The Beinecke Library has acquired a scrapbook and papers of Albert Tracy documenting his activities as a poet and artist from 1843-1892. Albert Tracy (1818-1893) joined the United States Army as a lieutenant in the 9th Infantry during the Mexican War, and served as Adjutant General of Maine, 1852-1855. He returned to the Army to serve in the 10th Infantry, in which he participated in an expedition against the Sioux from Fort Snelling, Minnesota, in the Utah Expedition, and in the American Civil War, when he attained the rank of colonel and served as aide-de-camp to John C. Frémont.

The scrapbook includes clippings of his poems published in newspapers, a letter from Wendell Phillips related to the publication of a poem, and Tracy’s published accounts of the Mexican War and his critiques of the post-Civil War United States Army. The papers include several manuscript poems and additional newspaper clippings, as well as pencil drawings that depict a panorama of Fort Bridger in the Utah Territory and a view of the fort interior, June 3-4, 1858.

Associated material: Albert Tracy papers, 1843-1893, New York Public Library, New York, New York

Images: Tracy scrapbook pages; manuscript of “The Battle of Lundy Lane” (1892); Tracy scrapbook pages including Wendell Phillips correspondence; drawing of Fort Bridger, Utah Territory, June 3-4, 1858 (click on any image for a larger view).

Collection description prepared by Matthew Mason, Archivist, Beinecke Library.

]]> http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/poet-soldier-albert-tracy/feed/ beineckepoetry http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/blogs-and-special-collections/ http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/blogs-and-special-collections/#comments Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:25:24 +0000 beineckepoetry http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/?p=98

Some of the creators and administrators of Beinecke Library blogs will be joining with other blogging special collections librarians and curators to present a Blog Boot Camp at the 49th Annual Rare Books and Manuscripts / American Library Association Conference at the Getty Research Center on June 26, 2008. All conference attendees are welcome and encouraged to join the conversation; for our colleagues and interested readers unable to attend the conference session, the conversation will be documented and augmented on the RBMS Blog Boot Camp Blog, which was set up in early June 2008 to support the seminar and provide a forum for continuing the conversation.

The Blog Boot Camp Blog highlights many of the various questions that panelists in the seminar will discuss and we invite readers to contribute thoughts, ideas, and additional questions. We’re especially interested in hearing from special collections staff currently utilizing blogs and other participatory web technologies. Thanks in advance for your interest and participation.

Additional Resources: Blogging at the Beinecke: Promoting Special Collections in the 21st Century; RBMS Conference details; ALA Conference details.

Image: Dorothy Porter Wesley, Howard University Librarian, photographed by Carl Van Vechten on May 23, 1951. Dorothy Porter Wesley was influential in developing archives and bibliographies concerning African American culture.

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.

]]> http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/blogs-and-special-collections/feed/ beineckepoetry http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/yale-awards-poet-john-ashbery-an-honorary-degree/ http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/yale-awards-poet-john-ashbery-an-honorary-degree/#comments Tue, 27 May 2008 14:51:25 +0000 beineckepoetry http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/?p=94

At commencement on May 26, 2008, Yale President Richard C. Levin awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree to poet and Bollingen Prize winner John Ashbery. Of Ashbery’s contributions to the art of American poetry, Levin said:

“You are one of the truly original poets of your time. In poem after poem, you keep your exhilarated readers off balance, capturing the spontaneous wonder of living in a world that resists the ability to capture it. Your imagination—at once witty and nostalgic—is altogether American, as capacious and unpredictable as the culture it celebrates. Your books stand among those rare works of genius that extend the poetic vocabulary. For your incomparable artistry in expressing the flux of life in a miraculous ’still performance,’ Yale is honored to grant you the degree of Doctor of Letters.”

Ashbery is the author of numerous books of poetry and he has been awarded virtually every significant prize for American poetry, including the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the Frank O’Hara Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the National Book Award. More information about the poet and examples of his work can be found at the Academy of American Poets site and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry site.

A list of all the 2008 Yale honorary degrees is available from the Office of Public Affairs: 2008 Honorary Degrees.

Photograph of John Ashbery by John Tranter; Tranter’s interview with Ashbery is available in Jacket Magazine.

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).

The Beinecke Library is pleased to announce its new staffed reference desk. Researchers and students are welcome to visit the desk to consult with Beinecke staff about the Library’s collections. Librarians will be available at the reference desk Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to noon and Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 3-5 p.m. Additional hours will be added in the coming weeks. Email reference queries can be directed to: beinecke.library@yale.edu

For additional information please contact Research Librarian Eva Guggemos at 203-432-6436.

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

The papers of poets Gladys Campbell, Kathleen Foster Campbell, Llewellyn Jones have been processed recently and are available for use. All three poets were members of the University of Chicago Poetry Club, a group formed in 1917 by students who wished to address the absence of modern poetry in the University curriculum. Members included Gladys Campbell, Kathleen Foster Campbell, Llewellyn Jones, Glenway Wescott, George Dillon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Arthur Yvor Winters, Maurice Lesemann, and Janet Lewis. Harriet Monroe, the founder and editor of Poetry Magazine, visited the group often. Gladys Campbell and Dillon were among the editors of the Poetry Club’s publication, The Forge: A Journal of Verse, published from 1924 to 1929.

Gladys Campbell (1892-1992) attended the University of Chicago and was one of the early members of the University of Chicago Poetry Club. Campbell and George Dillon were close friends for their entire lives and Dillon sent his poems to her for criticism. Other close friends of Gladys Campbell’s were writer Glenway Wescott and poet Charles Bell. Campbell wrote poetry throughout her life and her poems appeared frequently in various publications.

The Gladys Campbell Papers contain correspondence, writings, and other papers that document the work of the poet Gladys Campbell and friends from the University of Chicago Poetry Club, as well as her relationship with other poets. The papers also contain writings of George Dillon, Charles Bell, Janet Lewis, and Maurice Lesemann. The papers span the years 1914 to 1995. A full description of the papers may be found online: Gladys Campbell Papers YCAL MSS 251.

Kathleen Foster Campbell, born Kathleen Foster, attended the University of Chicago to study poetry. After graduating from the University, Campbell maintained a relationship with the members of the club and the University. Through the Poetry Club, Campbell became a close friend of Janet Lewis and Elizabeth Madox Roberts and eventually married Donald Campbell, the brother of fellow writer and Poetry Club member Gladys Campbell.

The Kathleen Foster Campbell Papers consist of correspondence, writings and printed materials that document the relationship between Kathleen Foster Campbell and friends from the University of Chicago Poetry Club, as well as her writings and writings of others. Included among the papers are several writings by Janet Lewis. The papers span the years 1924 to 1992. A full description of the papers may be found online: Kathleen Foster Campbell Papers YCAL MSS 252.

Llewellyn Jones (1884-1961) was born in Castletown in the Isle of Man, Great Britain. From 1914 to 1932, he was the literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post. During his time as editor, Jones also taught writing as a visiting summer instructor at the University of Chicago, where he was a member of the University of Chicago Poetry Club. Jones moved to Boston in 1937 to take the position of editor of the Christian Register, but resigned in 1941. He lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his death in 1961.

The Llewellyn Jones Papers document his personal and professional life as a writer and editor and span the dates 1902 to 1962. The Papers contain correspondence, writings, and other papers. The bulk of the correspondence regards the Christian Register and the American Unitarian Association, and his involvement in the Chicago literary community; a small portion of the correspondence is personal in nature. The collection also contains documentation of Jones’s involvement with the Cliff Dwellers, a Chicago club that supports the fine and performing arts. A full description of the papers can be found online: Llewellyn Jones Papers YCAL MSS 257.

Related materials in the Beinecke Collections can be found by searching the Finding Aid Database; poets’ published work can be located by searching Orbis, the library catalog. (MW)

Images: George Dillon, circa 1918 (YCAL MSS 251 photographer unknown, Box 4 Folder 82) ; Gladys Campbell, circa 1957 (YCAL MSS 251 photographer unknown, Box 4 Folder 80)

Due to ongoing construction at the Beinecke Library, the exhibition schedule for “Metaphor Taking Shape: Poetry Art and the Book” has changed: the exhibition will be on view through Saturday, March 15. The companion exhibition “The Publishers” Roundtable: Book Artists in Dialogue” will be on view at the Arts of the Book Collection at Sterling Memorial Library through March 31, 2008.

Metaphor Taking Shape: Poetry, Art, and the Book
The exhibition 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.
News Release (pdf file)
Podcast and additional information