Today at Houghton Library, we celebrated the birthday of Emily Dickinson a day before her actual birthday of December 10th with an inspiring gathering of colleagues, scholars and students, faculty and friends. A feature-focus of the party was the serving of Dickinson’s own black cake made by Houghton staff from the manuscript recipe in our […]
January 31st marks the closing of the centenary of Thomas Merton’s birth. Merton is best known for his 1948 autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, which charted his trajectory from world citizen and aspiring literati to cloistered monk at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. In addition to writing prose and poetry related […]
The Emily Dickinson manuscripts are a cherished part of Houghton Library’s collections and while it is her poems and letters that are most often celebrated, we’ve lately been dwelling on the poet’s lesser known lines: “2 Butter. / 19 eggs. / 5 pounds Raisins.” Dickinson’s manuscript recipe for black cake, from which these lines come, was sent […]
Reel Writing: Poems and prose off and on the tape reel, brought to you by Houghton Library and the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University, is a podcast series by Virginia Rose Marshall. Virginia is a recent graduate of Harvard University and one of the 2015 recipients of the Houghton Library Undergraduate Fellowship. Three episodes […]
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The Beats continue their expansion onto Houghton’s shelves by means of Santo Domingo Collection accessioning; Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) is the most recent author to attain fuller representation in our catalog. Ginsberg books in the collection range from the slightest volume […]
“It is/ A sound like any other. It will end,” writes Wallace Stevens in “It Must Change,” a sequence whose audible existence (at least as rendered in the poet’s voice) had until this Fall to a certain extent ceased. The lacquer microgroove disc of “It Must Change,” recorded 60 years ago this month, on October […]
“You can go backwards as well as forwards.” –Seamus Heaney When I first began the task of creating metadata for our recently-digitized Seamus Heaney recordings (part of the Woodberry Poetry Room’s initiative to digitize its entire collection of rare and at-risk Heaney cassettes), I anticipated a fairly straightforward trajectory. I’d sit down, don the headphones, […]
It’s been a great year for the Houghton Blog, which attracted more than 35,000 unique visitors during 2013. Let’s take a look back at our ten most popular posts on the year. 10. Reading Ira Aldridge. On the great 19th century African-American actor and expatriate. 9. What’s New: A Digital Harmony. Announcing the digitization […]
Finding aids for seven newly cataloged collections, and a preliminary box list for one recent acquisition, have been added to the OASIS database this month, including a scrapbook of Theodore Roosevelt’s time at Harvard, a collection of playbills for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the recordings of the Phone-A-Poem project. Processed by Michael W. Austin: Christophe […]
A story in this week’s Harvard Gazette covers a new exhibition at the Woodberry Poetry Room called PHONE-A-POEM: A Selection of Archival & Newly-Commissioned Answering Machine Poems. Started in 1976 by Cambridge poet Peter Payack, for 25 years Phone-a-Poem offered callers recorded poems from the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, or Donald Hall. Visitors […]
