Silliman's Blog

Ron, I remember as an undergraduate at UT in the 80s first encountering Joyce's Portrait of the Artist and Eliot's Waste Land while touring the shelves of the Undergraduate Library. The building stored all kinds of terrific British and American lit, with particular focus, it seems in recollection, on 18th c. through the Moderns.

So this year, as a returning student to PhD skool at UT, I too was surpised by the news you relate here. Truth is, however, the library has not been holding that many books now for many years, most of them being transferred to the other 14 or so libraries on campus. In addition, for years the Undergrad Library has housed the Student Writing Center, a computer lab, and other valuable resources for undergrads. I think the intent behind the decision to rename the building the Flawn Academic Center and to move out the books is to better serve the needs of students. Being back in school myself I'm surprised by how electronic things have become. Anyway, it's about resources and putting students in touch with them rather than some kind of anti-book thing.

For what it's worth,
Dale
 

don't worry. i believe they are just talking about the library we used to call "the ugly" (undergraduate library). it's a smallish one and used mostly for reference and student org meetings, really. too noisy for my tastes and with more carrels than books in the first place. there're several more libraries on the gigantic campus, including the real library, the perry casteneda, just a few blocks away.
 

My first significant poetry revelations in a library were at the Stanislaus County Free Library in Modesto. It didn't have that big of a collection, but I did find the Beats there, as well as Paul Carroll's anthology The Young American Poets, which mixed poets like Mark Strand and Charles Simic with Ron Padgett and Clark Coolidge, and had full-page photos of each writer.

I'm trying to reconstruct in my memory how I heard that the Beats were worth checking out in the first place, and I can come up with three original sources of info, the order of which is uncertain to me: my schoolmate David Darroch, who--I think--recommended On the Road, Naked Lunch, and possibly Howl; I found Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind at a yard sale for 25 cents; and, perhaps most ur-formatively, I recall sporadic references and allusions to various works and authors in the pages of late-seventies Creem magazine.

For about a decade after my first library epiphanies, I poked directionlessly through a miasma of tepid workshop verse and a few of the more widely available representatives of the New American line-up (Ashbery, mainly). Then, in 1988, when I was a re-entry undergrad, I had my second big shelf-discovery in the McHenry Library at UC Santa Cruz: In the American Tree (also Douglas Messerli's Language anthology and a couple of New York School collections). Finding Tree was like finding a big bag of sticky greenbud. I recognized Coolidge from Carroll's anthology, and I think I had heard whispered rumors about writers like Lyn Hejinian and Michael Palmer, but it was largely new and paradigm-shifting to me.

I was enrolled in an intermediate poetry workshop at the time, and I'll never forget the look of disdain on the instructor's face and the tone of contempt in his voice when I submitted some work that was influenced by my reading the writing in Tree. His trenchant criticism: "You don't want to bother with that stuff." I got a more tolerant (if slightly bewildered) response a year or so later when I brought David Melnick's "Men in Aida" into my Ancient Greek Lyric seminar as an example of homophonic translation.

It would be another decade, practically, before the next major stage of my engagement with contemporary poetry. In the late nineties at Stanford, when I was finishing up my doctoral work in Renaissance lit, my officemate Michael Golston had his shelves full of Language poetry, Gertrude Stein, early Ashbery, and other exciting writing. Re-inspired by time spent flipping through these pages, I checked out the collection at Green Library, which was not so shabby: in addition to lots of single-author books and chapbooks by Language and some post-Language poets, there were complete or near-complete runs of magazines like This, Hills, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, etc. A couple of years earlier, I had been in Marjorie Perloff's lyric seminar, which had also been interesting, but somehow I had gone through that course without taking advantage of the full range of the library's holdings.

So yes, libraries are good.
 

I'll never forget how I got introduced to beat literature.
I used to buy records and sci-fi books when i was fifteen at a place in Wichita Falls Texas called the Cosmic Squire. It's still there. The owner Mack is an ex-saxophone player and genuine texas beatnik. (He used to wear a pin on his vest that said "Old beatniks don't die, they open up bookstores." One day I wandered into the literature section because I had bought Kenneth Patchen's Journal of Albion Moonlight the previous week upon reading about Jim Morrison's interest in this text in No One Gets out of Here Alive. I found a book called _The Beats_ by Seymour Krim. When I brought it to the checkout stand Mack said something like, Do you know how long that book's been sitting there? Years!
And then he gave it to me! From then on I started reading everything beat I could get and Mack even gave me things from his personal library to get me going.
I ended up with free copies of a first edition paperback of Naked Lunch and a nice hardback of Leroi Jones' System of Dante's hell..
Then came Ferling.'s Her etc etc etc.. Eventually I was able to return the favor giving him a mint copy of Bob Dylan's Tarantula (his main music interest)
Mack's still going strong
as far as I know.
I wrote beat/patchen inspired poetry and prose all through high-school,
but when I got into college and took a poetry course with Ex-Poet Laureate of Texas Jim Hoggard, he called my work solipsistic. To me though I felt this was a compliment. Eventually though I was published in the school poetry magazine. The poem is lost to me but it was called _The Motorcycles of Old Tangier_.. At any rate, in 93 I taught english (poor kids) in Tangier for 3 months and got to meet Hamri, Paul Bowle's first guide there. In Tangier at that time, Hamri was something of a cultural treasure, and had a card which would allow him free taxi rides. amazing.
I hung out with him at his studio
and even saw pictures of Bowles and Burroughs which have never been published. Burroughs in a Djellaba was one of them.

Books are definitely where its at,
whether its in bookshops or libraries. half the writing (such as it was) I did in college was in libraries.

hickalectically yours,
solipsis