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.

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.

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).

New Poetry Podcasts

New podcasts from the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series are now available. These readings, by poets Jennifer Moxley, Evie Shockley, Douglas Kearney, and Amaud Jamaul Johnson are available at the Beinecke Library’s website or through Yale University on iTunes U. Additional readings in the series are also availble: http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/brblevents/poetry.html.

Jennifer Moxley is the author of four books of poetry: The Line, Often Capital, The Sense Record ; and Imagination Verses. Her memoir The Middle Room was published  in 2007. She has translated two books by the French poet Jacqueline Risset, The Translation Begins and The Powers of Sleep. She is poetry editor of The Baffler, and contributing editor of The Poker. She works as an Associate Professor at the University of Maine.

Evie Shockley is the author of a chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess (2001), and the collection a half-red sea (2006). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Fascicle, Hambone, HOW2, and Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University.

Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, and teacher. His work has appeared in Callaloo, jubilat, Ninth Letter, and other journals. His first full-length collection of poetry, Fear, Some, was published in October 2006.

Amaud Jamaul Johnson is a former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry Daily, From the Fishouse, and other journals. He teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His first book, Red Summer, was the winner of the 2004 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press.

Margaret Anderson and the Little Review

The Elizabeth Jenks Clark Collection of Margaret Anderson (YCAL MSS 265) is open for research at the Beinecke Library. A detailed description of the  Collection has recently been added to the Yale Library’s Finding Aid Database: Elizabeth Jenks Clark Collection of Margaret Anderson. In addition to providing a detailed catalog of the collection, the finding aid includes biographical sketches of both Anderson and Clark and a thorough chronology of Anderson’s life and publications.

Margaret Anderson was born November 24, 1886 in Indianapolis, Indiana. In the fall of 1908, she left Indiana and moved to Chicago, where she joined the staff of The Dial and was a book critic for the Chicago Evening Post. Bored at the Chicago Evening Post, she decided to edit her own magazine, giving it the title of Little Review. The Little Review became one of the most influential literature and art magazines of its time. In its early issues, the magazine included work by then-unknown writers, political extremists such as Emma Goldman, and radical social commentary, such as Anderson’s own article in defense of homosexuality.

In 1916, Margaret Anderson met Jane Heap, a Chicago art teacher co-founder of the Chicago Little Theatre. The two women quickly fell in love and moved in together. Heap joined Anderson as co-editor of the Little Review, maintaining a low profile by using a number of pseudonyms. Anderson and Heap moved the magazine to New York City in 1917 with the help of critic Ezra Pound, who the same year started his two-year tenure as foreign editor of the Little Review in London. Pound informed the direction of the magazine until its end. In 1918, Pound sent parts of James Joyce’s Ulysses to Anderson and Heap and the Little Review began publishing excerpts of the manuscript. In 1920, at half-way through the novel, the United States Post Office seized and burned issues of the magazine, charging it obscene. A court convicted Anderson and Heap on obscenity charges in 1921 and fined each woman fifty dollars.

The Little Review then began a period of decline, Anderson turned over the editorship of the magazine to Heap in 1923 and moved to Paris. It was published sporadically and the final issue was published from Paris in 1929. By the time it was finished, the Little Review had published some of the most influential new writers in the English language.

Anderson and Heap lived together for seven years, though their romantic relationship became strained. In 1923, Anderson met and fell in love with the French singer Georgette Leblanc, former companion and accompanist of Maurice Maeterlinck, and moved to Paris with Leblanc. Six years later, Anderson met and started an affair with Solita Solano, a poet and the partner of Janet Flanner. Anderson lived happily with Leblanc, whom Anderson considered to be her great love, and continued her affair with Solano for several years. Anderson wrote and studied piano in Le Cannet until Leblanc’s death of cancer in 1941. Grief-stricken and seeking the solace of friends, Anderson boarded the S.S. Drottningholm for the United States. On board she met and fell in love with Dorothy Caruso, widow of the singer Enrico Caruso, who was also returning to the United States. Within days of arriving back in the United States, Anderson befriended Elizabeth Jenks Clark through Solano, who had returned and was living in the U.S. Clark and Solano became Anderson’s closest friends and she corresponded with them almost daily until her death. Anderson and Caruso lived together in New York until Caruso’s death in 1955. Clark and Solano moved to Orgeval, France, prompting Anderson, who was mourning the loss of Caruso, to return to Le Cannet. Anderson lived out the remainder of her years in Le Cannet, until she fell ill of emphysema in 1973. She died on October 19, 1973 of heart failure.

The teachings of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff played a profound role in Anderson’s life. While in Paris, Anderson became close to Gurdjieff, an eastern philosopher and spiritual teacher who fled post-czarist Russia. Anderson and Leblanc studied with him, focusing on his original teaching called The Fourth Way, which combined simultaneously focusing on body, mind and emotions to achieve higher levels of consciousness. Anderson remained a student of Gurdjieff’s until his death in October 1949, writing about him and his teachings, most thoroughly in The Unknowable Gurdjieff.

Over thirty-two years, Anderson published a three-volume autobiography: My Thirty Years’ War, The Fiery Fountains, and The Strange Necessity. In her last years in Le Cannet, she wrote her final book, part novel and part memoir, Forbidden Fires, which recounts her days with Georgette Leblanc and Jane Heap.

Elizabeth Jenks Clark (1912-1989) was born in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Clark moved to Paris in early the 1930s. Later Clark lived and sculpted in Philadelphia and New York City, where Clark met and fell in love with poet and editor Sarah Wilkinson, also known as Solita Solano. Through Solano, Clark met Margaret Anderson. Clark, Solano and Anderson would remain close loyal friends until Anderson’s death in 1973.

The Elizabeth Jenks Clark Collection of Margaret Anderson contains correspondence, writings, photographs, sound recordings, and other papers of writer and editor Margaret Anderson. The material documents Anderson’s life, work, and personal relationships with many noted writers, poets, artists, photographers and performers of the twentieth century, in particular her romantic relationships with co-editor and writer Jane Heap, writer Solita Solano and close friendship with sculptor Elizabeth Jenks Clark. The papers span the entirety of Anderson’s life, though the bulk of them document her personal and professional life after the Little Review. The papers are a unique resource on Anderson’s personal life in France, including her friendship and studies with George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and participation in The Rope. A portion of the papers also document publishing the Little Review and provide context for Anderson’s role as founder and editor of the magazine. The collection contains material of mixed provenance. After Anderson’s death, Elizabeth Jenks Clark and Solita Solano inherited her papers.

A full description of the collection can be found online: Elizabeth Jenks Clark Collection of Margaret Anderson. Scanned photographs and negatives from the collection are found in the Library’s Digital Images Online at http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/anderson.html. A podcast with curator Nancy Kuhl and archivist Molly Wheeler can be listened to here: Unfolding the Corners: Intimacy in the Archive of Margaret Anderson. Margaret Anderson’s published work can be located by searching Orbis, the library catalog.

Molly Wheeler, Archivist

Images: Photograph of Margaret Anderson; Margaret Anderson and Georgette Leblanc in France; George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff; Margaret Anderson; Elizabeth Jenks Clark in Orgeval, France

New Exhibition: Living Portraits

Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten’s Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939-1964 features some 140 never-before-exhibited color photographs by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten (1880-1964) had an artistic vision rooted in the centrality of the talented person. He cherished accomplishment, whether in music, dance, theater, fine art, literature, sport, or advocacy.

He began to make photographic portraits in 1932; in 1939 he discovered newly available color film. For a quarter century, he invited friends and acquaintances, well-known artists and fledgling entertainers to sit for him, often against backdrops reminiscent of the vivid colors and patterns of a Matisse painting. Among his subjects were a very young Diahann Carroll, Billie Holiday in tears, Paul Robeson as Othello, and a procession of opera stars, composers, authors, musicians, and others who made notable contributions to the cultural life of the country. The exhibition includes 140 full-sized portraits, digitally reformatted from Van Vechten’s original slides. [ca. 140 items]
Selected images from the Carl Van Vechten Photograph Collection

Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten’s Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939-1964 is on view from April 30 through June 30, 2009. For more information: 203-432-2969

Images above: Diahann Carroll,  Paul Robeson , Billie Holiday, and Pearl Bailey photographed by Carl Van Vechten. Photographs by Carl Van Vechten are used with permission of the Van Vechten Trust; the permission of the Trust is required to reprint or use Van Vechten photographs in any way. To contact the Trust email: Van Vechten Trust.

Readings By G. E. Patterson and Jennifer Moxley

G. E. Patterson and Jennifer Moxley, Poetry Readings
Thursday, April 23, 4:00 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu

Poet, critic, and translator G. E. Patterson is the author of To and From and Tug, winner of the Minnesota Book Award.  Patterson’s awards include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Cave Canem, the Djerassi Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. After living in the Northeast and on the West Coast, he now makes his home in Minnesota, where he teaches.

Jennifer Moxley is the author of books of poetry including: The Line, Often Capital, The Sense Record ; and Imagination Verses. Her memoir The Middle Room was published  in 2007. She has translated two books by the French poet Jacqueline Risset, The Translation Begins and The Powers of Sleep. She is poetry editor of The Baffler, and contributing editor of The Poker. She works as an Associate Professor at the University of Maine.

Cabinet of (Poetry) Curiosities

In honor of National Poetry Month, throughout April the Beinecke Library’s Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities will feature poetry-related collection materials from the Yale Collection of American Literature and the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters. Stop by often–new posts will be added twice a week.

Image: manuscript draft of H.D.’s  “Hippolitus Temporizes” (YCAL MSS 24).