University of Arizona Poetry Center
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The University of Arizona Poetry Center is among the nation’s finest and most extensive collections of contemporary poetry. It is the largest open shelf, easily accessible such collection.
Founded in 1960 by Ruth Stephan, a Philadelphia poet and philanthropist, the Poetry Center is most comprehensive for contemporary English language poetry (including translations from other languages) of the last half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty first. However, the Center maintains a strong representative collection of poetry from previous decades and centuries. A variety of aesthetic viewpoints and poetics are collected from the mainstream to the avant-garde, including a good selection of poetry from the margins. Publishers from Norton to Green Integer, from Atheneum to Zoo Press are included. The New York School poets, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance and the deep image “schools” are well represented. There is a large selection of confessional poetry, poetic memoir, and autobiographical poetry. Both the New Formalists and Language poetry are well represented, volumes by Richard Wilbur are on the shelf near to those of Barrett Watten. As to format, the collection comprises single author monographs, anthologies, literary journals, rare books, limited edition books, artist-made books, chapbooks, broadsides, photographs, and prose and critical works by poets. There is an open shelf reference collection including dictionaries, directories, handbooks, encyclopedias, biographies, criticism and bibliographies.
The original collection of books from Ruth Stephan included 213 volumes of American English and European poetry (in translation). By 1970 the collection had grown to over 3,000 volumes. There are now (2005) over 30,000 volumes of poetry and 24,000 issues of journals and periodicals (320 current subscriptions), 400 broadsides, 3,000 photographs and 2500 audiotapes, videotapes, lp recordings, cds and dvds. In addition to published recordings, the Center's audio/video archive includes recordings that document the Visiting Poets and Writers Reading Series since its inception in 1962.
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[edit] History of the Collection and the Center
The Collection was founded by Ruth Stephan (herself a poet and writer) from Philadelphia and at first consisted of 500 volumes donated by her, a widely varied collections of materials, primarily books. In her “Notes on Establishing and Maintaining a Poetry Collection, Stephan directs the collecting as follows:
“The collection should consist of poetry, of biographies and bibliographies of poets, volume of poets’ letters and of prose and plays by poets. There should be no books of criticism or essays on poetry unless these books were written by poets; for example, Francis Thompson’s exquisite piece on Shelley, and T. S. Eliot’s essays. Occasionally poets have written novels, as did William Carlos Williams, and these should be included for a rounded understanding of the poet.”
Ms. Stephan also directed that the collection be primarily, but not only American in its focus and left a significant bequest that is used to enhance and update the collection.
For the most part this direction has been maintained during the last 45 years, with the addition of some acquisitions of critical work by major critics (Bloom, Vendler and Perloff , for instance) and with perhaps not enough diligence in the areas of biography and bibliography.
Ms. Stephan’s founding collection of 500 books (probably typical of the reading library of an educated person with an interest in poetry of the time) includes Pound, H. D. Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Stanley Kunitz, W. H. Auden, Berryman, Rilke, Millay and others, primarily in editions published in the forties and fifties. There are several volumes of translations of Asian Poetry and of French poetry. Juan Ramon Jimenez is represented by several volumes and there are two collections of translations of Sappho.
It is most likely that these volumes were purchased from The Gotham Book Mart by Ms. Stephan on her trips to New York. According to Annual Reports, The collection grew by 100 volumes during the 1962-1963 academic year, and to 900 volumes by the Spring of 1963. By the Spring of 1975 the total number of volumes had increased to 4,060 and there was “a large collection on poetry periodicals and poetry on records.” The tape collection, of readings sponsored was beginning to grow to surpass the 50 or so titles of readings elsewhere which had been purchased in the late sixties.
In 1960, Robert Frost traveled by train with a graduate student to Tucson to dedicate the Poetry Center. At that dedication, Mr. Frost was asked by Steward Udall if he would read a poem at John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration.
[edit] Programs
In addition to the collections, the Poetry Center hosts a number of programs. Keynote programs include support for the Creative Writing program; a reading series of visiting poets that has hosted Nobel laureates, Pulitzer prize winners, and many other major poets, both American and international.; a visiting Poet-in-Residence; a Poet-in- High Schools; Writing-in-Prisons, community poetry classes and lectures; a newsletter, and poetry contests. Detailed information about the Center’s current programs can be found at the Poetry Center’s website, http://w3.coh.arizona.edu/poetry/.
[edit] The New Poetry Center
A new 17,000 sq. ft. facility that will house the entire collection (much of which is in storage having outgrown the existing facility) is scheduled to be dedicated in October 2007. The University of Arizona Poetry Center will be housed in the Helen S. Schaefer Building, which will provide classrooms, a lecture hall for the Humanities Seminar series, audio/visual facilities, administrative and program offices, rare book storage, an archive, reading areas, and an outdoor odium. Further information is available via links at the Poetry Center’s website, including a link to the building site’s webcam.
[edit] Collection
The collection includes on a representative level, work of most poets writing in English in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Poets from earlier centuries are represented on a more selective level. Translations into English from other languages are also included at the same level.
Some examples and statistics:
Author No. Titles
- Robert Frost 42*
- Denise Levertov 49
- T. S. Eliot 50
- Jorie Graham All book length works
- Wallace Stevens 25
- Brenda Hilman All book length works
- Ezra Pound 42
- Ron Silliman 16
- H. D. 24
- Lyn Hejinian 15
- Louis Zukofsky 16
- Muriel Rukeyser 19
- Robertson Jeffers 20**
- John Berrymore 19
- Marianne Moore 21
- Charles Olson 25
- Bernadette Meyer 16
- Robert Lowell 21
- Anne Waldman 29
- Amy Lowell 7
- Several first editions. ** Includes the magnificent four volume Collected Poetry
The Poetry Center subscribes to over 300 current journals and periodicals. Most of the titles in the collection are those which print only poetry, primarily poetry or which print poetry on a regular basis. Some of the journals included are: The Antigonish Review, Callaloo, The Canary, Chain, The Germ, Green Mountain Review, The Kenyon Review, Nation, New Criterion, New Yorker, Spinning Jenny, Spork, Volt and ZZZYVA among many others.
The Poetry Center has over 3,000 photographs, primarily of poets who have read in one of the reading series from 1960 to the Present. There are both 8x10 photographs of each poet and usually 20 or 30 smaller snapshot photographs of each poet. The primary photographers in the collection are Laverne Harrell Clark, Lois Shelton and Christine Krikliwy.
The Audio/Video Collections includes over 2,000 items including long play records, audiotapes, videotapes, CDs and DVDs. Most of the recordings are listed in the catalog under the name of the poet. Half of the collection comprises tapes (video and audio) from readings held at the Poetry Center, or under the Poetry Center auspices at the Modern Languages Building or elsewhere. There are also commercially available materials such as the Lannan Literary Videos, the Visions and Voices Series from PBS and tapes from the San Francisco State Poetry Archive. You can hear, for instance, Robert Lowell read at several different times during his life, including with John Berryman, at the Academy of American Poets in 1963 at the height of both their careers. A large selection of lectures from Warren Wilson MFA program can also be found in the collection (you can hear Tony Hoagland lecture on “Obsession and the Creative Wound,” or Carol Frost on “John Berryman at 36” among many others).
The Broadside Collection includes over 300 items, sixty of which are framed. This collection includes posters, fine printing broadsides and often, more ephemeral pieces including post cards and broadsheets.
