By: Austin Bailey

My Reading Desk.

For this assignment I made use of Michael’s wonderful suggestion to check out Archive Grid: http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/. I found this to be surprisingly easy to use and quite helpful. You type in search criteria and it pulls up a list of libraries that carry matching items. This led me to the Morgan Library. My search criteria was “Ralph Waldo Emerson.” It turns out the Detroit Public Library has most of his papers and there are other items scattered across New England and California. However, I found two items of interest at the Morgan Library: a collection of newspaper and journal clippings relating to the transcendentalists and hand written notes from a 1859 speech Emerson delivered on behalf of John Brown. This speech was delivered on November 18th, roughly a month before John Brown was hung for treason.  Below is a photograph.

Emerson crosses out “Wordsworth.”

I thought this was neat because it’s the word “Wordsworth” written then crossed out. It seemed to have resonance by itself, floating atop the page and seemingly separate from the rest of the text. It reminded me of a comment I read recently in Harold Bloom’s 2012 Anatomy of Influence: “A great poet in prose, and a very good one in verse, [Emerson] invested himself in his journals, lectures, and essays because Wordsworth’s giant form blocked the New England seer from achieving a full voice in verse” (209). It’s interesting to think in terms of how the archive can inform and dialogue with our preestablished critical frameworks. Putting this next to Bloom’s assertion, for example–an assertion that seems generally true, so in a sense hard to assess–we can think about how process works in the making of a text. This would suggest a different way of thinking about influence, seeing it as more palimpsestic and usable rather than anxious and oppositional. (I don’t particularly buy what Bloom is saying anyway. Emerson wasn’t the best poet because he sounded too Victorian despite his desire not to. This wasn’t due so much to an anxiety of influence as it was to his inability to get his pitch right in verse. He knew this himself and remarked once that his voice was a “husky” one, better suited to prose.)

I was kind of surprised by how formal the archive was. It was like meeting a celebrity or going through airport security (though much more aesthetically pleasing). Catherine mentioned the Morgan Library’s archive system in her post but I’ll iterate my own version here. You can’t get to the Morgan Library’s reading room directly; you have to be escorted there. A nice man with a pony tail helped me get my visitor’s pass and took me upstairs to it.

When you get to the reading room you are instructed to put your personal items in a storage locker and to wash your hands. You present your ID to the archivist behind the glass. Then they let you in. It’s all very procedural. They instruct you to read through a list of rules and handling instructions. While you’re doing this they prepare the requested materials for you. In my case, these were newspaper clippings in a bound book, one that I could touch freely as they were simply xerox copies. But the other item I requested–the hand-written Emerson speech–was in a bound book placed on a kind of reading dais (I’m not sure what the exact term for it is but it’s essentially a wooden book holder). For these types of items you’re allowed to move the pages (carefully of course) but you are instructed not to reposition the book in any way. Below is a photo of the entrance which I surreptitiously snapped.

Entrance to the Reading Room

There was one other person doing research. He was photographing some series of illuminated manuscripts. There was an odd moment when one of the archive curators said to the other one: “Want me to move this stack of books so you can see him better?” referring to the researcher who was observing the illuminated manuscripts. The researcher then cheekily responded: “You can’t see me Marie?” with a smile. He and the archivist knew each other well enough to be on a first-name basis (at least in his mind) yet the curator was talking audibly about surveiling him. The whole scenario seemed oddly interesting.

As cliche as it may sound, there was something wonderful about being in the presence of all that literary historical material. I have no investment in manuscript studies per se, but I found myself wanting to trade with the guy next to me–his materials for mine–just so I could have a different viewing experience. Part of what was so alluring about Emerson’s script was that it looked like something someone could’ve written yesterday, as it was only black ink scribbled on blue-lined legal paper. It made me recall our conversation with Steve Jones and what he said about the delicacy of more recent textual materials, since they were printed on cheap, acidic paper.

Sketch of Henry David Thoreau, from the transcendentalist notebook.

I think being in the presence of the archive had an impact on me in two key ways: 1) it opened me up to an area of scholarship which I have heard a lot about but have not had any direct experience with, that being archive work in general, and 2) it made me aware of one of the salient values of the archive, which is to put the scholar in contact with the corporal presence of the text in its initial makings. This generates a new-found sense of a text being something that is made. It puts one in touch with the materiality of thinking and its affective forces. While none of the materials I found are directly relevant to what I’m working on now, I did snap some photos of some important journal clippings. These journal clippings presented in aggregate a record of Emersonian critical reception in the last years of his life and right after. Interestingly, what they reveal is that a lot of the conversations talking place within academe in the late 19th century concerning the meaning of Emerson’s work are surprisingly similar to one’s taking place now. Of course, certain elements of the 19the century conversation are dated and very different; still, there are skeletal similarities in the ways these late 19th century American and European literary critics themetized his oeuvre. I have made note of these things as they will come in handy in the future.

By: Catherina Sara Engh

Two Fridays ago, I visited the Morgan reading room where I looked at two oversized books of satirical prints drawn by the English caricature artist James Gillray. The experience was excellent, the librarians were helpful and getting into the reading room was as easy as could be expected. I was asked to stow my things—everything but a laptop, my iphone and a few papers–in a locker. I washed my hands and gave my driver’s license to a librarian to photocopy. Inside the reading room, someone had already pulled the two books that I requested and a librarian set one of them up for me on a stand.

The first book that I looked through was approximately two by four feet–very cumbersome—and consisted of 307 pages with Gillray prints pasted into the books’ pages. I stood to look at the prints and used a weight to hold the pages in place. The second book was much lighter, with fewer pages.

In her book The Golden Age of Caricature, Diana Donald argues that caricatures don’t fit neatly into the categories of high or low art. In the drawings, allegorical content is mixed with impolite subject matter. At the Morgan, for instance, I saw a print of the Queen of England on a Toilet titled ‘Patience on a Monument’—a line from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The mixture of high and low formal qualities and the cross-class audience—in the 1790s and today—makes the status of caricatures on the art market complex. Seeing so many prints pasted into the pages of this book, I couldn’t help but think that whoever put the collection together did not consider these etchings very valuable. (The collection I saw was given to the Morgan by Gordon N. Ray, who acquired them in 1815, but it’s unclear who owned them before him.)

The visit was, as I had hoped, productive to my research and thinking. I’m working on a paper that focuses on representations of English women in the 1790s world of fashion. Before the visit, I made a list of all the caricatures that I hoped to see and I left having seen seven of ten. It was great to get photos of details that I won’t find in a Google image search.

As I looked for the prints that I knew I wanted to see, I came across several that will help me prove my argument. This print –‘The Introduction’–pictures Frederick, the Prince regent, (in 1791) presenting his wife Charlotte to King George III and Queen Sophia. Charlotte’s apron is overflowing with gold coins. Behind her is an unfortunate depiction of an orientalized Prussian man who stands guarding more of her money.  I’ll have to see if I can find a good account of Charlotte and the dowry she brought into her marriage with the Prince. The laugh here is at the expense of the crown. The Prince was notoriously in debt to the crown and this marriage must have been a mercenary one. In my paper, I want to talk about how Gillray links marriage to the market and social spectacle to financial speculation. So, for my purposes, the print is great—it depicts marriage as a transaction. The King and Queen value Charlotte for the money that she brings to the marriage, regardless of where it came from.

The other great find was a series called ‘Progress of the Toilet’ which includes ‘The Stays’ ‘The Wig’ and ‘Dress Completed.’ In these drawings, a woman stands dressing before a mirror—a common enough setting for a Gillray print. But on the wall is a framed image depicting the time of day—morning, noon and evening in respective prints. Gillray exaggerates to comic proportions the time it takes this woman to get dressed, even with the help of a servant. In Catharine, or the Bower, Jane Austen uses a similar comic technique—she exaggerates a rakish character’s dressing time to indicate his foppishness and to suggest to her reader that he’s not morally serious.

It was great to see the prints as they were originally sized. I noticed details like the pictures of morning, noon and night in the ‘Progress of the Toilet’ series that I probably wouldn’t otherwise have noticed. The size of the prints made the intricacies of Gillray’s line and shading techniques more apparent and impressive. When people write about caricature prints, they usually discuss ‘supercharged features’ and, indeed, I noticed that the monstrous proportions of facial features instantly indicate who to laugh at or, more strongly, disdain. The queen, wherever she is pictured (see ‘The Introduction’), appears monstrous. I also noticed a lot of tavern drawings and admired up close the compositional arrangement of these overcrowded, busy scenes .

Finally, I saw a number of dreamscapes—drawings of Tom Paine or the Prince Regent asleep in a bed, surrounded by dream imagery. In his essay ‘The Cartoonist’s Arsenal,’ E.H. Gombrich applies Freud’s theories of compression and displacement to his readings of caricature prints. Before this trip, I was a little skeptical of Gombrich’s Freudian approach. But seeing the many dream scenes included in the book of collected prints, I was convinced that the Freudian approach is a good one and that Gillray’s kind of comedy expresses a thorough knowledge of human psychology.

By: Christina Quintana

This past weekend I visited the NYPL Archives in order to review the records for the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, a New York association formed in 1933 for the purpose of employing refugee European scholars in American institutions. While the committee worked to support all scholars fleeing Nazi persecution, special attention was paid to Jewish scholars who required assistance. The records are quite extensive—over 200 boxes—and consist mainly of grant files on refugee scholars who applied for aid, along with some correspondences between the committee and other philanthropic organizations. I was interested in only one file, however: Hannah Arendt’s, who submitted an application for aid in 1934. Hannah Arendt was a German-born Jewish political theorist who wrote extensively on theories of power, politics, and totalitarianism, among many other topics. For my final paper for my other course (Professor Miller’s Postwar Women Writers and Intellectuals) I plan to examine Arendt’s sometimes troubling notions of identity, and how she often eschews seemingly objective labels such as ‘woman’ or ‘Jew.’ Because the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars somewhat focused on Jewish scholars in need of aid, I was interested to see how Arendt would position her Jewish background in her application.

As both Sarah and Chelsea discussed, the NYPL can sometimes resemble a crowded amusement park more than a library. After a frustrating ten minutes or so of bypassing dawdling tourists and jogging up and down flights of stairs, I finally found the Archives Division, tucked away at the end of a fairly well-hidden corridor. The archivists working that day were all extremely helpful and informative, but I do agree (again) with Chelsea and Sarah that the highly restrictive nature of the archives is somewhat problematic. While I can understand the reasoning behind the appointment-only structure of the archive (in order to ensure no one is carelessly wandering in and poking around), the need for references and proof of academic affiliation seems unnecessarily obstructive and elitist. Again, as Chelsea pointed out, the implication that only “real” scholars (i.e., those attending an institution) need to and can have access to primary materials is disquieting.

Once I had signed in, I was given my box of requested materials. As I mentioned, I was interested in only Arendt’s file, which consisted of about thirty separate documents. The first dozen or so documents were fairly standard forms requesting the applicant’s name, date and place of birth, marital status, employment history, etc. Several letters of recommendation were included, which were fascinating to read. Both Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger submitted recommendations, but unfortunately they were in German (a possibility I naively had not even considered). The other letters, written in English from various colleagues of Arendt’s, all testified to her staggering intellect and warmly recommended her for financial aid. In terms of my original inquiry—that is, how does Arendt discuss or position her Jewish background on her application—I was not able to find a lot of satisfying material. On her CV, Arendt lists her field as “History of Jewish Emancipation and Assimilation” and marks her religion as “Jewish—Reformed”; otherwise, there was little to no mention of Arendt’s background in any of her application material or in the correspondences between the committee and Arendt. This is most likely due to the fact that the committee’s application did not require any sort of personal statement or academic essay, and therefore the majority of the file’s documents were not even authored by Arendt herself (except in the most perfunctory of ways, such as filling out generic forms).

Ultimately, Arendt was denied a grant from the committee nearly ten years after she originally submitted her application (a puzzling find for me—why did it take them so long to arrive at their decision? It seems absurdly long), but assured by the committee’s secretary that all the members held her in high esteem and would reconsider her application at a later date. Although these documents didn’t exactly address my original question, I was grateful to have had the opportunity of engaging with these texts in such a direct, tactile way. Additionally, the experience revealed to me the incredible potential of archival research in general—and that it’s not nearly as intimidating as I originally thought it would be.

tactile poetry!

By: Erin Glass

For our archive assignment, I decided to go to the Poet’s House nestled inside the bottom two floors of a riverfront building in Battery Park. The website describes the Poet’s House as a national archive, but perhaps Wikipedia’s description of Poet’s House as a “literary center” is a bit more fitting, as the archives themselves seem to play only a small role in actual use of the space.  Though their collection includes 60,000 books, chapbooks and literary journals, visitors typically come for one of their readings or other poetry-related events rather than to peruse their shelves.  Or at least so it seems.  Personally, my first few visits to the Poet’s House were entirely event related.  And now that I finally had a chance to check out their holdings — along with co-explorer Seth — I had the distinct sense we were treading a sort of forgotten frontier.  The window side tables were full of laptopped students, perhaps some even enjoyed poetry in addition to sunlit work spaces, but once near the actual heart of the archive, the population dropped.

the wall of new poetry.

Such is often the case with libraries, archives, so no criticism here. The sunlit windows, the free wifi, the poetry readings and classes, are all equally important organs for the vitality of such a literary center.  It was one of the events, in fact, that made me so eager to explore their actual collection.  No other institution in my experience, save perhaps for the university itself, has so successfully drawn my interest and activity to its bibliographic holdings through events.

Let me explain. A year or two ago, I attended a talk about the history of the chapbook at the Poet’s House that was held in conjunction with The Center for the Humanities annual Chapbook Festival. Now just in case anyone here isn’t exactly sure what a chapbook is, let us briefly recollect. Wikipedia nicely describes the chapbook’s contemporary form as:

chapbook shelves

…publications of up to about 40 pages, usually poetry bound with some form of saddle stitch, though many are perfect bound, folded, or wrapped. These publications range from low-cost productions to finely produced, hand-made editions that may sell to collectors for hundreds of dollars…The genre has been revitalized in the past 40 years by the widespread availability of first mimeograph technology, then low-cost copy centers and digital printing, and by the cultural revolutions spurred by both zines and poetry slams, the latter generating hundreds upon hundreds of self-published chapbooks that are used to fund tours.

The chapbook is the folk press, a means of distributing one’s texts outside the pearly gates of conventional publishing.  It is perhaps the most important — and unruly! — form of underground poetry movements in 20th century United States.  One need not have the approval of an editor or the capital of a printing press, but only the gumption to turn available resources into the means of transmission.  And so a survey of chapbooks of the past sixty years brings forth all sorts of shapes, materials and styles that defy traditional expectations of a published book.  Without a standardized means of production, the chapbook’s form depended largely on its creator’s imagination.

fringe and uber-fringe publications live happily together.

But back to the talk. The speakers articulated some of the historical roots of the chapbooks in early modern Europe, and then described some of the genre’s major transformations in the past century. For example, tools and organizations that in many ways made chapbook publishing a far more accessible, sustainable, and influential endeavor also contributed to the homogenization of the form. Prior to the Xerox machine, chapbook makers essentially had to individually determine the materials, forms and style of the chapbook, which enforced, so to speak,diversity within the genre. Additionally, one speaker linked the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 — which did important work cultivating some of these chapbook endeavors into shinier, more professional, more public forms — with the waning of a DIY, rough-edged culture of chapbook makers.  While no one was arguing that the Xerox machine or the NEA were not much welcome resources for fringe cultural producers, the speakers quite effectively demonstrated how diversity, reach, and sustainability of cultural production are all dramatically influenced by available resources, and not always in the way we expect. When the talk ended we were left to explore a curated selection of chapbooks from the fifties and sixties that highlighted the dramatic range of creativity in publishers that worked with minimal resources and support.  Somehow, I walked away that night thinking that the curated display just represented the tip of the iceberg. I was flooded with visions of combing through the past century of our nation’s folk publications.  How on earth, I wondered, would they even catalog such an oddball, odd-shaped, uncategorizable set of items. Oh, I’d return, all right.

chapbook shelf close up.

But when I did return — a few Fridays ago — making my way past the first shelf of this year’s published books of poetry, past the shelves devoted to international poetry, past the books of criticism, journals, memoirs, dictionaries, past, really, the entire printed discourse related to English poetry, all the way to the very back to its chapbook collection, I realized my imagination had perhaps run away from me.  Here, in about two aisles, lies the Poet’s House chapbook collection. Unruly, surprising, impressive, yes — one might find hand decorated, stapled, glitter explosive works snugly sharing shelf space with more official works by the likes of Louise Gluck — but hardly the National Library of Chapbooks that I had somehow been expecting.  I browsed through the mildly alphabetized materials, losing interest as it seemed most were produced in the last ten years, and all off an Epson printer.   Where, then, I wondered, did the nation’s history of chapbooks exist?

By: Sophia Natasha Sunseri

Like Chelsea, I visited the Shelley and his Circle Archives (part of the Pforzheimer Collection) at the NYPL. My experience also bore a resemblance to Chelsea’s in that I, too, encountered a somewhat agitated archivist who informed me that she wasn’t frustrated with me, but with the assignment (which, in her opinion, is too vague). Regardless, I proceeded with my research, albeit somewhat tentatively.

I was initially interested in perusing some of Mary Wollstonecraft’s manuscripts (and was specifically hoping to come across a working draft of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]). Some preliminary research revealed, however, that only two of Wollstonecraft’s working drafts are known to have survived: the first page of her essay “On Poetry” and a book review that she wrote. Thankfully, I was able to ascertain this information beforehand, as the NYPL’s online resources were quite useful. I refered to the library’s archives portal (https://wa.gc.cuny.edu/owa/?ae=Item&t=IPM.Note&id=RgAAAADEc%2fqmmQwMRauaFFPEeyqxBwCrCKyHOuKOTpLhQMMhSjpdBeuf4XH9AAACijVP6CjeSoftZudbrYoNAI1O47G7AAAJ) as well as to their published version of the Shelley and his Circle materials (Harvard UP, 1961-, 10 vols.), accessible here: http://catalog.nypl.org/record=b11093889~S1. Before my visit, I emailed the aforementioned archivist and requested to see correspondence between Mary Wollstonecraft and her sister, Everina Wollstonecraft, as well as the “On Poetry” manuscript.

In Mary Wollstonecraft’s letter to Everina (dated May 11-12, 1787), she discusses an ongoing monetary dispute with her brother, her experiences as a governess, a handful of French authors (especially Rousseau), and running into— and eventually snubbing—”Neptune,” an elegant but snobbish man for whom she once had affection. It is Wollstonecraft’s draft of “On Poetry,” however, that captivates my attention most. Although only one page of the draft survives (it is speculated to have originally been 11 quarto pages long) it affords much insight into Wollstonecraft’s revision process, which I find quite fascinating. Two published works are derived from this draft: an essay in the form of a letter to the editor of The Monthly Magazine, which was released in April of 1797 (http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008920340) and an essay published after Wollstonecraft’s death in September of 1797 under a new title assigned by Godwin: Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (with Godwin noting its origins in the preface). The differences between the two published versions are quite striking. The text from Posthumous Works most closely resembles the manuscript version (suggesting that it was most likely composed before The Monthly Magazine version). In this earlier version, Wollstonecraft employs simple vernacular: compare the phrase “the dream is over” (Posthumous Works) with the phrase “the reverie is over” (The Monthly Magazine). The text in the Monthly Magazine is ostensibly more baroque. Juxtaposing both works with what remains of the original manuscript reveals Wollstonecraft’s penchant to elaborate in her rewriting (it should be noted that Godwin did not heavily edit Wollstonecraft’s writing; he mostly made minor changes to punctuation). By assessing these primary source materials, I was able to draw conclusions that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.

While I did not find what I originally set out to find (a manuscript of one of Wollstonecraft’s better known works, like The Vindication of the Rights of Woman) it was interesting to observe that many of the ideas expressed in Wollstonecraft’s correspondences and in her essay draft were foregrounded in earlier works with which I am familiar (for example: her conflicted relationship to Rousseau; her rejection of highly stylized writing in favour of writing that communicates direct personal experience).

In the end, I was grateful that I came across materials that were previously unknown to me. It is this serendipitous aspect of archival research that I find most appealing—the accidental stumbling upon and the unexpected turns that one’s research may take as a direct result (which is one of the reasons why the archivist’s insistence upon a research project with such rigidly defined parameters irked me). I am looking forward to conducting more research at other archives in the city (and hopefully elsewhere).

By: Chelsea Wall

In the interest of full disclosure (and because I was probably the only one of us who had such an encounter), my experience with the New York Public Library archives began with a rather strange email exchange with one of the curators, whom I suppose should probably remain nameless. I filled out a request form to access the archives of Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley, to which this (slightly touchy) curator responded with a lecture on the vagueness of my assignment as well as a semantics lesson on the uses of “archive” vs. “archives.” This semantics lesson turned out to be incorrect, as I learned in a further email from said curator, however if anyone is interested in its nature, the singular form of “archives” is, in fact, “archives.”

Semantic quibbling aside, upon filling out the form, I received response rather quickly from multiple sources, though I was directed by the curator of the Berg Collection to consult the archives of Shelley and his circle, rather than the Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley archives, as vastly more of her papers are contained within the Pforzheimer Collection. The curator of that collection further requested that I consult the volumes of Shelley and His Circle before looking at the holdings of the archives, as many of the manuscripts are already published there, and I could potentially find them more useful than looking at the originals.

This brings me to draw upon a point that Sarah made in her posted assignment on her experience in the archives of the NYPL – it seems that access to manuscripts is quite guarded, and the filtration system to keep out the “riff raff,” so to speak, is rather extensive. While I fully understand the necessity of protecting two hundred year old documents, I remain discomfited by the privileging of access to and production of information and knowledge being restricted to those in higher-level education. The fact that I was asked to provide a reference in order to visit the archives speaks volumes to this point. As was pointed out in class, the creation of knowledge isn’t restricted to the institutions of academia, though we seem to have established a monopoly on primary sources and documents. I worry about what this privileging and micromanaging of access is doing to the production of knowledge through alternative avenues by denying access to primary documents to “amateur enthusiasts,” as if someone without a college education couldn’t use these sources in an appropriate manner.

Therefore, my search for information began in the second floor research area, where I, again like Sarah, was struck by the level of touristic noise and hullabaloo from the first floor below. Despite the nature of the library space as unconducive to quiet study and reflection, I did indeed find the volumes that I was instructed to look through quite informative. I focused on Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley’s correspondences rather than any manuscripts, in the interest of finding any reference to her neuroses regarding her failed pregnancies and determining their influence on the genesis of Frankenstein, which is rife with creation anxieties and motherless figures, intertwining life forces and death forces that are correspondent with Shelley’s lived experience. While I found nothing of this nature, after rifling through the 8 or so volumes of Shelley and His Circle, I decided to take a look at the letters written by Mary Wollestonecraft (Mary Shelley’s mother) to her childhood friend Jane Arden, written from 1773-1783. While they didn’t prove pertinent to any of my current work, I found it quite interesting to be privy to a private childhood squabble between Wollestonecraft and Arden, as if I was hearing a piece of juicy gossip some 225 years after the fact.

Though I didn’t find what I was looking for (though maybe I am an inadequate researcher), I was thankful to have some small experience with the daunting processes of archival research, and this assignment was effective in mediating my reluctance to engage with such processes. I refrained from taking pictures as I got the sense from our presentation on the archives at the NYPL some weeks ago that picture-taking is frowned upon, at least within this particular institution. However, I look forward to conducting research more pertinent to my work in other archives as well!

By: Sarah Hildebrand

I visited the New York Public Library’s archive of the Bryant-Godwin Papers. This collection is fairly expansive – 25 boxes worth of material including letters, diaries, manuscript drafts, notes, newspaper clippings, financial/legal records, and photographs. As many of you probably know, the NYPL has strict procedures for working with its materials, so I requested to look only at box 20, which contains William Cullen Bryant’s notebook and notes on agriculture and gardening. William Cullen Bryant was a 19^th century poet and editor of the New York Evening Post; he also played a role in the creation of Central Park. I was interested to see how his observations of and interaction with the natural world may have informed his writing process and affected the production of meaning in his poetry, much of which would fall under the category of nature poems.

While in some aspects the NYPL has become a most horrid tourist trap (I’m always disappointed by its initial loudness and the presence of gift shops on the first floor), it also works surprisingly hard to keep the riff raff out of the archives. The building itself is a bit difficult to navigate if you’re actually looking for information rather than photo-ops. Few tourists would simply happen to stumble upon, let alone into, the Manuscripts and Archives Division, which is not only located at the end of an off-shooting hallway, away from the main corridor, but requires you to buzz in and wait to be escorted inside. This certainly says something about the privilege of, and access to, education/information. Something about checking all my items at the ground floor, minus a clear plastic bag and laptop, made me feel a bit like a felon, despite the conspicuous nature of my “breaking in” to the library.

Once arriving inside the Archives Division (and after signing-in several more times) I was presented with the box of items I had requested. I was instructed to only remove one folder from the box at a time and to keep everything in order (even though there didn’t appear to be much order to begin with). Inside the folders were William Cullen Bryant’s to-do lists of gardening chores – planting, transplanting, propagating. Various lists of plant species within his garden, as well as fastidious detailing of their locations. Several lists of “flowers in bloom” at Roslyn (his estate) on particular dates in October, sporadically throughout the years 1866-1877, as well as comments on that year’s weather. Next were various newspaper clippings on agriculture – mulching, pruning, cultivating, manuring, protecting against cuculio (a type of invasive insect), setting fence posts. It became clear that Bryant spent copious amounts of time both observing the outside world and actively laboring in it. Based on the plethora of newspaper clippings (an entire journal pasted with clippings, alongside a stack of free-floating articles), he was certainly interested in the natural world from a scientific perspective, as well as an aesthetic one.

While I didn’t stumble upon anything particularly relevant to my own projects, it was interesting to handle some 150-year-old documents and see what we have/haven’t learned about tree and plant care in that time. While some of the clippings were almost comically inaccurate (a combination of poor pruning cuts based on ill-researched newspaper articles probably led to the increased rate of tree disease and insect outbreaks he discovered at his estate) others were alarmingly informed. It is no wonder that Bryant constantly struggled to maintain his garden, and was careful to take his own copious notes about its progress. He was likely aware that a lot of his agricultural practices were somewhat experimental, and thus endeavored to document the outcomes and learn as much from his own experience as from what he read in the papers – knowledge that certainly came to inform his poetry.

By: Iris Cushing

This past Monday morning I visited the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I had been wanting to visit the LHA since encountering archive founder Joan Nestle’s writing on queer New York history last summer. The LHA is staffed entirely by volunteers; Kayleigh and Celeste were both there on Monday morning to show me around the space and tell me about how it works.

Founded in 1974 by writer Joan Nestle (whom Jennifer writes about in her previous post), the LHA existed for its first 15 years in Nestle’s Upper West Side apartment. With collectively-raised funds, the LHA was able to purchase a limestone building in Park Slope in 1990 to house its ever-growing holdings. The history of the space itself is fascinating. The ground floor features an extensive library of writing by and about lesbians, women, and a wide spectrum of queer discourses. The second floor contains extensive files about individual lesbians, as well as a materials related to lesbian history based on region and topic. In addition to material holdings, they also have digital audio, video and photo archives. The space is full of framed photos showing lesbian activists over the years, posters, and things like jean jackets bearing loads of buttons and patches–the physical correlates of a vibrant and diverse culture.

One goal I had in visiting the LHA was to see if they had any archival film footage (in any format) of poet Eileen Myles reading her poetry in the 70s, 80s or 90s. Recently I agreed to help a filmmaker named Catherine Pancake locate footage of Myles from this time period; I had found several films online, but wanted to see if there were any undigitized films (on VHS, for example) there at the LHA. Pancake is making a documentary about four New York-based lesbian artists and writers, including Myles and Jibz Cameron, whose recent work I’ve reviewed for Hyperallergic. Participating in Pancake’s material-gathering process for her documentary seems like a good opportunity to get some insight into one of my academic areas of interest: feminist and queer literary communities in postwar America in general, and in New York in particular.

I asked Kayleigh about the possibility of vintage Myles footage at the LHA; she looked Myles’ name up on the LHA’s database, but all that came up were Myles’ books and the biographical file on her. She told me I was welcome to look through the LHA’s VHS collection and see if I could find anything there, but warned me that there the VHS collection had not been organized in any way whatsoever, so it might take a long time. She led me to the kitchen, where the VHS tapes were arranged on a shelf in the corner. There were at least 500 of them, most of them home recordings with handwritten labels. They ranged from recordings of radical women’s collective meetings, to indy films, to DIY tapes of lesbian love scenes collaged together from mainstream movies. It seemed entirely likely that there could be Myles footage in there.

It was at this point that I looked around me and really considered the social and aesthetic nature of the LHA. The kitchen was occupied by a well-used copy machine that appeared to be at least 15 years old, a refrigerator decorated with hand-drawn fliers and rainbow magnets, and a coffee pot ringed with years’ worth of drip coffee. It reminded me, quite movingly, of many of the radical community activist spaces I spent time in on the West Coast: anarchist “infoshops” and feminist bookstores, places with necessarily nonhierarchical power structures and all-donated resources and time. The phenomenon of the LHA struck me as a subject of study unto itself (as, I suppose, all archives are). I felt drawn in by the physical qualities of the space, the smells and the light, the sense of how people have moved through the rooms over the years. It felt very alive and particular, an organic hybrid of library, museum, house, cafe, and something else that I can only describe as a sort of lesbian church.

I elected not to sort through the hundreds of VHS tapes, and headed upstairs to look at the biography files. Both the files and the library are organized by the subject or author’s first name, which I imagine is an anti-patriarchal organizing scheme, although I cannot find any mention of the alphabetizing scheme on the website. The file on Eileen was thick. I plunked down at the long oak table (half-covered with boxes of unsorted papers) and began to read.

The gathering of Myles-related letters, notes, fliers and clippings in the folder felt entirely appropriate both the LHA and to Eileen Myles herself–her poetry and her way of being in the world. Casual, funny, covertly challenging of “normal” social formalities. As I leafed through about a dozen mailed postcard notices for readings, addressed to Joan Nestle and bearing 19-cent stamps, an awesome sense of intimacy opened up. This felt like an archive that could only exist between friends, between living people who knew each other—one whose work is gathered, one who is doing the gathering—as opposed to a preservation of documents and artifacts from the past.

I was also fascinated by the sudden immediacy of the material nature of literary communities as they existed “back then” (in the 80s and 90s, in this case). A poet like Myles would have to send out Xeroxed postcards to people if she was having a reading, or releasing a new book; she would have to make posters to put up in bookstores. It struck me as odd that I had literally never considered the simple material and location-based ways in which literary events were promoted–and literary communities built– before the digital age. In that way, looking at these pieces of paper did feel like making contact with the past.

The majority of the Myles file was devoted to Myles’ 1992 write-in presidential campaign, which I had always known about (she includes it in her brief bio) but never knew the details of. In the chapter on Myles in Maggie Nelson’s Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, Myles is quoted as saying that she talked about the campaign everywhere she went as it was happening, but she did not describe the writing and material-based elements of it. I was delighted to discover that the campaign, which Myles first announced in 1991, was a real grassroots campaign, complete with weekly Xerxoed letters to her constituency, posters, buttons, brochures, and information about rallies to support Myles’ candidacy. The letters include prose paragraphs and poems, and were wonderful to read: details about Myles’ childhood in Boston, her views on housing issues and homelessness, her claim that as a marginalized and poor person, she represents “the average American” more accurately than Bill Clinton or George Bush. It was wild to encounter a poet’s presidential campaign materials. To me, they are documents of a singularly unique literary project, almost a piece of performance art: joking but serious, propagandizing but also entirely liberating.

Before leaving, I decided to take a quick look at the “Regional” archives, a collection of sundry lesbiana organized by states within the US and by country. I took out the file for Arizona, where I used to live. The American Southwest, in my experience, is a site of both vehement homophobia AND radical queer countercultures (and everything in between); I was curious what kind of documentation of lesbian culture I would find in this file. There were things like brochures for women’s circles in Tucscon, newspapers about AIDS activism, posters for the first Gay Pride March in Phoenix. But what really blew my mind were the numerous newsletters and print ephemera about the lesbian rodeo scene in Arizona in the 80s and 90s. I had never imagined that lesbian rodeo riders existed, let alone a whole subculture devoted to promoting them and the culture (bars, dances, concerts, gatherings) surrounding them. Reading about these riders, their occupation of a historically very patriarchal space, resonated beautifully with the uncannily performative aspects of Myles’ presidential campaign. I ended up looking at that stuff until the LHA had to close for the day.

These encounters with the material traces of lesbian literary and social histories were tremendously eye-opening to me. I am looking forward to returning to the LHA, perhaps with the sole intention of sorting through those VHS tapes.