In the 1950s, Yale University Press published a number of Gertrude Stein’s posthumous works, among them her incomparable Stanzas in Meditation. Since that time, scholars have discovered that Stein’s poem exists in several versions: a manuscript that Stein wrote and two typescripts that her partner Alice B. Toklas prepared. Toklas’ work on the second typescript changed the poem when, enraged upon detecting in it references to a former lover, she not only adjusted the typescript but insisted that Stein make revisions in the original manuscript.

This edition of Stanzas in Meditation is the first to confront the complicated story of its composition and revision. Through meticulous archival work, the editors present a reliable reading text of Stein’s original manuscript, as well as an appendix with the textual variants among the poem’s several versions. This record of Stein’s multi-layered revisions enables readers to engage more fully with the author’s radically experimental poem and also to detect the literary impact of Stein’s relationship with Toklas. The editors’ preface and poet Joan Retallack’s introduction offer insight into the complexities of reading Stein’s poetry and the innovative modes of reading that her works require and generate.

Students and admirers of Stein will welcome this illuminating new contribution to Stein’s oeuvre.

Order from Yale UP: Stanzas in Meditation

Colson Whitehead, Reading
Monday, February 6, time 4:30pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: louise.bernard@yale.edu

Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels The Intuitionist (1999), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; John Henry Days (2001), which won the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), which won the PEN/Oakland award; Sag Harbor (2009), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner; and, most recently, Zone One (2011), a zombie novel set in Manhattan. He has also written a book of essays about his hometown, The Colossus of New York (2003), and his reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Grantland.com. A recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, Whitehead lives in Brooklyn, and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton.

Image: William Shakespeare, Shake-Speares Sonnets,London: G. Eld for T.T., 1609, (Eliz 194).

This exhibition is part of Shakespeare at Yale, a multi-venued celebration for the spring of 2012 that will display the extraordinary resources that exist at the University for the study and enjoyment of Shakespeare. For more information, visit: Shakespeare at Yale.

H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, written between 1952 and 1955 and published posthumously in 1961, is a major work of a modernist poet at the height of her powers. Yet critical attention to it has been relatively sparse, most likely due to the puzzling effect created by the dynamic combination of poetry and prose. Conventional readings of this poem have either ignored the prose segments altogether or interpreted them through psychoanalytic, feminist and postmodernist perspectives. But an important letter H.D. wrote to Norman Holmes Pearson on the 3rd of February, 1955 reveals that she decided to include the prose segments after she had visited a nearby recording studio where she had made the spontaneous decision to give brief introductions to the poems. The letter furthermore indicates that she envisioned her own translation of Euripides’ Ion to be a model for crafting the prose interludes—and indeed Euripidean drama and its criticism turns out to offer crucial perspectives for understanding how they function. This essay seeks, therefore, to problematize conventional readings of this poem and offer new considerations of its hybrid textuality by situating it within the contexts of Euripidean drama and twentieth century theories of orality. When read in this light, Helen in Egypt reveals itself to be a reflection of its compositional process both structurally and at the level of its narrative, thereby constituting a unique example of a reflexive modernist text that fuses poetry and prose as well as oral and textual consciousness.

Susan Barbour, “The Origins of the Prose Captions in H. D.’s Helen in Egypt”, Review of English Studies, 2011 (advanced access published November 18, 2011).”

H. D.’s letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, 3rd of February, 1955, appears in the Norman Holmes Pearson Papers (ZA Pearson); related collections and resources include the H. D. Papers (YCAL MSS 24) and Image Guide and the Bryher Papers (GEN MSS 97) and Image Guide.

Image:  H. D in Egypt

Gertrude Stein wanted Ida to be known in two ways: as a novel about a woman in the age of celebrity culture and as a text with its own story to tell. With the publication of this workshop edition of Ida, we have the novel exactly as it was published in 1941, and we also have the full record of its creation. Logan Esdale offers informative critical commentary and judiciously selected archival materials to illuminate Stein’s experience of authorship from the novel’s beginning in early summer 1937, through the various drafts and negotiations with her publisher, to the reviews that greeted the book’s publication. Stein’s careful and systematic preservation of all Ida-related materials for her archive at the Yale University Library was a conscious decision, and an invitation for us to study the complexity of her creative process.

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was born in Allegheny, PA, of German-Jewish immigrants. She moved to Paris in 1903 and lived in France for the rest of her life. She published Ida: A Novel in 1941, eight years after she became famous for her best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Logan Esdale teaches at California State University, Long Beach.

Beinecke Collections: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers Finding Aid (YCAL MSS 76); Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers Image Guide

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has acquired the papers of American writer, poet, naturalist, and activist Terry Tempest Williams.

The author of more than a dozen books including The Secret Language of Snow (1984), Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991), Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape (1995), Leap (2000), and Finding Beauty in a Broken World (2008), Williams calls attention to the relationship between our natural environment and social justice. A fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has testified before Congress on women’s health, committed acts of civil disobedience to protest nuclear testing in Nevada, and served on the boards of The Wilderness Society, the Nature Conservancy’s Utah Chapter, the advisory board of the National Parks and Conservation Association, and on the President’s Council for Sustainable Development. She has collaborated with artists and photographers such as Mary Franks, Emmet Gowin, Richard Misrach, Meridel Rubenstein, and Debra Bloomfield. Her essays on ecological and social issues have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion, and The Progressive. In 2006, The Wilderness Society presented William’s with its Robert Marshall Award, the highest honor the society bestows.

Ms. Williams, whose ancestors were among the earliest Mormon pioneers to settle the valley of the Great Salt Lake, grew up in Utah. She graduated from the University of Utah in 1978 with a degree in English and a minor in biology. She taught on the Navajo reservation at Montezuma Creek, a settlement of fewer than 500 in the southeast corner of Utah, and earned a master’s degree in Environmental Education in 1984. From 1986 through 1996 she worked as curator of education and naturalist in residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History. Ms. Williams, who was recently a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah.

“For more than a quarter of a century,” observes George Miles, William Robertson Coe Curator of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, “Terry Tempest Williams has written lyrically about life and the landscape of her Utah home. She has joined with artists, writers, and scientists to increase our appreciation of the wonder and fragility of the world we inhabit and to make us more aware of how the damage we cause that world rebounds to harm us individually and to diminish our society. Her diaries, journals and drafts reveal the extraordinary originality of her creative process while her correspondence with colleagues from around the county illuminates the concerns and efforts of a generation of American environmental activists.”

Ms. Williams’ papers, which comprise 204 boxes, arrived in New Haven this summer. The library’s archivists are organizing the papers and preparing a guide to them, after which they will be opened for consultation.
Questions about the Williams’ papers may be directed to George Miles, Curator of Western Americana, at George.Miles@yale.edu or to Nancy Kuhl, Curator of American Literature for Poetry, at Nancy.Kuhl@yale.edu.

Photo: Terry Tempest Williams

Publication Studio comes to the Elm City to redefine the social life of the book.

A One-week Residency in the Coop Center for Creativity
November 14 – 19, 2011

Publication Studio, founded in Portland, Oregon in 2009, is an experiment in sustainable publication that has branched into six independent sibling studios around North America. They print and bind on demand, creating original books quickly with writers and artists they admire. They attend to the social life of the book, cultivating a public that cares and
is engaged.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

POP-UP SHOP
196 College Street, New Haven, CT
Hours: 11:00 – 6:00 MTWTF (NOV 14-18); 12-5 SAT (NOV 19)

Demonstrations (open to the public)(refreshments served)
MONDAY, NOV 14 5:00 – 6:00
TUESDAY, NOV 15 5:00 – 6:00
WEDNESDAY, NOV 16 5:00 – 6:00
THURSDAY, NOV 17 1:00 – 2:00
FRIDAY, NOV 18 12:00 – 1:00

Rebinding Party
SATURDAY, NOV 19 12:00 – 5:00
“Five Buck Book Binding Blow-Out”!
Bring in your old, falling-apart paperbacks
or a book whose cover doesn’t suit you,
and get it rebound into a sturdy manila
bound edition. $5/rebind.

PUBLIC LECTURES
Matthew Stadler, founder of Publication Studio
“The Ends of the Book: Authors, Readers, Public Spaces”
Thursday, November 17, 4:00 – 5:30.
Location: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
121 Wall Street, New Haven, CT
Free and open to the public

Diana Balmori, internationally renowned landscape and
urban designer, speaking at the launch of Publication
Studio’s facsimile edition of her Moleskin Diaries.
Friday, November 18: 6:00 – 7:30
Location: 196 College Street, New Haven, CT
Free and open to the public.
Seating is limited, so please arrive early.

Co-sponsored by ArtSpace New Haven and
the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
in conjunction with the ArtSpace exhibition
“Library Science”.

He had his home, posthumous, in the town of New Haven,
In a white building, behind walls
Of translucent marble like turtle shell
—Czesław Miłosz, from “Beinecke Library.” Provinces. New York: Ecco Press, 1991.

The life of Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), Polish poet, novelist, diplomat, and Nobel Laureate, spanned a time of political upheavals and social turmoil. He lived in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, in the Paris of exiled literati, and in the United States, perched atop the Berkeley hills with a view of San Francisco Bay. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library celebrates the centennial of Czesław Miłosz, renowned author of Bells in Winter, Captive Mind and Native Realm, with an exhibition drawn from the library’s holdings. The manuscripts, documents, and photographs on display reveal lesser-known aspects of Miłosz’s multifaceted relationship with America, with his adopted home in California, with fellow émigré authors, and with the English language.

Related Conference: Milosz and America

Dan Beachy Quick, Poetry Reading
Thursday, November 3rd, 4:00 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of poetry collections including North True South Bright (2003), Mulberry (2006), Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist for poetry, This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009), and Circle’s Apprentice (2011). He is the author of A Whaler’s Dictionary (2008), a response to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Beachy-Quick’s work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation. He has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Colorado State University.

For more information and examples of Dan Beachy-Quick’s work:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/dan-beachy-quick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Beachy-Quick