Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative is excited to announce the recipients of our 2017-2018 Grants and Fellowships.
Lost & Found 2017-2018 Archival Research Grant Recipients
Lost & Found Archival Research Grants are designed to support student archival research in 20th century cultural materials, with a focus on poetry and poetics. The work supported by these grants is multivalent and involves archival research at all stages of its development, digital practices, public events, oral history, mentorship, transcription, and editorial support. The recipients of the 2017-2018 Archival Research Grant are:
Christopher Clarke
Chris Clarke is investigating a series of drafts of New York poet Muriel Rukeyser [1913-1980]’s translations of Arthur Rimbaud that were discovered in the Rukeyser archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. These different drafts of Rukeyser’s translations of portions of Une Saison en enfer (1873) and Voyelles (1871-1872) illustrate Rukeyser’s particular reading of the Rimbaud pieces, and the variants between the multiple typescript drafts speak to her method as a translator and the decisions she made during the process. A comparison of her translations to other English-language translations of the time (Delmore Schwartz, Louis Varese) will help to emphasize Rukeyser’s particular reading of these texts, and to contextualize their place in the English-language reception of Rimbaud’s work. An attempt at ascribing an approximate date to these undated typescripts will also help to contextualize Rukeyser’s translations within the chronology of her own body of work.
Brad Fox
Brad Fox will be exploring out-of-print and unpublished work by the contemporary American writer Darius James. James gained recognition as a writer and performer in the 1980s Lower East Side and published the sui generis classic Negrophobia, as well as a wild and hybrid a book on Blaxploitation, before leaving the US in the mid-1990s for Berlin. In his years abroad, a German publisher released several small-run collections of stories, criticism, and memoir, such as the riotous Froggy Chocolate’s Christmas Special. James returned to his hometown of New Haven in 2005, where his papers are kept in the basement of his family home. James’s position between performance, literature, and criticism, as well as his perspective on race within the US avant-garde make him a unique an invaluable voice
Seth Graves
Seth Graves will be mining the archives—begun last year at Berkeley, now following up along the East Coast—pertaining to correspondences with/by Philip Lamantia (1927-2005). Lamantia, referred to as “the only unqualifiedly surrealist poet” of The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 anthology (Jody Norton, The American Poetry Review, 1992), and perhaps the sole preserver of an otherwise failed attempt to spread surrealism to the United States. Graves is interested in the ways in which Lamantia interconnected webs of influence between the San Francisco Renaissance Poets, the Beats, the New York School, and the Chicago Surrealist Group.
Laura Hillegas
Laura Hillegas’ project aims to recover the unseen writings and archival materials of writer Steve Cannon and his ongoing project, A Gathering of the Tribes. Steve’s former art space in the East Village, a hub of poets, visual artists and thinkers, was lost to gentrification in 2014. Beyond creating a space, however, Cannon has been a gatherer of community and boundary-pushing art and writing for decades. Conceived as a collaborative process through conversations with Steve, this project hopes to do justice to the radical hospitality of Tribes.
Jojo Karlin
Jojo Karlin will investigate and research the use of digital platforms to present and preserve the various rich media used by figures like poet Helen Adam.
Alexis Larsson
Alexis Larsson is researching Gregory Bateson, an interdisciplinary researcher and theorist of ecology, communication, psychology, systems, and non-dualism. Bateson was a key thinker in 1960’s and 1970’s counterculture, presenting at numerous conferences and symposia devoted to change in political realities and consciousness. His Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind (1972) was a classic of its day. Many of his lectures were recorded and archived at Archive.org and at the Special Collections Library at UC Santa Cruz. However, a stash of recordings were mis-archived and remain uncatalogued. This project aims to make one lecture available to the public by transcribing it for Lost & Found, sharing a way of thinking that remains relevant today.
Jose Alfredo Menjivar
“The Herstory of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press” is an archival research on the founding, achievements and eventual closing of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the world’s first publishing company run autonomously by women of color. This project of interest and archival research directly connects to Lost & Found’s interest and focus on poetry and poetics, as the Kitchen Table published many poets, including Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, and writers published in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. My hope is that it will be a unique contribution to Lost & Found, and an important contribution to generations to come.
Jaime Shearn Coan
Jaime Shearn Coan will continue working with the papers of Thom Gunn (1929–2004), housed at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. Gunn is perhaps most widely known for his 1992 poetry collection The Man with Night Sweats, in which he charts his experience living through the AIDS Crisis in San Francisco. Sprinkled throughout his extensive poetry notebooks are occasional journal entries; Gunn also kept a diary, which briefly notated the main events of each day: lunch dates with friends, anonymous sexual encounters, types and quantities of illicit drugs taken, etc., in about three lines of tiny print. Distinct from both his poems and essays, these writings demonstrate the total enmeshment of his sexuality and his poetics—there was one singular drive that powered them both. Coan hopes to collect these autobiographical writings in order to add to the scholarship on Gunn as well as to add to the archive of queer cultural history that engages with the AIDS Crisis.
Stephanie Vella
Stephanie Vella’s research project focuses on the classicist Jane Harrison, an influential figure in modernist cultural practice, and the development of her research methodologies. Harrison used embodied practices, geographical mapping, and visual analysis as methods of moving through time and reconstructing a particular vision of classical Hellenic culture. She developed this methodology while constructing a correspondence course through the British Museum, and through embarking on a tour of archaeological sites. Both of these forms (correspondence and travel) offer an interesting relationship with the content of Harrison’s practice: the movements through space and time of bodies and information echo a methodological turn toward imagining the embodied practices of distant historical eras.
2017-2018 Diane di Prima Fellowship
The Diane di Prima Fellowshipis awarded for direct work on and with Diane di Prima, with a particular emphasis on working with archivists and institutions to envision new channels of access across various holdings and modes of her oeuvre. The 2017-2018 Lost & Found Diane di Prima Fellows are:
Iris Cushing
In June/July of 2017, Iris Cushing will return to Diane di Prima’s home in San Francisco to conduct archival research as well as in-person interviews with di Prima. A specific focus will be studying di Prima’s lectures on Percy Bysshe Shelley, written for and delivered at the New College in 1984, with the aim of generating material for a Lost & Found chapbook on the lecture titled “Prometheus Unbound as a Magickal Working.” Mary Catherine Kinniburgh and Iris will be working together in San Francisco for part of the time.
Mary Katherine Kinniburgh
Mary Catherine Kinniburgh will be returning to Diane di Prima’s archive at the Wilson Library of UNC-Chapel Hill to examine her collage notebooks from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as continue research on her multimedia holdings. Mary Catherine will also be traveling to San Francisco to work with di Prima at her home with Lost and Found colleague Iris Cushing. These two trips will contextualize di Prima’s personal and institutional archives, to more fully understand how to support preservation and access to di Prima’s prolific poetic contributions.
2017-2018 Legacy Fieldwork Grant Recipients
Lost & Found Legacy
Fieldwork Grants are dedicated to projects with unusual circumstances that might not be tied to an immediate research or archival project. Legacy Fieldwork is conceived of as the application of skills acquired through the archival research and publication process of Lost & Found to serve and educate the literary community writ large. The recipients of the 2017-2018 Legacy Fieldwork Grant are:
Daisy Atterbury
Daisy Atterbury is continuing her archival research at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the NYPL, assisting in cataloging previously unprocessed papers in 20th Century American Poetry.
Josh Schneiderman
Josh Schneiderman will be doing research at the NYU Fales Library for a forthcoming documentary (produced by Peter Rosen) on the New York School painter, musician, and filmmaker Larry Rivers. His work involves watching and logging 600 hours of film in Rivers’s archive, and will help introduce Rivers’s work to a wider audience. Josh also plans to write an essay about the experience entitled “600 Hours of Larry Rivers.”