As one last follow up on the Declaration of Independence, I’d like to give a hat-tip to our friends at Independence National Historical Park for their annual reading of the Declaration, which happens every July 8, the day the Declaration was first read publicly. It has become a bit of a collections department tradition to hike over to this event, and despite the heat a couple of us made it over today for the festivities.
When not listening to immortal words of Jefferson, I’ve spent much of the week hauling paint and painting walls in preparation for the upcoming Westward Ho! exhibit. Collections intern Dana Byrd has been a huge help with this; many thanks to our new painting queen. But there have also been a number of poetry related items that have crossed my path this week and they are more interesting than watching paint dry, so I figured I’d give them a shout-out.
Yesterday we had a celebration to mark the end of this year’s Words in Bloom project, a poetry collaboration with the Stiffel Senior Center in South Philadelphia. The project is taught by the
Rosenbach’s poet-in-residence, Nathalie Anderson, who works with seniors to explore different modes of poetry and help them develop their own poetry. Yesterday the group travelled to the Rosenbach to read selections from their poems and enjoy a small reception. It was a real pleasure to listen to them; I especially enjoyed a couple of poets who infused their work with humor. Nat Anderson also read her poem “Sweat,” which was quite appropriate, given the day. Congratulations to all and many thanks to Nat and all the folks here and at Stiffel who made this possible.
On a completely different note, last weekend I ran across an interesting review of a book entitled The Art of the Sonnet. The book focuses on the endurance and flexibility of the form into the twentieth century and beyond and the review devoted a chunk of space to Marianne Moore’s No Swan So Fine. All roads lead to Rosenbach…
Finally, I wanted to mention a new collections project we’re just starting, also focused on poetry. As anyone who has been to Friend or Faux knows, the Rosenbach has a number of 17th-century commonplace books, which were hand-written compilations of poetry assembled by educated literary types for their own pleasure. In the 1950s, Edwin Wolfe 2nd compiled a card index of the first lines of the poems in our commonplace books, along with books that the Rosenbach Company sold to other libraries. Fast forward 50 years and the Folger Shakespeare Library has created an online first line index at firstlines.folger.edu. They not only put in their own information from their own indices, but are encouraging other institutions to contribute their records to create one centralized and searchable database. We are just beginning the project of inputting our files, with the assistance of another great collections intern, Chelcie Rowell, and given that our index includes thousands of cards it will certainly take a while to complete, but it’s very exciting to be able to join in this collaborative endeavor. In the meantime, you can have fun checking out the holdings of other major libraries.