About the event
Watch the video recording for this event here:
Join us for an evening of imaginative bibliography as we both touch and discuss library collections that focus on communities and poetry—including one in particular, the Maud/Olson Library, traveling from Gloucester, Massachusetts to New York City for the first time. This event will include a hands-on exhibition of books, punctuated by short talks and discussion on how the Maud/Olson Library is developing an ongoing model for preserving and animating a legacy library, associated with poet Charles Olson and scholar Ralph Maud.
The Maud/Olson Library is part scholarly achievement and part conceptual art project: it contains copies of all the books Charles Olson was ever thought to have read, based on Maud’s scholarship, as well as Maud’s handwritten replications of Olson’s own annotations. The exhibition will reflect the variety of subjects contained within—from indigenous history to mimeograph magazines, with rare and ephemeral volumes alongside pulp. We welcome scholars of New American poetry, librarians and archivists, poets, community organizers, historians of place, and anyone intrigued to join and participate. Together, we will explore how legacy and author-specific libraries can become not just vectors back to their creators, but sites for new experimentation and discovery. Attendees will receive a limited edition broadside, drawn by poet Ed Sanders to commemorate the occasion.
Organized by Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, with Ammiel Alcalay, Ann Charters, André Spears, and members of the Steering Committee of the Maud/Olson Library including John Faulise, Gregor Gibson, Paul Cultrera, Henry Ferrini, and Barbara Gale.
For more information on the Maud/Olson Library’s Steering Committee and Staff, please see their website here.
This event is sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, the Gloucester Writers Center, the Galen Gibson Fund, and Granary Books, Wendy's Subway, with thanks to the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
