The collection of Modern European Books and Manuscripts consists of printed and archival material, photographs, artwork, audio-visual, ephemeral, and production material documenting the history, philosophy, literature, arts, and social movements of Continental Europe since 1800.
A ristotle, in his Poetics (ca. 330 B.C.), claimed that a poet’s function is not “to relate what has happened, but what may happen…” In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), William Wordsworth wrote that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…” And in the last line of his poem “Ars Poetica” (1926), Archibald MacLeish ventured, “A poem should not mean / But be.”
None of these famous descriptions, however, are a match for Beyond Words: Experimental Poetry and the Avant-Garde, currently on view at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which shows just how “experimental” poetry can be and leaves you considering just what makes a poem a poem.
I'd never been to a reading in the Beinecke before, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the four ambitiously long, semi-circular lines of chairs on the mezzanine were mostly full by the time I arrived at 4:55 p.m. Perhaps I walked into Jhave Johnston’s reading on Oct. 17 overly expecting to have the words to describe what I would see, knowing as I did that the reading/performance was part of the current Beinecke exhibition, Beyond Words: Experimental Poetry & the Avant-Garde
In one of his more affecting columns, Daoud writes of a trip to Yale’s Beinecke Library, where he finds a handwritten manuscript of The Myth of Sisyphus. Daoud pores over Camus’s scratched-out lines, noting that “the manuscript is the place where the book hasn’t erased its other possibilities.”
The Yale campus and the streets of New Haven will literally become a poem for a few hours on the afternoon of Friday, September 27. Spelled out in letters the...
