Poetry at Beinecke Library

Poetry collections, events, and news.

  • Windham-Campbell literary festival moves online with nine-episode salon

    September 14, 2021

    Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes have transformed their flagship fall literary festival into a virtual salon series showcasing the creativity of its 2021 recipients over the course of nine episodes streaming every Wednesday from Sept. 15 to Nov. 10. Each episode will highlight one of the eight prize recipients with the final episode featuring a keynote address by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo based on the theme “Why I Write.” One-time registration for all nine episodes is free and open to the public. The series will take its audience on an international literary tour of words, music, performance, and art.

  • Queer Shoulders at the Wheel (Boston Review)

    May 21, 2021

    A lot of Wieners’s later writing is lost: much was never published, and though his papers are spread across several university collections, from which the letters in Yours Presently are drawn, many later manuscripts were in all likelihood lost after his death. But we know that Wieners continued producing elusive, obscure, often waspishly humorous texts for his own pleasure and sometimes for that of others. Some of these late poems appeared in o·blēk, The East Village, and Big Bridge, and others were mailed to his younger friend and last devoted Occult School member Lansing, and are therefore deposited in Lansing’s archives at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. When Wieners died in 2002, at his side were his longtime supporters Shively and Jim Dunn.

  • Yale poets, experts weigh in on relationship between social media, poetry (Yale Daily News)

    May 7, 2021

    Nancy Kuhl, Beinecke Curator of Poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature, said that the publishing history of American poetry is rich and fascinating. Innovation made by American poets, such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickison, provided a “fertile ground” for later writers. “Social media platforms add a new layer — allowing poets to reach new audiences around the world and providing a virtual space for the development of dynamic new poetry communities,” Kuhl said.

  • ‘A Whole World’ is a new book of poet James Merrill’s letters (The Day)

    April 8, 2021

    The renowned Stonington poet and Pulitzer Prize winner James Merrill was incredibly prolific. Not only was his most famous poem, "The Changing Light at Sandover," 560 pages long — and written with the aid of his trusted Ouija board that still exists in the poet's former house in Stonington Borough — Merrill wrote hundreds of poems and was also a novelist, playwright, and essayist.

  • 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize Recipients!

    March 22, 2021

    The 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize recipients are: in nonfiction, Vivian Gornick (United States) and Kate Briggs (United Kingdom/Netherlands); in drama, Michael R. Jackson (United States) and Nathan Alan Davis (United States); in poetry, Canisia Lubrin (Canada/Saint Lucia) and Natalie Scenters-Zapico (United States); and in fiction, Renee Gladman (United States) and Dionne Brand (Canada/Trinidad and Tobago).

  • Nobel Laureate Louise Glück on Teaching and Poetry

    March 9, 2021

    President Peter Salovey and Professor Louise Glück discuss her discovery of poetry, the importance of mentorship, and her love of teaching. Their conversation is followed by a recording of Professor Glück’s reading of her poem “October.”

  • Road Show at Beinecke Library

    February 3, 2021

    In spring 2021, the Yale Collection of American Literature at Beinecke Library and the Public Humanities Program will collaborate to present a graduate workshop focused on the Library’s exhibition, Road Show: Travel Papers in American Literature.

  • Biography Symposium 2021

    February 1, 2021

    REGISTER Wednesday February 24th, 12-1pm Langdon Hammer & Terrance Hayes Zoom Webinar Registration Information: https://bit.ly/38V8xz1 Thursday February...