Presentation

2025 Lost & Found Fellows Showcase: New Poetics and Archival Research Projects

Thu, Feb 6, 2025

6:00 PM–8:00 PM

The Skylight Room (9100), CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC. Free and open to all. Registration required.

Join Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative Graduate Center doctoral student fellows Onur Ayaz, Sochuiwon Priscilla Khapai, Addy Malinowski, Shobita Mampilly, Nicodemus Nicoludis, Sam O’Hana, and Natasha Tiniacos who will present their archival research projects 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. Following the methodical model of “follow the person,” join these 2024 L&F Fellows to learn more about their archival journeys and adventures researching such figures and subjects as: Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa’s unpublished poetry and letters; Etheridge Knight’s influences on future generations of poets through the the Free People’s Poetry Workshop; Charles Olson’s teaching and pedagogy; Robert Duncan’s artistic relationship with painter and lifelong collaborator Jess Collins; Cid Corman’s correspondences; Arthur Russell’s relationship to Kevin Killian; and an examination of Allen Ginsberg’s tax returns.

The event will be introduced by L&F Faculty Mentors and Editors Zohra Saed and Megan Paslawski. The fellows’ presentations will be followed by a Q&A session. Learn more about the fellows and their work below.

Lost & Found Fellows & Project Presentations

Onur Ayaz

Charles Olson’s Teaching and Pedagogy

Onur Ayaz’s archival research project aims to contextualize Charles Olson within a larger dialogue of teaching and pedagogy that has yet to occur. This work also builds on Ayaz’s dissertation, wherein he addresses the lack study regarding Olson and his teaching, especially his time as a teacher at SUNY Buffalo. Finally, the project builds on past work done on Olson and his contemporaries–including work from previous Lost & Found initiatives like at SUNY Buffalo’s Poetry Collection (where Ayaz studied the unprocessed materials of Al Glover and interviewed him at his home in Canton), the NYPL (Paul Metcalf), and at the Maud/Olson library in Gloucester.

Through this project, Ayaz asks the following questions: what was Olson’s method like as a teacher, how did he conduct his courses? And, what can we learn from his teaching materials and the records surrounding those? Recent research at the Charles Olson Research Collection at the University of Connecticut has led to Ayaz tracing the correspondence and underexplored network between Charles Olson, Jonathan Williams, and Paul Metcalf. These questions serve to guide Ayaz in looking at the archival record and in presenting these materials to audiences.

Sochuiwon Priscilla Khapai

The Archival Interplay of Robert Duncan

Sochuiwon Priscilla Khapai’s project explores the work of Robert Duncan in close relationship to the book Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead who is considered the founder of process philosophy. The aim is to deepen an understanding of composition in Duncan’s poetry, particularly those informed by natural phenomena and metaphysical concepts. The project also looks at the artistic relationship between Duncan and his partner Jess Collins who was a painter and lifelong collaborator.

Addy Malinowski

“My Arthur Russell”

In this project – titled “My Arthur Russell” – Malinowski investigates 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.

Shobita Mampilly

Etheridge Knight’s Free People’s Poetry Reunion

Etheridge Knight’s poetry inspires generations of free poets to take stage in spoken song across the globe, activating agency through rhyme across time. In the summer of 2024, The Free People’s Poets reunited at the crossroads of America in Indianapolis, after thirty-one years of expanding Knight’s light around the world. Convening over music and poetry at the historic Chatterbox Jazz Club on historic Massachusetts Avenue. Curated by poet Kenneth May, the summer reunion launches an ongoing project to trace the expanse of Etheridge Knight’s influence on future generations of poets, through memoir, readings and workshops led and inspired by the original Free People’s Poetry Workshop family.

Nicodemus Nicoludis

Theodore Enslin and Cid Corman: Committed Correspondences

In 1960, the poet Theodore Enslin reclused himself from the scene of poetry and moved to Maine, and in that relative solitude, he took on the life of both a hermit poet and a letter writer. In the Maine woods, Enslin wrote prolifically, and the scope of this research project centers around Enslin’s correspondences with poet and Origin publisher Cid Corman to uncover the nature of the relationship between poet and publisher, their shared poetic visions in the face of the Vietnam War, and the commitment of literature to social and political realities. Using their letters, this project aims to produce a chapbook of their letters alongside a series of essays printed in the journal EL CORNO in 1966 between Enslin, Denise Levertov, and other poets to interrogate the social and political position of the poet during times of genocide and invasion.

Sam O’Hana

Allen Ginsberg vs. the IRS

A selection of Allen Ginsberg’s papers at Stanford special Collections

Sam O’Hana’s research project examines Allen Ginsberg’s tax returns over the 47 year period of his career and compares it to the publication dates of his major works to give a clearer picture of the relationship between creation of literary writing and the income that is generated as a result of its publication. The aim is to better understand how writers without pre-existing financial support generated literary work in relation to personal income, and whether the initial investment of time and energy into a poet’s craft can be undertaken without financial support in societies with high levels of income inequality.

Natasha Tiniacos

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.

Free and open to all. Please register here to attend.
Click here to learn about all 20 of the 2024 L&F Fellows and their archival research projects.
Click here to learn more and apply for the 2025 Lost & Found Archival Research Grants.

Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative Archival Research Grants were made possible by generous support from the Early Research Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center, and co-sponsored by The Office of the Provost, and with generous support from Engaging the Senses Foundation.