Poetry at Beinecke Library

An archive of correspondence, writings, and printed material by or relating to the poet Frank Stanford (Uncat MSS 998) are now available for use at the Beinecke Library. Stanford was born in southeast Mississippi in 1948. In the following year he was adopted by Dorothy Gilbert, and in 1952 relocated to Arkansas when Gilbert married Albert Franklin Stanford. Remembered as a bright and athletic child in his early youth, the young Frank Stanford was greatly affected by the knowledge of his adoption. He entered the University of Arkansas in 1967 as a student of Civil Engineering, but later on switched to study literature, and was well known in the Fayetteville literary community for his poetry. He wrote poems for the student literary magazine, Preview, and many of the early poems following his college years were published in journals such as Field, Ironwood, and American Poetry Review.

Stanford left college without earning a degree. In 1970 he met Irving Broughton, editor and publisher of Mill Mountain Press, who published Stanford’s first book, The Singing Knives. Between 1970-76, Mill Mountain published five more of Stanford’s books. Also in the early 70s, Broughton and Stanford made a documentary film about Stanford’s work and life. The film—It Wasn’t a Dream it Was a Flood—won the Best Experimental Film Award at the West Coast Film Festival in 1975. The following year saw the birth of Stanford’s own publishing company, Lost Roads Publishers. Lost Roads sought to “reclaim the landscape of American poetry” by publishing little known authors, whom the poet C.D. Wright, succeeding Stanford as editor, called the “the beautiful wild poets we grow from the road.” In 1977, Lost Roads Publishers and Mill Mountain Press joint-published Stanford’s epic poem, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, a manuscript of over 15,000 lines of poetry that Stanford had been working on sporadically since his early teenage years.

Stanford was well aware of the unique sensitivity that marked him apart from others even in childhood. “When the rest of you / Were being children / I became a monk / To my own listening / Imagination.” Elsewhere, Stanford speaks of Death, which he imagines as a fisherman in a boat: “Young as I am I / Hold light for this boat.” Amongst Stanford’s most powerful poems are his reflections on this shadow from which none return. Franz Wright called him “one of the great voices of Death.” With uncanny insight and beauty, Stanford’s poems often seek to portray and imagine Death, which was, in Wright’s words, “his biggest love affair.”

On June 3 1978, at the age of 29, Stanford took his own life in his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His chapbook Crib Death came out shortly afterwards. Lost Roads published more of his poems in You in 1979, and a collection of his short fiction Conditions Uncertain And Likely To Pass Away in 1990. The following year the University of Arkansas Press published The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford. Amongst the collection in Beinecke are many of Stanford’s yet unpublished manuscripts, drafts and notebooks. There are photos, music, notes from his daily life alongside articles and journals commemorating his work, amongst a miscellany of other collections.

Related materials may be found in the Library’s Finding Aid Database and Uncataloged Acquisitions Database; copies of Stanford’s books in the Yale Libraries can be located by searching Orbis, the Library’s catalog.

Collection description prepared by Shu-Han Luo, Y’09.

Image: Photo of Frank Stanford from poets.org

The Archibald MacLeish Collection (MSS YCAL 38) and the Archibald MacLeish Collection Addition (YCAL MSS 269) consist of material, such as correspondence, writings, personal papers, and sound recordings, documenting Archibald and Ada MacLeish’s personal life, family history, and careers.

MacLeish and Ada Hitchcock MacLeish, a noted singer, moved to Paris in 1923 to pursue their artistic ambitions. The couple’s move to Paris marks MacLeish’s decision to leave his career as a lawyer and to devote his life to poetry. Although MacLeish had already published a book of poems, this period in Paris was a time of intense study and shift from his earlier poetic style to a more modernist approach. In an interview with Patrick Hynan for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1971 MacLeish explains: “[I] tried to not write myself, until I could see light ahead, where I, whoever this unknown ‘I’ was who wanted to be a poet, could move.”

The couple were part of a thriving artistic community, which included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. The Murphys, who are featured in the exhibit “Making It New: The Art and Style of Gerald and Sarah Murphy” at the Yale University Art Gallery, were among the MacLeish’s close friends. In an interview with Patrick Hynan MacLeish discusses his experience in Paris and his relationship with the Murphys. MacLeish notes Gerald Murphy “had very great talents as a painter. [He] later became what Picasso thought was the best American painter in that generation. A man with a marvellous gift for life. A marvellous gift for living life. He lived life consciously.”

Like many artists, Archibald MacLeish drew on the Murphys for artistic inspiration, basing his Pulitzer Prize-winning play “J.B.” on the Murphys’ tragic loss of two sons and financial collapse. The Archibald MacLeish Collection (MSS YCAL 38) contains material relating to “J.B.” including early drafts, drafts of the Houghton Mifflin edition of the play, of the original Yale production, of the Broadway production directed by Elia Kazan, and of subsequent productions. The Addition contains John Tydeman’s radio adaptation of “J.B.” for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as well as a sound recording of the play performed for the CBC.

In 1928 the MacLeishs returned to the U.S. and Archibald MacLeish went on to a multi-faceted career as both a poet and a public servant, serving as Librarian of Congress (1939-44), Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Affairs (1944-45), and Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at Harvard University (1949-62). MacLeish’s poetry and dramatic writings earned him Pulitzer Prizes in 1932, 1952, and 1959, the Bollingen Prize and the National Book Award for poetry in 1953, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, and the National Medal for Literature in 1978. Archibald MacLeish died in Boston on April 20, 1982.

Related manuscript collections can be located by searching the Library’s Finding Aid Database; copies of MacLeish’s printed works in Yale libraries can be located in Orbis, Yale’s catalog for books. (HD)

Images: Ada Hitchcock MacLeish and Archibald MacLeish on their honeymoon in 1916. Box 23, folder 247, Archibald MacLeish Collection Addition (YCAL MSS 269); Ada Hitchcock MacLeish photographed in Paris by Man Ray. Box 24, folder 249-258, Archibald MacLeish Collection Addition (YCAL MSS 269); Draft for “Escape” from Tower of Ivory (1917). An example of MacLeish’s writing style before moving to Paris. Box 23, folder 244, Archibald MacLeish Collection Addition (YCAL MSS 269).

Please join us for a poetry reading by poet Joy Harjo on Wednesday, April 9th, at  4 pm, at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street (please note venue change). This event is co-sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library and the Native American Cultural Center at Yale. The reading is free and open to the public.

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, poet Joy Harjo is an enrolled member of the Muskogee Tribe. She is the author of many collections of poetry, including How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, A Map to the Next World: Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award, and In Mad Love and War, which received an American Book Award. She has received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.

For more information about Joy Harjo and examples of her work visit:

http://www.joyharjo.com/

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/60

http://www.nativewiki.org/Joy_Harjo

Authors’ Guidelines for Preserving Digital Archives

In an effort to aid writers in ensuring the long-term accessibility of their digital archives, the Beinecke Library has created the following Authors’ Guidelines for Preserving Digital Archives; in generating these guidelines, the library consulted a variety of professionally drafted standards and examples of similar documents written by other libraries, including Creator Guidelines: Making and Maintaining Digital Materials: Guidelines for Individuals from the International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES 2) and “Guidelines for Digital Preservation” from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A formatted PDF copy of the guidelines designed to enable quick reference, skimming, and browsing is available here: Authors’ Guidelines for Preserving Digital Archives (PDF). This information is permenantly posted on line at Digital Preservation, Poetry at Beinecke Library.

Authors’ Guidelines for Preserving Digital Archives

The Least You Can Do

Save old media and files. Don’t dispose of physical media (i.e. disks, flash drives, external hard-drives or computers) if they contain records not maintained elsewhere and don’t write over old files. Even if files are unreadable, or hardware is obsolete, repository staff may be able to recover files and new technology may enable staff to recover files in the future.

Back up your files. Maintain security copies of digital materials in case your computer is stolen, your hard drive crashes, or your records become corrupted. Back up materials only on another computer, external hard drive, or other portable media format, and store these security copies in a separate location from your working computer.

Name your files consistently. Document names can help others identify and retrieve files. A file naming structure may include some or all of the following elements: title, type, version number, date (in yearmonthdate order), and file extension. For example: perfumedraft1.doc.

Organize your files. The management of your digital materials can be enhanced if you handle them in groups and organize them in a logical manner. This structure should be consistent with the organization of any paper records you have, or records in other media, so that all records related to the same activity or subject, or of the same type, can be identified as part of one conceptual grouping.

Going Further

Take steps against hardware and software obsolescence. When parts of the technological environment in which you are working begin to become obsolete, they should be upgraded to the most advanced technology available according to your needs, and all digital materials inside and outside the system should be migrated to the new technology. When replacing hardware, it is important for the replacement hardware to have capabilities at least equal to the hardware it is replacing.

Select software and hardware that allow you to share digital materials easily. Software should be able to accept and output files in a number of different formats. The ability to interact easily with other technology is called interoperability. It will make it easier to access your materials and to move them to other systems.

Select software that adheres to standards. This is one of the best things you can do to ensure that your material will last. Standards endorsed by national and international organizations are best. If these do not exist for your materials, you can help ensure longevity by adopting software that is widely used.

Select software that presents materials as they originally appeared. Materials should keep the same look over time to be fully intelligible and accessible. When replacing software, make sure the new software will be able to read your older materials in the software format in which you kept it and display it in the same form in which it was originally displayed. In other words, new software should be backward compatible with older software.

For further discussion of key concepts and best practices in maintaining electronic and born-digital resources, see the complete InterPARES Guidelines.

The papers of the writer and animal trainer Vicki Hearne have been processed recently and are available for use (Vicki Hearne Papers YCAL MSS 250). Born in Austin, Texas in 1946, Hearne grew up in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi before studying writing at the University of California, Riverside, and receiving her B.A. in 1969. She began her dog and horse training career in California in 1967, after learning she had a talent for the work when she trained her own dog under the mentorship of Hollywood animal trainers Bill and Dick Koehler. She continued to work with animals throughout her life.

Hearne’s writing was informed by her work with dogs and horses and the philosophies of Plato, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, among others. Her published collections of poetry include Nervous Horses (1980), In the Absence of Horses (1983) and The Parts of Light (1994), and many of her poems were published in poetry and mainstream magazines. A posthumous work, Tricks of the Light, edited by her friend and mentor John Hollander, was published in 2007.

Hearne addressed issues of animal behavior and the ways in which animals communicate with humans in her books of nonfiction and in magazine and journal articles. She authored Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name and Animal Happiness, and co-authored the book Horse Breaking: the Obedience Method with Bill Forest. Her articles “Talking With Dogs, Chimps and Others,” and “How to Say Fetch,” were published in Raritan in the early 1980s. She was published in American magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and The New Yorker, and in foreign publications including the Japanese edition of Esquire magazine.

An ardent defender of breeds of dogs labeled by legal authorities as innately dangerous, Hearne served as an expert witness on dog behavior beginning in the 1980s. Her experiences while defending a dog (mistakenly identified as a pit bull) that had been sentenced to death for his biting offenses in Stamford, Connecticut, were the subject of her book, Bandit: Dossier of a Dangerous Dog. The events surrounding the Bandit case were also chronicled in a documentary film, A Little Vicious, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1992.

The Vicki Hearne Papers consist of correspondence, writings, personal papers, photographs, audiotapes, and clippings, and span the years 1955 through 2001, with the bulk of the material dating from 1980 through 2001. The papers document the development of her writing from her works of poetry in the 1970s, through the books and articles she wrote in defense of dogs at the turn of the twenty-first century. The majority of the correspondence consists of letters from friends, family members, colleagues, publishers, and editors.

Files relating to animal training and material accompanying the drafts of her writings reveal her professional and personal connection to her own companion animals and to those of her friends and colleagues. A full description of the papers may be found online: Vicki Hearne Papers.

Related materials in the Beinecke Collections can be found by searching the Finding Aid Database; recently acquired materials may be found in the Uncataloged Acquisitions Database. Vicki Hearne’s published work can be located by searching Orbis, the library catalog. (SB)

This Thursday, February 7th, at 5:30 PM the Yale University Art Gallery will host a talk  by artist Thomas Nozkowski in conjunction wiht the Beinecke exhibition “Metaphor Taking Shape: Poetry, Art, and the Book.” 

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Thomas Nozkowski: Art, Poetry, and the Book
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Thomas Nozkowski, the Yale University Art Gallery’s current Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence, is a critically acclaimed and influential abstract painter. In 2007, Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale University School of Art, included Nozkowski’s work in the Venice Biennale. Nozkowski presently has paintings on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and will have a career retrospective at the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal in 2009.  He has been called the “poet laureate of abstract painting.” Nozkowski will discuss his work and reflect on his recent projects engaging poetry and the book as forms of art.

The Yale Univeristy Art Gallery is located at 1111 Chapel Street in New Haven.

on view January 22 through March 31, 2008

Metaphor Taking Shape: Poetry, Art, and the Book includes a broad display of books exploring the ways in which poets, publishers, artists, and printers have navigated the intersection of poetry and art in printed formats. The exhibition considers the ways poetry and book arts interact and connect, their shared context, and their potentially conflicting functions; materials on display explore questions of verbal and visual metaphor making, emphasizing the roles of creative and collaborative processes involved in uniting image, verse, and print. A companion exhibition, The Publisher’s Roundtable: Book Artists in Dialogue, will be on view at the Arts of the Book Collection at Sterling Memorial Library.

In conjunction with this exhibition, a symposium featuring poets, artists, publishers, and critics in conversation will take place on March 13 and 14. Speakers include Carolee Campbell, Macy Chadwick, Steve Clay, Simon Cutts, Johanna Drucker, Ann Lauterbach, Anna Moschovakis, C. Mikal Oness, Kyle Schlesinger, Buzz Spector, C. D. Wright, and John Yau. For more information and to register, please visit http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/metaphor/index.html.

Image: Blaise Cendrars, watercolor pochoir by Sonya Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien et de La Petite Jehanne de France, Paris: [Les Hommes Nouveaux], 1913 (detail).

The Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series on line finding aid for streaming audio of poetry readings at the Beinecke Library has recently been updated to include 2006 and 2007 readings by John Ashbery, Fanny Howe, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, Ron Padgett, and Natasha Trethewey, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry. The 2007 Yale Student Poets reading, featuring Georgiana Banita, Mary Daniel, Rebecca Dinerstein, Adam Eaker, David Gorin, David Griswold, Erich Matthes, Chiara Scully, Jenni Sorkin, and Samantha Tonini has also been posted. These readings as well as many others recorded since 2002 can be streamed directly from the finding aid: Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series.

Beginning in fall 2007, recordings of many events in the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series will be available as podcasts that can be downloaded as well as streamed directly from the web. The first podcasted event, Charles Bernstein’s October 2007 poetry reading, is now available: Charles Bernstein Reading at the Beinecke Library MP3. New podcasts of recent readings will be added to the following page as soon as they become available: Beinecke Library Readings: Podcasts and Steaming Audio.

Image: A reading by famous poets of selections from their own works. From the Bryher Papers.

Please join us for a poetry reading by Frank Bidart on Tuesday, November 27th, 4 pm. This event is co-Sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series and the Department of English; the reading is free and open to the public. The poet will be introduced by Yale graduate student Erica Levy McAlpine. For additional information about readings at Beinecke Library visit: 2007-2008 Readings at Beinecke Library.

Frank Bidart is the winner of the 2007 Bollingen Prize for poetry. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-90, Desire, Star Dust, and Music Like Dirt. He has received the Wallace Stevens Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and the Bobbitt Prize for Poetry. He has taught at Brandeis University and, since 1972, Wellesley College. In 2003 he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

For more information about and examples of Frank Bidart’s work visit:
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/162
http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/07-02-26-02.all.html
http://www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/98_99/bidart.html

Please join us for poetry readings by Graham Foust and Elizabeth Robinson on Thursday, November 15, 2007, 4pm. This event is free and open to the public. For additional information about readings at Beinecke Library visit: 2007-2008 Readings at Beinecke Library.

Graham Foust is the author of three books of poetry, Necessary Stranger, Leave the Room to Itself, and As in Every Deafness and numerous poetry chapbooks. He was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He is currently the Director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at St. Mary’s College of California.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Pure Descent, winner of the National Poetry Series, Apprehend, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series, Under that Silky Roof, House Made of Silver, and Bed of Lists. She has been awarded the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. She is co-editor of 26, a magazine of poetry and poetics, EtherDome, a press dedicated to publishing the work of emerging women poets, and Instance Press.

For more information about and examples of Graham Foust’s and Elizabeth Robinson’s work visit:

Graham Foust
http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/foustg_poems1.htm
http://www.typomag.com/issue02/000026.html
http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2004/12/graham-foust-wrote-two-books-of-poems.html

Elizabeth Robinson
http://www.woodlandpattern.org/poems/elizabeth_robinson02.shtml
http://brooklynrail.org/2007/9/poetry/three-poems-by-elizabeth-robinson
http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/04/elizabeth-robinson-is-author-of-6.html