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.
The vibrant spirit of protest culture has seldom seemed more alive than it does today. But the legacy of that spirit, its place in historical and living memory...
Caitlin R. Woolsey is the Manton Post-doctoral Fellow in the Clark Art Institute’s Research and Academic Program. Her research revolves around the historical confluence of visual art, performance, and media in the twentieth century. Before joining the Clark, she assisted in curating an exhibition of experimental poetry at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in fall 2019.
I was aware of the Yiddish “renaissance” movement during the teens, ’20s and early ’30s, in avant garde literature (in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale); this included the Yung-Yidish (1918–1921), an avant-garde group in Łódź, Poland.
Rouwenhurst, on behalf of Yale’s Center for International Finance, actually purchased one of the oldest active bonds to date — a 1648 corporate Dutch water authority bond written on goatskin that was originally issued to raise money for the construction of a pier. Most of the oldest active perpetual bonds are from this very same Dutch water board, because this board has been in charge of maintaining all of the dams and levees and dikes in a given corner of the Netherlands for hundreds of years and is very stable. You don’t need a record of ownership to keep the bond active, but the catch is that the bearer of the bond needs to travel to the water board’s registrar’s office to have it notated, meaning the staff at Yale needs to travel all the way to Holland to maintain it.
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.”
