stylus

THE DOUBLE DREAM OF JOHN ASHBERY: On the Ashbery Papers and Reading Library

Just as the publication of John Ashbery’s The Double Dream of Spring (1970) helped to cement the poet’s post-Tennis Court Oath reputation, the double presence of Ashbery's papers (at Houghton Library) and his personal reading library (at the Woodberry Poetry Room) promises to do the same for generations to come.

GETTING WISE TO THE B SIDES: Recent Discoveries in the Packard Collection

While the greatest discoveries await you, some of our favorite in-house finds thus far have included a series of 1947-48 outtakes by T. S. Eliot, experimenting with how to give voice to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." On these distinctly different recordings, you can hear Eliot reading the hypnotic opening line....

Announcing the 2018-2019 WPR Creative Fellowship & Grant Recipients

The Woodberry Poetry Room is pleased to announce that Tracie Morris (of Brooklyn, New York) has been selected as the recipient of the 2018-2019 WPR Creative Fellowship for her project “The Impossible Man.”

YOU ARE UNSUBSCRIBED: Some Activisms of Carol & Robert Bly

I’ve long been interested in individual actions—and minimalist instances of resistance—that testify against a seemingly insurmountable power. It’s no wonder, I suppose, that this interest has been revived of late. As a poet, I have been especially fascinated by the role of refusal: particularly, actions on the part of writers—those whose very material is the language—to use “No” (and silence itself) as a dexterous...

“ARCHIVE OF THE MOUTH”: Tracing Baez, Plath, Sun Ra, Sexton, Et Al Back to a Single Pivotal Recording Studio

This was supposed to be a story about one of the nation’s first "library of voices" and its phonographic instigator Frederick C. Packard, Jr. And, in many ways it remains so. But, as poet Lyn Hejinian has observed, people are collecting-experiences, and if one genuinely follows a single human being one inevitably happens on someone else who forms the fulcrum of a very different...

THE LOST SPEAKERS: When Poetry, Technology & Public-Speaking Converged

As we enter a new era of civic discourse—one governed by 140-character-limits, “air quotes,” and alt facts—and as we encounter an administration intent on destroying the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, it is helpful to reflect on a time that faced similar social and economical struggles (accompanied by rapid technological advances) and met them with a combination...

Carl Sandburg Gives His Regards to Our “Garrulous” Moment

On October 18, 1950, Socialist troubadour, Abraham Lincoln biographer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Sandburg read at Harvard University under the auspices of the Morris Gray Reading series. He was likely invited by Department of English faculty member Archibald MacLeish. Long-time friends Sandburg and MacLeish shared in being "critical of writers who [had] remained detached from the national emergency of World War Two." True...

ORAL HISTORY INITIATIVE: A Conversation with Jean Valentine

The primary questions I asked her related to the mid-century history of the Poetry Room and its then curator John Lincoln Sweeney. The stories that emerged included a much wider sphere of intersecting lives and poetries than I had heretofore imagined, among them: Adrienne Rich, Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, Fanny and Susan Howe, Edwin Honig, Robert Lowell, Dudley Fitts, Robert Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and...

POETRY’S NOBLE PAUSE: On Patti Smith’s Nobel Prize Performance & Poetic Rupture

Poet and singer-songwriter Patti Smith’s recent magisterial performance at the Nobel Prize ceremony—in which she interrupts her own rendition of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and takes a moment to apologize for her nerves—offers us a chance to reflect upon and celebrate poetry’s role in an increasingly mechanistic society.

AIR RAID: Archibald MacLeish and the Radio as Literary Device

On October 19th, 1938, a year and a half after the Columbia Workshop debut of his first (and what is largely considered the first) verse play for radio, The Fall of the City, Archibald MacLeish sat down at a microphone in Holden Chapel at Harvard University to record (and more importantly to inform the reading of) his most ambitious verse drama to date: Air...