Exhibition Update

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

Digital Preservation

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 Even if files are unreadable, or hardware is obsolete, repository staff may be able to recover files and new technology may enable staff to recover files in the future.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.

Vicki Hearne Papers

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)

Exhibition Podcast: Metaphor Taking Shape

Exhibition Podcast: Metaphor Taking Shape: one of the exhibition curators discusses highlights from the show (MP3)

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 Publishers’ Roundtable: Book Artists in Dialogue, will be on view at the Arts of the Book Collection at Sterling Memorial Library. Both exhibitions are on view from January 22 through March 31, 2008.

Recordings of some of the poets featured in the exhibition can be found at the followings links: William Carlos Williams at PennSound; Johanna Drucker at PennSound; Ron Padgett at poets.org; John Yau at PennSound; C. D. Wright at poets.org; Robert Duncan at PennSound; Rita Dove at poets.org.

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

Other works discussed in this podcast include the following:

Works by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, including
Dante Rosetti, drawings by William Morris, Ballads and Narrative Poems, Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1893.

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Paul Verlaine, drawings by Pierre Bonnard, Parallèlement, Paris: A. Vollard, 1900.

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Walker Evans, photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge; from the
Black Sun Press edition of Hart Crane’s The Bridge, published in 1930.

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Marisol, image from: William Katz, ed., Stamped Indelibly:
a Collection of Rubberstamp Prints, New York: Indianakatz, 1967.

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Incantations by Mayan Women: Fathermothers of the Book
San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico: Taller Leñateros

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Jeremy Sigler, images and one poem by Jessica Stockholder
with printmaker Ruth Lingen,
Led Almost by My Tie, New York: Picture Books, 2007.

Poetry Reading: Donald Hall, February 6

Please join us for a poetry reading by former United States Poet Laureate Donald Hall on Wednesday, February 6th, at 4 pm. This event is free and open to the public. The Beinecke Library is located at 121 Wall Street, New Haven.

Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He is the author of many collections of poetry including recent titles such as White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006, Painted Bed, and Without: Poems. In 1988 Hall’s The One Day (1988), won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Hall has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Silver Medal, a Lifetime Achievement award from the New Hampshire Writers and Publisher Project, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry. In June 2006, Hall was appointed the Library of Congress’s fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He lives in Danbury, New Hampshire.

For more information about Donald Hall and examples of his work visit:

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/264
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/more_hall.html
http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum178.php

Poetry, Art, and the Book: An Artist’s Perspective

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.