The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, is happy to announce:

WHEN POETS RULED THE EARTH
An Exhibit of Poetry in Buffalo 1962-1978

The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries
University at Buffalo
420 Capen Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260
(716) 645-2917

On display through the end of June 2012
Monday-Friday
9 am to 5 pm

As a satellite exhibition of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s WISH YOU WERE HERE: THE BUFFALO AVANT-GARDE IN THE 1970s, the Poetry Collection’s exhibit features first editions, manuscripts, posters and broadsides from University at Buffalo poets Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, John Logan, Irving Feldman, Carl Dennis, Leslie Fiedler, Max Wickert, Howard Wolf, Bill Sylvester and many others. In addition, WHEN POETS RULED THE EARTH features many of the UB campus poetry magazines of the period such as Intrepid, Fathar, Audit and Buff. There is also a selection of poetry publications from Buffalo community poets including materials from Buckle”, Earth’s Daughters, Just Buffalo Literary Center, Niagara Erie Writers and White Pine Press. Curated by Edric Mesmer, Alice Bailey and Michael Basinski.

Searching through the thousands of little magazine titles in the Poetry Collection, one would find a small number that have lasted more than a decade or two. A notable exception is Osiris magazine, edited and designed by Andrea and Robert Moorhead of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Since 1972, the magazine has published 72 issues, an impressive act of editorial dedication on the part of the Moorheads, who have donated the papers of what is now a nearly 40-year-old archive of Osiris to the Poetry Collection.

The Moorheads have dedicated much of their lives to contemporary poetry. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, Andrea Dubs Moorhead later moved to Connecticut before studying French and philosophy at Chatham College in Pittsburgh. Robert Moorhead was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Warren and Tarentum, Pennsylvania, earning a B.F.A. degree from Carnegie Institute of Technology and M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University.

The two were married in 1969, and after living in Pittsburgh, Troy and Schenectady for short periods, they moved in 1976 to Deerfield, Massachusetts, when Robert accepted a position at Deerfield Academy, a preparatory school. The author of over 17 publications, Andrea is a poet, translator and editor writing in French and English who currently teaches French at Deerfield Academy. Robert, a painter and graphic designer whose work has been exhibited widely, teaches visual design and architecture at Deerfield Academy. In addition to their magazine, the Moorheads also direct the Deerfield Academy Press.

Throughout their lives, Andrea Moorhead explains, “Osiris [has] remained our link to the great world, to the community of writers and artists engaged in modern thought and aesthetic movements.” The magazine began, she recalls, “Tuesday, April 11, 1972, in a small white house along NY Route 43 in the town of Averill Park.” From its inception, Osiris has been decidedly international in its focus and committed to a lyric tradition, publishing poetry by hundreds of writers around the world in such languages as English, French, German, Romanian, Danish, Spanish, and others, as well as in English translation. This was always a conscious choice by the Moorheads, who, in an early issue, define Osiris as “an apolitical international journal, which seeks a human art, without intellectual or social categories.”

As they elaborated in a recent interview:

The origins of Osiris are related to the general political and social climate of the late 1960s and 1970s. We spent our university years in Pittsburgh during a time when the city was shaken by the civil rights movement and the growing debate over the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The idea of launching a literary magazine, however, did not grow out of our concern about social and political issues…. Art and literature were rapidly becoming vehicles for social change. If one wanted to foster an aesthetic that was not “engaged,” it would be necessary to create a radical form of expression that refused to be co-opted by either the establishment or the forces for social change…. This simply meant that art in the broadest sense of the word should be free to explore those spiritual, psychological, emotional, and intellectual aspects of people’s lives that were not connected to nations or social groupings.

And yet, “for all its international involvement, Osiris is resolutely American. We like frontiers, new territories, and challenges. In a sense Osiris is an ambassador for our country, offering others the chance to share their work with an American audience without sacrificing their native language. This is an essential element of Osiris—the gathering of many voices in many tongues.”

Today, this “gathering of many voices” has itself been gathered and donated to the Poetry Collection, where it serves as an important research tool for students and scholars. After conversations with James Laughlin, founder and publisher of New Directions, whose personal poetry archive is in the Poetry Collection, and editor James Cooney, the papers of whose magazine Phoenix are also part of the collection, the Moorheads made their first gift to the Poetry Collection in 1995, with additional installments and further financial support arriving in subsequent years. Describing their decision to give their archive to the Poetry Collection, Robert and Andrea explain that:

Buffalo has always had a reputation for cultural excellence. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House and the Albright-Knox Museum among other cultural institutions stand out. The reputation of the Poetry Collection has always been foremost in our minds.

The Osiris Collection, documenting nearly forty years of the magazine’s history, helps promote the Poetry Collection’s mission of serving as the library of record for 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone poetry, and the Collection remains resolutely grateful to the Moorheads for the continuing generosity of their donations.

LANGUAGE TO COVER A WALL:
VISUAL POETRY THROUGH ITS CHANGING MEDIA

Nov 17, 2011 – Feb 18, 2012
UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts, North Campus
For more information, click here.

Opening reception Thur Nov 17, 5 pm to 7 pm:
5:45 pm Opening address by Marvin Sackner
6:15 pm Sound poetry performance featuring internationally acclaimed Canadian sound poets Paul Dutton, Nobuo Kubota, and W. Mark Sutherland

This exhibition of international scope will be one of the largest single gatherings of its kind, drawing upon language-art material from as early as a Pueblo Indian petroglyph (Galisteo Basin, New Mexico, ca. 1350-1680) up to the twenty-first century that contributes to an alternative tradition to standard linear poetry. Included are examples of seventeenth-century pattern poems, contemporary concrete, poesia visiva, eye poems, typestracts, poem-objects, and digital poems. Works by George Herbert, Lewis Carroll, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Barbara Kruger, Henri Chopin, Robert Lax, Dick Higgins, Daniel Spoerri, Alison Knowles, d. a. levy, Bob Cobbing, Siebren Versteeg, bpNichol, Bill Bissett, and Guy de Cointet are among a multiplicity on view.

Funding for the exhibition is gratefully acknowledged: UB Art Galleries, David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters (UB), The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, Canadian-American Studies Committee (UB), and the Government of Canada.

Generous support has also been provided by the Canadian Consulate, Buffalo, NY; Electronic Poetry Center (UB); Department of Media Study (UB); James H. McNulty Chair of English (UB); and Gaylord Bros.

For exhibition poster, click Language to cover a wall.

The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, is currently hosting two exhibitions for the fall 2011 semester:

James Joyce & His Literary Circles: Paris, Personalities, Presses
An exhibition of Paris literary culture of the 1920s featuring Poetry Collection items relating to James Joyce, Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company, The Little Review, William Bird and Three Mountains Press, Gertrude Stein, Nancy Cunard and the Hours Press, and Harry and Caresse Crosby and the Black Sun Press.

May I Trespass on Your Valuable Space
An exhibition of broadsides by Norah Maki. Completed primarily during the artist’s scholarship at the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland, each of the images corresponds to one chapter of Joyce’s novel Ulysses.

Monday – Friday, 9am-5pm
The Poetry Collection
University Libraries, University at Buffalo
420 Capen Hall (North Campus)
Buffalo, NY 14260-1674

http://library.buffalo.edu/pl

716.645.2917

Last fall, the Poetry Collection experienced what may well be a first in its nearly 75-year history when it received a generous donation from the undergraduate students in Professor Steve McCaffery’s English 361 class.

Impressed and inspired by their class visit to the Poetry Collection, during which Curator Michael Basinski gave a history of the collection and presented a number of significant, rare, and otherwise noteworthy poetry items, the students in Professor McCaffery’s Modern and Contemporary Poetry course decided among themselves to make a class donation. More specifically, they wanted to raise funds to repair the binding of the Poetry Collection’s first edition of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Claire Marie, 1914), an important volume of linguistic innovation and a favorite of the English 361 students.

A strong advocate for the Poetry Collection, Professor McCaffery, David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, introduces his students to the primary materials of the collection each semester. Commenting on the respect these particular students developed for the materiality of the collection’s holdings, McCaffery states, “In my entire history of teaching, this spontaneous collective gift was unprecedented. To me it indicates the value placed on rare and fragile items. It was a rare gesture, and in our current predominantly digital world, an almost revolutionary gesture.”

This gift will ensure that the Poetry Collection’s first edition of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons receives the physical conservation it requires, and will be available for the benefit of students and scholars for decades to come. Once the repair work is complete, Professor McCaffery’s students will be honored with an acknowledgment slip placed inside the book.

Such a donation underscores the Poetry Collection’s need for ongoing maintenance of its renowned collection of modern and contemporary poetry publications, some of which have become endangered over time. It also demonstrates how preservation funding can come from diverse sources. Historically, the collection has received conservation awards from individuals and private foundations, but never—until last fall—from a group of students. “By this act of simple philanthropy,” notes Curator Basinski, “our young scholars and poets have become curators in the realm of the poem.”

This is not the first time that Professor McCaffery has directly supported the University Libraries’ Poetry and Rare Books collections. Last year he sponsored the rebinding of a 1482 edition of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius as part of the Gray Chair’s commitment to an annual restoration, a generosity that is most appreciated for its long-term care of the rare and special items in both collections.

For more information about other conservation projects in need of funding, please contact the curators at (716) 645-2917 or lpo-poetry@buffalo.edu. Gifts to the Poetry Collection can be made online by visiting library.buffalo.edu/giving.

Dear patrons of the Poetry Collection:

There will be construction in our research room in Capen 420 beginning May 19. We will remain open for research during our regularly scheduled hours, but patrons should be prepared for elevated noise levels and other disruptions in the research room.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,
The staff of the Poetry Collection

April 14, 2011

Dear patrons of the Poetry Collection:

Due to the installation of new shelving in our closed stacks, some materials may not be immediately accessible. Should you be requesting any of these, please understand that there may be a short delay of a few days until they can be ready for you.

Thank you for your patience as we upgrade our facility.

Sincerely,
The staff of the Poetry Collection

The Poetry Collection invites you to a reception for the exhibition

Poems & Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book (1946 – 1981)

Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Time: 7 p.m. – 10 p.m.
7 p.m. to 8 p.m. : wine, cheese, and conversation with the Poetry Collection’s Michael Basinski and James Maynard. 8:20 p.m. to 10 p.m. : reading by members of the UB undergraduate poetry group The Pronouns
Location: Western New York Book Arts Center (WNYBAC), 468 Washington at Mohawk, Buffalo, NY 14203

Organized by the Center for Book Arts in New York and curated by Kyle Schlesinger, Poems & Pictures examines the relationship between visual and language art. The exhibition features over 60 books produced between 1946 and 1981, as well as paintings, collages, periodicals, and ephemera. Poets, artists, and collaborators include Wallace Berman, Joe Brainard, Robert Creeley, Jim Dine, Johanna Drucker, Philip Guston, Joanne Kyger, Buffalo’s own Steve McCaffery, Emily McVarish, Karen Randall, Larry Rivers, George Schneeman, and many more. The bulk of this exhibit is on loan from the Poetry Collection. WNYBAC is the final stop (on display between February 25 and April 2, 2011) of a 3-city exhibition tour.

Charles Olson, 1964

Olson in/and Buffalo

The UB Poetry Collection hosts an exhibition of archival materials to celebrate the poet’s centennial

For many American poets living at mid-century and after, Charles Olson (1910 – 1970) was a defining poet of the era, and Robert Duncan, for one, often referred to the 1950s and 1960s as “the Age of Olson.” Within the wider circle of innovative poetries, Olson is most closely identified with a group of writers known as the Black Mountain poets, known for their shared appearance in the pages of The Black Mountain Review, a literary magazine published by the experimental liberal arts college of the same name.

Olson’s 1950 essay “Projective Verse” is most often recognized as a central statement of the group’s poetics, and he both taught at Black Mountain College and served as its rector leading up to its closing in the fall of 1956. Seven years later, Olson joined the UB English Department where he taught such courses as modern poetry and myth and literature. Although he left the department in the fall of 1965 to return to Gloucester, Massachusetts, Olson made a lasting mark on the history of poetry in Buffalo. His students edited magazines such as Niagara Frontier Review and The Magazine of Further Studies before having their own careers as poets and teachers. To this day, Olson still exists as a tutelary spirit for UB’s Poetics Program. In addition to “Projective Verse,” Olson is best known for Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Melville, and especially The Maximus Poems (1953-1968), a wide-ranging long poem that investigates the history and geography of Gloucester.

On Friday, October 15, 2010, as part of Olson at the Century: A Symposium, a celebration of Olson’s centennial, the UB Poetry Collection hosted a day of panels and presentations organized by Professor Steve McCaffery, David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, and the UB Poetics Program. In conjunction with the event, the Collection is presenting Olson in/and Buffalo, an exhibition of first editions, little magazine appearances, broadsides, manuscripts, correspondence and ephemera that showcases the history of Olson’s publications as well as the archival traces of his presence across the Poetry Collection’s various manuscript collections.

Curated by Alice Bailey, Michael Basinski, Jeannie Hoag, Simon Horning, Mary E. Kohler, James Maynard and Susan A. Sturm, the exhibition is on display from October 15, 2010, through January 31, 2011 in the Poetry Collection, University Libraries, 420 Capen Hall, UB North Campus.

Earth’s Daughters presents

Gray Hair Series: Season 5
Helen Conkling & Bernhard Frank
Wed, Oct. 13 at 7:30 pm
Hallwalls
341 Delaware Ave
$5

More information about both writers can be found here.