Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes original research, based on primary sources and related to figures central to or associated with the New American Poetry. Under the guidance of an extended scholarly community, the work is done by students in the English Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York as well as by guest fellows, and supported by private donors, foundations, and the Center for the Humanities.
Lost & Found also initiates research, works with living writers and their heirs, and organizes seminars and events that promote new, cooperative models of textual scholarship and publication. Taking the New American rubric writ large, to include the affiliated and unaffiliated, the precursor and follower, our aim is to open the field of inquiry and include ancillary materials of importance to the writers themselves. In focusing on extra-poetic work (correspondence, journals, transcriptions of lectures), Lost & Found illuminates unexplored terrain of an essential chapter of 20th-century life. Utilizing personal and institutional archives located throughout the country, Lost & Found scholars seek to broaden the vision of our literary, cultural, and political history. In addition to the annual series, the Initiative has joined with select publishers for book length projects emerging from our research, to appear under the general title Lost & Found Elsewhere.
Poised at the intersection of scholarly investigation, innovative publishing, public programming, and the preservation of cultural heritage, each Lost & Found project emphasizes the importance of cooperative work and the relationship of archival materials to a living legacy.
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Read Lost & Found defining moments and testimonials from editors and friends of the project:
"I usually only weep from exhaustion while doing archival work, but Michael Rumaker's letter to Don Allen about his participation in the 1979 March on Washington overwhelmed me. Rumaker's joyousness as he linked arms with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, two men who had shared his struggle for liberation instead of institutionalization, was transformative for him... and for me, as I read his words 23 years later."
- Megan Paslawski, editor of Michael Rumaker's Letters, and co-editor of the new edition of Rumaker's Robert Duncan in San Francisco
"Fall 2010: huddling on the terrace of Judith Malina’s apartment above the Living Theatre on a foggy October day with Diane di Prima and Ammiel Alcalay, Diane reading us a poem. After months of correspondence and editing, to be there with Diane and Ammiel was to be finally in the present, aka history in the making. The bare department store mannequins scattered for some reason around that terrace might as well have been bits of Greco-Roman statuary – in the ancient times, or in the basement of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zadar, Croatia (my homeland) as war ships aimed at it from the night Adriatic. HD was there, too. The urgency of Diane’s poem finally did spill into the streets of New York one year later."
- Ana Bozicevic, editor of Diane di Prima's lectures on HD and Charles Olson
"Working on Muriel Rukeyser’s “Darwin and the Writers” for the first series of Lost & Found chapbooks, I knew I would have to contact her son and literary executor, Bill Rukeyser, for permission. All of the editors and authors of the books on Rukeyser thank Bill exuberantly. In the acknowledgments to the Collected Poems, Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog spend a full paragraph praising his insight and generosity, calling him not just an active participant, but a partner. With the logic, panic, and conviction of a rookie, I was certain that this suggested precisely the opposite of what it seemed to say. “They’re thanking him so forcefully,” I told myself, “because he’s difficult! He’ll never approve my little project! Never!”
Bill, as you may already have guessed, gave me permission to annotate and publish “Darwin and the Writers.” He generously told me in an email that I was “tapping into a very important theme in [his] mother’s life and work.” And, the next April, when I took an Amtrak train all the way from New York to Montreal to present a paper on Rukeyser’s “scientific imagination” at the NEMLA conference, Bill and his wife flew even farther, from southern California, to attend the panel devoted to his mother. It was a surreal experience to throw declarative, scholarly sentences into an audience containing the one person who actually knew. But Bill was – and here’s that word again – profoundly generous: interested in and grateful for our grapplings, our perspectives, willing, when asked, to search his memory for a related anecdote, a bit of evidence.
In The Traces of Thomas Hariot Rukeyser describes finally being admitted to do research in the tower of Alnwick Castle; she describes: “My young son ran up and down that ladder, and finally rigged a rope device by which to let a case of papers down.” I love that part because of the way it collapses the intimate and the scholarly. It is an example of the bold erasure of boundaries that makes Rukeyser’s work so interesting and important to me. In Montreal, I got to talk to Bill about climbing the ladder’s rungs to handle those strange, old, crumbling documents on the top shelves, and I felt a shift in my own life and work. I suddenly saw so clearly the way research is done by people in rooms, reading, handling pieces of paper, or, if they are very very lucky, having a conversation."
-Stefania Heim
