Get Your Hands on Poetry!

Following the well-attended pop-up exhibition in October, as part of the wider UCL Festival of the Arts, on Saturday there is a chance to see some different items from UCL’s collection of little magazines and alternative press publications. Slade Librarian Liz Lawes and Department of Information Studies PhD student Sara Wingate Gray have curated a selection of the concrete poetry, and Sara has also designed some bookmarks and an accompanying website, with support from a professional graphic designer.

From the event web-page:

Did you know that UCL Library holds over 12,000 small press poetry items?

As part of UCL Special Collections, the Poetry Store is a collection especially rich in visual, sound and concrete poetry: these forms of poetry are visually striking and innovative, questioning established forms and attitudes, all of which featured prominently in small press activity from the mid 60s onwards in Europe and America.

Come along to our hands-on exhibition to explore in more detail a specially-curated selection of these rare items, and learn more about their history from Liz Lawes (UCL Library Services), Anne Welsh and Sara Wingate Gray (UCL Department of Information Studies), who will help you explore these items on the day.

The Itinerant Poetry Library will also be opening for part of the afternoon and there is a wide range of other activities, all free, and almost all on a drop-in basis.

Day of DH: A Day in the Sterling Library

N.B. This is a reposting of part of my Day of DH blog.

So this is where I spent the bulk of the day. I’m working on a paper for the Researching the Reading Experience conference. I’ve been working through de la Mare’s essay collection Pleasures and Speculations (Faber, 1940) and examining copies of books remaining in his Working Library for evidence of reading. I’m starting to get a sense of his virtual library – books that we can infer he owned or had access to but which are not extant in the books designated his working collection.

Pleasures and Speculations is a useful case study, as it contains essays he reworked, all about books he loved, and far from finding copies of each work he mentions, coverage is patchy and either early (books dating from before the turn of the century) or late (books published 2-3 years before 1940 – i.e. the time period in which he would have been reworking the earlier versions of the essays).

One of the main purposes of my overall work on the de la Mare library is to test the limits to which we can push different bibliographic methods. In this paper I’m testing inferences around the virtual library to the max. Which is lots of fun … and something of which I hope de la Mare, who was a prolific book reviewer, would have approved.

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Image: the Sterling Library, home to Senate House Library’s Historic Collections Reading Room and its Palaeography and Book Studies Collections.

Serendipity, or, Why There’s No Such Thing as a Waste of Research Time

Today my main goal is to complete the marking of the Historical Bibliography essays submitted a week and a half ago, and I am rewarding myself (and keeping my focus) by breaking after every four essays and sorting through some of the extra research photos I took in Oxford a couple of years ago.

What do I mean by “extra” photos? Well, the purpose of the trip was to build up a swatch of handwriting samples from the de la Mare papers to compare with the writing in the annotations in the books at Senate House. I finished this with a couple of days to spare and instead of heading off into the summer sunshine like any normal person might, I took some photos of some of the pocket books in the archive. I didn’t need them for the handwriting sample, but I thought they might come in useful at some point later in my research.

Analysing de la Mare’s handwriting proved to be pretty dismal as far as dating is concerned. There’s a clear shift in the last couple of years of his life, and his teenage writing is very like his mother’s and becomes more distinct when he starts work at the oil company, but that leaves a span of around fifty years in which nothing changes so drastically that I would like to look at an annotation in one of his books and date it with any feeling of confidence beyond “not very old and not young either”.

So, in the end, the trip felt a little bit of a cul-de-sac. I proved a negative: that handwriting analysis was not going to be helpful to me. I learned a little bit more about that sort of analysis, and I got some good practice in the palaeography of de la Mare’s quite distinctive hand. Nothing more.

I assigned sorting through the “extra” photos to be my marking displacement and wake-up task. (It’s really important to refresh yourself regularly while marking, so that no student suffers impact from boredom with the process on the part of the marker).

Fast forward to this morning. And lo! Notes from one of the early notebooks about what he’s reading. The very thing I have on my seek and locate list for the summer, as described by Whistler:

At about this time too he began making exercise books on waste sheets of paper from the Oil Office. The first is in an alphabetical notebook for November 1892. (The Life of Walter de la Mare: Imagination of the Heart. Duckworth, 1993 (2003 imprint), p. 50)

I’ve not got images of them all, and I hope the years I don’t have are waiting for me in the boxes at the Bodleian, but it’s pretty exciting to find some of the very things I am seeking sitting on my own hard drive.

Thank goodness for the Bodley’s policy for researchers to take their own images. And thank goodness I didn’t go off in the sunshine once I’d finished my main research task. What was the focus then turned out to be not so important, while the marginal, the extra activity, could be really very useful indeed.

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Image: flicking through images on my hard drive