it is now available for the first time to a global, far-reaching audience from the Beinecke Library website:  Monkeys’ Moon and Pool Films. The film was recently featured in Art Forum:  “Lost and Found: Kenneth Macpherson’s Monkey’s Moon,” by Richard Deming, and screened at the 2009 Telluride Film Festival and Pordenone Silent Film Festival.

Pool Films resulted from the creative collaboration of writers Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) and Imagist poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Funded by Bryher’s inheritance from a vast family fortune, their projects were fueled by the principals’ interest in film and artistic experimentation. The three were invested in developing a context in which the young medium of film might be viewed as a fine art as well as interact with other verbal and visual art forms. The Pool Films productions, which were directed by Macpherson and often featured H. D. and Bryher as actors, experimented with narrative forms and explored the use of dramatic lighting and effects such as montage to represent emotional and psychological states. Pool Films made several short films—Monkeys’ Moon, Foot Hills and Wing Beat—using montage, double or triple exposure, and other experimental techniques to represent interior experiences and impressions.

The only full-length feature film produced by Pool Films, Borderline, was written and directed by Kenneth Macpherson; actors included Macpherson, H.D., and Bryher along with other friends. The only professional actor in the film was Paul Robeson. The film explores issues of race, class, sexuality, and gender in what H. D. referred to as “[a] particular borderline town of some indefinite mid-European mountain district.” Of the characters in the film, the poet writes: “they are borderline social cases, not out of life, not in life….” Macpherson attempts in Borderline to explore a visual representation of various conscious and unconscious mental processes and extreme psychological states, reflecting the group’s abiding interest in psychoanalysis and the possibilities it might represent for experimental artistic expression. In addition to making films, the collaborators also published Close Up, which they described as “the first periodical to approach film from any angle but the commonplace,” Close Up was, indeed, the first journal devoted to the discussion of film as a fine art. Close Up was published from 1927–33. Working with writers and filmmakers in many European cities, Close Up was international in scope, including reviews of a wide range of films and an ongoing critical discussion by writers such as Gertrude Stein, Upton Sinclair, Marianne Moore, Nancy Cunard, Sergei Eisenstein, and other key figures in Modernist literature.

Related Collections: H.D. Papers (YCAL MSS 24 ; digital collection); Bryher Papers (Gen Mss 97); Close-Up Photographs; Norman Douglas Collection (Gen MSS 88); Viola Baxter Jordan Papers (YCAL MSS 175); others related materials can be found by searching the Library’s Finding Aid Database and Orbis, the Library’s catalog for books and printed materials.  Images from the collections are available through the Beinecke’s Digital Library.

Images: Monkeys’ Moon Film Stills; Kenneth Macpherson on the set of Borderline.

Cole Swensen Reading

Cole Swensen, Poetry Reading
Thursday, October 8, 12:20 p.m.
Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street
In conjunction with the exhibition
Continuous Present
Contact: 203.432.0600

Cole Swensen’s numerous books include, Flare, a collaboration with artist Thomas Nozkowski, published this year you YUAG and Beinecke Library; Goest; Such Rich Hour ;  Noon, winner of the New American Poetry Series Award; New Math, winner of the National Poetry Series competition. She has translated the work of French poets including Olivier Cadiot, Pierre Alferi, Jean Tortel, and others.  Cole Swensen currently teaches at the University of Iowa.

The YUAG exhibition Continuous Present is on view October 6, 2009–January 10, 2010. Continuous Present features a selection of work by 11 of today’s most compelling contemporary artists working in a broad array of media, including film, video, photography, painting, and sculpture. The artists chosen for the show—Francis Alÿs, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Rodney Graham, Roni Horn, On Kawara, Thomas Nozkowski, Gabriel Orozco, Laura Owens, Dieter Roth, and Franz West—share a keen interest in time and sensory perception despite the aesthetic diversity of their practices. Their work reveals the capacity for art to profoundly reposition our physical and intellectual engagement with the world around us as they invite us to experience the “continuous present.” Exhibition organized by Jennifer Gross, the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery. Made possible by the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund, with additional support provided by the Carol and Sol LeWitt Fund and Allen Grover Fund for Contemporary Art. More information can be found here: Continuous Present.

Book Artist Didier Mutel

A Conversation with Contemporary Book Artist Didier Mutel
Thursday, September 24, 2009, 4:00 pm
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 121 Wall Street
Free and open to the public

Didier Mutel, artist, author, and bookmaker, has been experimenting with graphic modes of storytelling for the past two decades. Working in one of the last surviving 18th-century printers’ ateliers in Paris, Mutel uses old methods and new technologies to re-envision classic texts.

The Beinecke Library and the Special Collections of the Haas Family Arts Library hold a selection of his book works, including his latest opus, the multi-part “The Out Side”, in which Guy de Maupassant’s classic science fiction tale “Horla” is explored facet by facet – creating a work of art and printing finesse.

Mutel will discuss his work techniques and his inspiration in a conversation with Beinecke curator, Timothy Young.

[image: ink pots in Didier Mutel's studio; credit: Kathy Martinson, 2007]

To view details of this event online, please click here.

Living Theatre at Yale

Forty‐one years after The Living Theatre’s now legendary performance of Paradise Now at Yale Repertory Theatre in September 1968, which ended in the arrest of ten performers and audience members for public indecency, co‐founder and Artistic Director Judith Malina returns to New Haven for a two‐day residency at Yale School of Drama, September 14‐15. Free public screenings of Signals Through the Flames and Resist!, documentaries about the work of The Living Theatre, will be held at Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street, at York Street) on September 14 and 15 respectively at 7:30PM. The screenings will be followed by discussions and book signings with Judith Malina, Tom Walker, and Brad Burgess.

The Beinecke Library acquired the Living Theatre Archive in 2008. Among the largest archives ever acquired by the Yale Collection of American Literature, the Living Theatre archive includes some 300 boxes of records, correspondence, scripts, photographs, journals, diaries, audio-visual materials, personal papers, and publicity materials documenting the influential theater company and its founders and principal figures, Julian Beck and Judith Malina.

The archive documents in detail the Living Theatre’s development of imaginative alternatives to the commercial theater, including pioneering the unconventional staging of poetic drama, including works by Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams among many others, and various experiments in public and political theater and collective arts. This will be a premier archive for the study of 20th century American theater.

More information about the Living Theatre at the Yale School of Drama is available online:  The Living Theatre at the Yale; a description of the archive can be found here: Living Theatre Records.  (Images courtesy of the Living Theatre: Living Theatre productions including Paradise Now, The Brig, and Maudie).