Editors Bharat Mehra and Vanessa Irvin have accepted my book chapter proposal, “Reading in the Stacks: Raising Young Poet-Librarians in The Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo” for their forthcoming book, Poetry as Knowledge in Library and Information Science: Inquiry, Identity, and Practices, to be published by Emerald Group Publishing for their Advances in Librarianship series.
Abstract: A few personal histories of the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo have been published in small periodicals, but not many; like Black Mountain College, this era of creative productivity in public higher education needs to be recorded. In this narrative, I will recount how the Poetry Collection, a special collections library at Buffalo, contributed to the education of undergraduates in the program by hiring and training them, introducing them to new work, and showing them how different poetry communities interacted (such as which small presses worked with whom, who corresponded with whom, etc.). This unparalleled access to a closed-stacks archive, much of which was not yet cataloged, was a special bonus education for us and is part of what led me to library science, where I still engage with poetry, such as writing about intersections of library science and poetry, writing about libraries for poetry magazines, and organizing writing workshops and poetry readings as programs in the library. This experience has also been true for other working poets such as Ric Royer (a performance artist/poet who worked at the Buffalo Public Library), Jeannie Hoag (a poet and now Reference and Assessment Librarian at Fordham University Libraries, as well as some of the current staff at Buffalo who are also working poets. Rather than privileging libraries or poetry, the Poetry Collection was a space where our creative lives were encouraged, so that for instance, I would be assigned to catalog materials that Dr. Michael Basinski (Fluxus poet and then-curator) thought would inspire my poetry; I would work diligently to archive the materials because I had a stake in them, creatively. These two elements, the exactitude of library science and the creativity of poetry, informed one another, which came in especially useful when materials were difficult to catalog and needed a creative mind (such as Basil Bunting’s astrolabe, the vast collection of mail art, or Clark Coolidge’s cheese sandwich). The Poetry Collection at Buffalo has had a long-term influence on American poetry, librarianship, and community by employing student workers who were interested in poetry.