City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2019 The Shape of Knowledge: The Postwar American Poet's Library, with Diane di Prima and Charles Olson Mary Catherine Kinniburgh The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3029 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE SHAPE OF KNOWLEDGE: THE POSTWAR AMERICAN POET’S LIBRARY, WITH DIANE DI PRIMA AND CHARLES OLSON by MARY CATHERINE KINNIBURGH A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2019 © 2019 MARY CATHERINE KINNIBURGH All Rights Reserved All quotations, excerpts, and poems by others remain in their individual copyrights as per the terms of the estates. ii The Shape of Knowledge: The Postwar American Poet’s Library with Diane di Prima and Charles Olson by Mary Catherine Kinniburgh This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ____________________ __________________________________________ Date Ammiel Alcalay Chair of Examining Committee ____________________ __________________________________________ Date Eric Lott Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Ammiel Alcalay Matthew K. Gold Wayne Koestenbaum THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT The Shape of Knowledge: The Postwar American Poet’s Library with Diane di Prima and Charles Olson by Mary Catherine Kinniburgh ADVISOR: Ammiel Alcalay On the shelves of any collection of books, or what we might deem “a library,” is material evidence that generates multiple vectors of meaning. After D. F. McKenzie's “sociology of the text,” our ability to read books requires that we not just know their contents, but understand the networks in which they are built, distributed, interpreted, and used. In this capacity, books are a prime way of answering a political and epistemological question: how does knowledge take material form? And how is this process politically shaped at different points in time, by the types of knowledge that are privileged, siloed, distributed, or silenced? This dissertation asks this question through the eyes of two key knowledge-seeking poets in post-1945 American poetry: Diane di Prima and Charles Olson. Writing during the height of the Cold War, and later Vietnam, Olson and di Prima were intimately familiar with the restrictive approach applied to knowledge in the mid-twentieth century (the former investigated, the latter arrested, by the FBI). Since both of their poetic practices involved extensive historical research, covering Mayan glyphs, pre-Christian Western ritual, the history of America, and alchemy, Olson and di Prima understood the precarity of what knowledge takes material, discoverable form—if it ever does. Writing alongside Amiri Baraka, Muriel Rukeyser, Ed Sanders, and other poets in this era (whose Blues People, Willard Gibbs, and Investigative Poetry demonstrate intuitive research and recovery practices), Olson and di Prima make vivid the truth that building and keeping books is a political act. iv Not just the idea of knowledge—newly “disembodied” in Cold War America, thanks to models of information theory—but its specific material conditions are essential to Olson and di Prima. Both poets invested heavily in form as a key concept in their poetics: Olson, through the groundbreaking “Projective Verse,” and Diane di Prima, with her dedication to representing embodied experience with its mysteries undiminished. Both Olson and di Prima are prolific book collectors, and at times cataloguers, impromptu archivists, and assemblers of their own extensive libraries. Their devotion to knowledge-seeking as an embodied practice that happens in libraries, archives, museums, and cities—beyond the narrow realms of academic-meaning making that they both rejected—shows how poets, working outside of formal institutions, structured the very shape of knowledge as they collected it in post-1945 America. Among numerous archival documents and collections, two important non-institutional resources address these critical features of Olson and di Prima’s work. The first, the Maud/Olson Library in Gloucester, Massachusetts, contains a copy of every book Olson was ever thought to have read, collected by scholar Ralph Maud with annotated bookplates. The second is Diane di Prima’s “occult library,” a collection of books that dates back to the 1960s that she envisions as a specific act of archival preservation and as a working resource. Alongside the context of these libraries, di Prima’s understudied role as a printer and publisher, especially around the era of Revolutionary Letters in the 1960s and 1970s, offers greater insight into how di Prima in particular addresses the importance of securing knowledge in material form by taking matters into her own hands. Together, these objects of study offer a perspective on libraries, archives, and books that is fully articulated by poets—a key perspective against the larger backdrop of institutions, professional organizations, and dealers that now shape the world of special collections. By exploring these specific case studies—the Maud/Olson Library, Diane di Prima's occult library, and Diane di Prima’s work as a publisher in her work Revolutionary Letters—this dissertation v establishes three main arguments. Firstly, libraries that belong to poets are significant archival and conceptual units, which require specific institutional and scholarly approaches in order to be legible and indeed preserved. Secondly, that understanding these libraries as projects of how poets structure knowledge in postwar America offers us new insights into the question of the “postmodern,” or information overload from an archival perspective. And thirdly, that Diane di Prima's work warrants far more extensive critical study for her work at the intersection of multiple identities that make knowledge material: publisher, book collector, and indeed, alchemist. For the evidence of these claims, I turn now to the books themselves. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost: this project would not exist were it not for Diane di Prima, a poet, publisher, mother, and medium for poetry’s history. Both di Prima and her partner, Sheppard Powell, were generous in manifold ways—allowing me to work in their home and visit Diane, allowing me to examine their library, and memorably, teaching me the uses of protective crystals. My experience with Diane and Shep left me changed. Thank you both. The staff and steering committee of the Maud/Olson Library, especially Henry Ferrini, André Spears, Gregor Gibson, and Judith Nast, welcomed me frequently to the collection and shared their expertise freely. Gloucester now feels like a second home, made all the more special by the history of poets in the community. I send gratitude to Gerrit Lansing, a generous and kind friend, who passed in early 2018. Few things have proven more important in shaping my work than Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, which is responsible for connecting me with the libraries I research in this dissertation and for apprenticing me in the world of archives, publishing, and living literature. Lost & Found underwrote four research fellowships for me to visit the Maud/Olson Library in Gloucester, Massachusetts, as well as Diane di Prima’s home in San Francisco, California. Working with Kendra Sullivan, Sampson Starkweather, Stephon Lawrence, and the team of the Center for the Humanities is a true pleasure. Likewise, Lost & Found connected me with Kate Tarlow Morgan, an indispensable editor and mentor. My love to fellow editor and di Prima scholar, Iris Cushing—our research on the beach at Solstice, in backyards with nasturtiums, and driving around Willits in a loaner pickup truck made this process inimitable. My thanks also to the Early Research Initiative, who provided a Knickerbocker Award in American Studies to visit California and di Prima. Likewise, gratitude to Graduate Center Digital vii Initiatives for their support of my early research with a Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant, and to Matthew K. Gold for his mentorship and faith in my work. Thank you to Wayne Koestenbaum, for his willingness to go alchemical with me on the second exams and then join for the dissertation. My gratitude also to Miriam Nichols, who attended my annual meeting and dissertation defense, and offered invaluable suggestions on the manuscript. And thank you to my colleagues and friends at the New York Public Library, including William P. Kelly and Declan D. Kiely, as well as Isaac Gewirtz. I learned from each of you, among the Dickens and Thackeray of the Berg Collection where I worked during the composition of this dissertation. My respect and gratitude to the librarians, archivists, booksellers, and staff who made my research possible at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, at the University of North Carolina Chapel-Hill, and at the New York Public Library. Enormous thanks to the tireless staff at the Graduate Center Library, especially the Interlibrary Loan Team, who retrieved countless items for me at a speed that seemed to warp the universe. Thanks to Steven Clay of Granary Books and to Elaine Katzenberger, of City Lights Books, for generosity of information and conversation. Cosmically, this was made possible by Ammiel Alcalay, founding editor of Lost & Found and advisor of this dissertation. I can’t thank you enough for what you gave me as a person in this work. I am fortunate beyond comprehension to be your student; it’s a role I plan to occupy for this lifetime and the next. Gratitude to my sister, Virginia Kinniburgh, who paved roads of intellectual discovery and friendship. Thanks to the friends, who listened and read.