Each year, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative offers Archival Research Fellowships and Grants to CUNY Graduate Center doctoral students conducting archival research on poets, writers, artists, and musicians whose contributions to New American Poetry remain understudied, including their political, pedagogical, and activist commitments, deepening and complicating common understandings of past historical and cultural moments. This year, thanks to generous support from the Early Research Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center, 13 students have received financial and logistical support as they traveled to archives here and abroad, both personal and institutional, developing their innovative research. This archival research is how Lost & Found seeds new publications and programming, so look forward to the flowers of these projects which may take any number of final forms—dissertations, conferences, digital publications, Lost & Found chapbooks, or full-length books published in collaboration with a larger press as part of our Lost & Found Elsewhere series. Read about the 2024 L&F Fellows and their archival research projects:
Lou Sullivan’s Queer Transmasculine Advocacy
Lou Sullivan, a gay trans man, author, activist, and ardent diarist, died of AIDS-related complications in 1991 at the age of 39, writing upon receiving his diagnosis, “They told me at the gender clinic that I could not live as a gay man, but it looks like I will die as one.” His edited diaries, which allowed a generation of younger queer transmasculine people to reach across the archive and connect with an ancestor, provide almost three decades of his internal monologue, but leave his letters unexamined. This project highlights tensions and connections in trans communities and trans healthcare access through exploring Sullivan’s frequent correspondence with other trans people from the ‘70s to the ‘90s, his interpersonal and organizational work throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s to build a vibrant transmasculine community in and beyond California’s Bay Area, and his unrelenting efforts to educate surgeons and other medical professionals on the existence of queer trans men.
“My Arthur Russell”
In this project – titled “My Arthur Russell” – Malinowski writes on the intersecting lives and aesthetic qualities of Arthur Russell and his contemporary Kevin Killian. Born a year apart, both artists left an indelible mark on the shape of experimental American music and poetry, respectively. Malinowsi’s hope is for his writing to sense both Russell and Killian as fellow travelers in the present.
Educators and Organizers: Queens College Socialist Feminisms of the 1970s
This project, which is a collaboration with a collective of scholars, organizers, and archivists, aims to document the history of socialist feminisms in the SEEK program at Queens College in the 1970s. Through oral history and archival work, we hope to shine light on a remarkable group of educators that included Andaiye, Joan Nestle, Margaret Prescod, and Wilmette Brown, with a focus on the relationship between their pedagogy and organizing.
NYC’s Poetic Collaborations: 1953–1996
Since the 20th century in the United States, poets’ theaters have nurtured projects that are experimental and often hard to categorize, while, at the same time, canonical, hearkening back to the days of ancient dramas, when the poet and the playwright were the same person. While recent scholarship on poets’ theaters has much to say about the plays produced for these venues, Rosenberg’s research focuses on the interactions that preceded the actual texts and performances. To shift critical attention toward preceding encounters within the multi-media archives, Rosenberg’s project looks to the correspondences that facilitated poets’ theaters and their collaborative poetics in New York City between 1953 and 1996.
Making Space for Edward Owens Within the New American Cinema Movement
This project focuses on the archives and letters of Edward Owens, a nearly forgotten queer Black filmmaker who spent a few productive years in New York when he was barely in his twenties, making several acclaimed underground films before returning to his hometown of Chicago. The archival research will center on Owens’s correspondences with friends and acquaintances in the NY underground. Through the archival reconstruction of Owens’s community of filmmakers, critics, and poets in New York, this project hopes to re-center Owens within the New American Cinema movement. Exploring new archives will also allow for a speculative engagement with unmade and unfinished films that Owens described in letters or sketched out in still collages and notes after his return to Chicago, when his filmmaking practice has been presumed to have ended.
Gary Snyder as an Educational Approach to Confronting Climate Change
Gary Snyder is best known as a foundational thinker of American ecopoetry in the 20th century, and much of his creative life has been studied. However, his life as an instructor has received relatively little attention. In this project, Nicoludis intends to survey Snyder’s course materials, from reading packets to lecture notes, to broaden our knowledge not just of his life as an educator but also to uncover new instructional approaches for teaching environmental poetry in the age of climate change.
Mapping Samuel Delany’s Poetic Dialogues
Teich seeks to build on their scholarly understanding of the generative and vast relationship between Samuel Delany and queer avant garde poets that began to take shape last summer. Secondly, Teich hopes to potentially gather the writing for a Lost and Found Series Chapbook containing Kevin Killian and Delany’s correspondence, a republication of Delany’s letter on Lew Ellingham’s biography of Jack Spicer, originally published in Mirage, run by Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy. Finally, Teich aims to start taking concrete steps towards a larger and more long term project of producing an anthology of writings by poets on Delany (derived from Teich’s archival work on social mapping) that combines republishing pre-existing essays with commissioned works. This might be supplemented with a do-si-do format that includes excerpts from Delany’s archive where he directly engages poetry—in other words, interspersing “Poets on Delany” with “Delany on Poets.” Teich aspires for this work to find potential publication through Lost & Found Elsewhere or a similar platform that bridges academic scholarship with literary community.
Uncovering Kenneth Patchen’s Vision
Kenneth Patchen is the often overlooked poet of anger and light, whose reputation is cursed by his singularity (not fitting in neatly with Beats who immediately followed him, though they contained key admirers), his dogmatic pacifism (which earned him no friends especially during its first manifestation during WWII when he was living in New York) and his physical remove from “the scene” caused by his chronic back pain. Much of Patchen’s recent rehabilitations and attention has come from an attempt to place him in the context of the Beats and that has been the lens through which his archive has been viewed. This project is to visit his underprocessed papers at UC Santa Cruz to uncover his subterranean ecological and pacifistic vision, especially in the hundreds of heterodox “picture-poems” that he devoted the end of his life to creating.
An Unveiling of Gloria Anzaldúa Through Poetry
Tiniacos’ project involves doing archival research on The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin, and working towards publishing one of her previously unpublished pieces. Anzaldúa, a notable American queer Chicana theorist, activist, and writer, significantly influenced Chicana/x identity through her poetry, theory, and prose. By examining Anzaldúa’s expressions of physical disability and her reconfigurations of the human, this project aims to offer new optics from which to read her poetry.
The Archival Interplay of Robert Duncan
This project will look at the work of Robert Duncan in conjunction with Charles Olson’s manifesto “Projective Verse” and the work of process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The aim is to foreground the more idiosyncratic intellectual byways of Duncan’s work. It will also look at the artistic relationship between him and his partner Jess Collins who was a painter and lifelong collaborator.
Poetic Prose and Diaspora Politics: The work of Edwidge Danticat and Other Afro-Caribbean Americans in 20th Century New York
In the 20th century, Afro-Caribbean diasporic writers like Edwidge Danticat and Arturo Schomburg created vivid poetic prose that spoke to the impact of immigration and diaspora politics on communities in New York City and beyond. Their work explored the in-betweenness of being in diaspora, highlighting the tragic flaws and strengths of this state. By studying their writings and that of other diasporic writers like Felipe Luciano, Mayra Santos-Febres, and Danielle Legros Georges, we can begin to understand the political power of Black immigrants in the Americas and their contributions to culture, social movements, and public policy.
Amina Baraka and the Revival of Spirit House
Amina Baraka (née Sylvia Robinson, b. 1942) is perhaps best known to the wider world as poet Amiri Baraka’s wife – but to many, including Newarkers, she is known as a political, artistic and spiritual force in her own right. Her role in the Black Arts Movement and in Newark’s Spirit House at 33 Sterling Street as well as her own artistic work has certainly been noted, but more should be done to document and bring to new generations the manifold work of the Spirit House.
The Spirit House (SH) had a mission to meet the spiritual and material needs of Newark’s black people and, now, when poetry writ large feels stifled and inert due to capture by non-profits, universities, and other more conservative structures of support, a renewed attention to SH’s history can show us the possibilities of a different, more radical structure. The work of Baraka and her comrades resulted in programs there like the Afrikan Free School; plays were produced and staged – one of Amina Baraka’s earliest connections with the SH was through acting in Amiri Baraka’s black nationalist play, “A Black Mass”; Baraka herself was an active member of the Communist Party (CPUSA) and helped found the Black Radical Congress in 1998 in Chicago. The SH also sponsored events throughout the country with Kwame Ture, Harold Cruse and other Black leftists.
The research project Krusling is proposing would seek to dig into the history of Newark’s Spirit House as well as Amina Baraka’s work to nurture it and other aesthetic-political projects in order to help produce a pamphlet or larger project that would provide a useful document of an arts community and one of its most remarkable stewards.
Conversations of Lois Elaine Griffith
This Lost and Found project proposes to digitize, transcribe, and prepare an oral history/sound collection of a private archive belonging to Lois Elaine Griffith, the last surviving founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. These recordings include conversations with Pedro Pietri, Amiri Baraka, Marcel Christian, Arlene Gottfried, Miguel Algarín, and more. This work will assist Griffith for two works in progress: “Confessions,” where she will explore creative documentation and other multi-genre possibilities for preservation in non-traditional forms, and Chrónicas, a work of creative non-fiction about the contents of her sound collection.