 The Library adds Gary Snyder to its stellar post-war poetry collection.
"I always meet my Bodhisattvas in the street," declares Japhy Ryder the mystical poet in Jack Kerouac’s Beat novel Dharma Bums. Kerouac based the character Ryder on the poet Gary Snyder, and now we can meet the works of Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet of the Beat Generation, and other Bodhisattvas at Geisel. Snyder’s letters have just been acquired by UC San Diego libraries, complementing a number of single-author collections in the UCSD Mandeville Special Collections Library. These include the papers of his colleagues Joanne Kyger, Lew Welch, Paul Blackburn, Clayton Eshleman, and Jerome Rothenberg (UC San Diego Emeritus professor of Literature and Visual Arts), and of Snyder’s publisher, Donald Allen.
“Our collection is known for its focus on the ‘New American’ poets, including the Black Mountain poets, the Objectivist Movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, the Language writers, and the Beat poets,” says Robert Melton, curator of the Archive for New Poetry. “We also hold the most comprehensive collections of the personal papers of about 30 of the nation’s most prominent poets, including those of George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Susan Howe, Jackson Mac Low, Lyn Hejinian, Paul Blackburn and James Schuyler.”
“The ANP supports intense research use by students, scholars and writers throughout the world,” says Michael Davidson, a professor of Literature at UC San Diego, who has played a significant role in building and shaping the ANP over the last decade. “The Archive has substantial holdings of literary manuscripts and correspondence, publishers’ and editors’ archives, broadsides, sound recordings, ‘little magazines,’ ephemeral printings, artists’ books, concrete poems, and serials, as well as monographs, anthologies, and works on criticism and interpretation,” says Davidson.
The ANP was established in 1968 by UC San Diego Literature Professor Roy Harvey Pearce, and now includes more than 35,000 volumes, 1,800 journals, 700 poetry broadsides and extensive manuscript holdings. It is widely recognized as the most outstanding and comprehensive collection of new and experimental American poetry on the West Coast and one of the top two collections of its kind in the nation.
From October through December, the UCSD Libraries will hold an exhibit to celebrate the centenary of Pulitzer-Prize winning poet George Oppen and his wife, writer Mary Oppen.
If you want to know more about the Archive for New Poetry go to: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/anp
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