LOST AND FOUND

My set just arrived--the Baraka/Dorn correspondence is worth the price of admission alone. Here's the scoop from Ammiel Alcalay:


Printed in elegant, stapled editions, the inaugural chapbook series of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative activates and puts into wider circulation important but little known texts drawn from personal and institutional archives.


An ongoing publication project emerging from archival and textual scholarship done by students, faculty and guest fellows at the Graduate Center, the primary focus of Lost & Found is on writers who fall under the rubric of the New American Poetry. Since enhanced accessibility to a broad spectrum of archival material helps create alternative, divergent and enriched versions of literary and cultural history, the Lost & Found initiative takes the “New American” rubric writ large, including the affiliated and unaffiliated, precursors and followers. The first set includes correspondence, essays, and journal selections:

Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: Selections from the Collected Letters 1959-1960, ed. Claudia Moreno Pisano, includes letters written between 1959 and 1960 and covers a wide-range of discussions, from quotidian observations of being snowbound without enough heat...to the hashing out of experiences, fears, and anxieties directly related to the socio-political culture of the early 1960s.

The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch & Frank O’Hara 1955-1956, Part I and II, ed. Josh Schneiderman, includes letters [...] written over an eighteen-month period from 1955 to 1956 [that] provide an account of the poets’ important, if often overlooked, friendship. Full of poems, literary gossip, and nods to artistic influences, Koch and O’Hara’s correspondence also chronicles a key moment in what would come to be known as the New York School of poets.

Darwin & The Writers, Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Stefania Heim, is an unpublished essay about Darwin (rejected by The Nation in 1959). The piece is an exercise in the discovery, collection, and exposition of “meeting-places” between scientific and literary imaginations, extending the intellectual work Rukeyser started in works like Willard Gibbs and The Life of Poetry.

1957-1977 Selections from the Journals Part I and II, Philip Whalen, ed. Brian Unger, is comprised of entries from Whalen’s Journals from two key periods in his life: the mid to late 1950s following the public recognition of the Beats, and the early 1970s, after his return from Japan and his decision to live in a Zen monastery.

The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference / Robert Creeley’s Contexts of Poetry, with Daphne Marlatt’s Journal Entries, ed. Ammiel Alcalay, is a Creeley lecture and conversation with Allen Ginsberg. Contexts of Poetry is from the landmark 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, with excerpts from the journals of the prominent Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt, chronicling her attendance as a student.

Together, the set marks an auspicious beginning to a project that brings the finest traditions of small press publication and textual scholarship to a broader reading public.

We are delighted to announce that the chapbooks are available at bookstores across the nation, from St. Marks Books to City Lights.
Books may be ordered online at http://www.centerforthehumanitiesgc.org/lostandfound where they are on sale for $10 per issue, $35 per set, and $25 per subscription. 

- KS