A story in this week’s Harvard Gazette covers a new exhibition at the Woodberry Poetry Room called PHONE-A-POEM: A Selection of Archival & Newly-Commissioned Answering Machine Poems. Started in 1976 by Cambridge poet Peter Payack, for 25 years Phone-a-Poem offered callers recorded poems from the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, or Donald Hall. Visitors [...]
Graphology is not necessarily a part of my job description. But, as the curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, I’ve had occasion to grow curious about the convergence of an author’s handwriting with the audio recordings in our collection. Sound archives offer a particularly compelling constellation of human tools and technology. In the case of [...]
One thinks of Houghton Library as a repository of the very old and the very special but it is also — in its association with Harvard Review — a publisher of the very new. For more than a decade, Houghton has been the home of Harvard’s only professional literary journal, publishing the likes of Seamus [...]
[Thanks to Christina Davis, Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, for contributing this post.] On the occasion of our 80th anniversary, the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University is proud to announce the creation of a new website that offers scholars and poetry-readers worldwide the opportunity to encounter rare and heretofore inaccessible recordings from its [...]
On October 12th, noted biographer Lyndall Gordon will speak at Houghton Library. Her talk, “‘Abyss has no biographer’: Can we risk the Abyss?” will focus on her recently published biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives like loaded guns: Emily Dickinson and her family’s feuds (2010). The book has stirred some controversy by proposing that the poet [...]
For the next two weeks, the Woodberry Poetry Room will be home to an art installation that celebrates the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Created by Adams House art tutor Zachary Sifuentes, “Fugitive Sparrows” literally offers a number of new ways of looking at Dickinson’s poems, including small placards placed in the yard below, viewable through [...]
