Dear Andrew Browne,
It was certainly not my intention to suggest that I thought Irish
poets were to blame for selling their papers to the highest bidder ...
if I gave that impression then I ought to bite my tongue!
In fact recently, in an exchange of e-mails with Gabriel Rosenstock I
suggested that Gabriel himself ought to threaten the NLI that he will
GIVE his papers to Emory if the NLI doesn't make a decent offer for
them! I support the poets, not the institutions (who have been
foolish in the extreme).
The NLI on its web-site brags about all the manuscript literary work
they have collected ... difficult to believe when we know where most
of the literary collections of recent and older times have gone!
Further, for several years the NLI on-line catalogue could not even
display any page containing a "fada"! It was difficult to believe
such technical incompetence coming from a NATIONAL Library. (That
problem has been rectified lately, but nevertheless!)
However, despite the current interest of American institutions in
Irish literary collections, I see one terrible problem for the future
... as I will explain.
The largest Irish archive in the U.S. is The Celtic Collection at the
University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Recently I had to
drive several hundred miles to get there so I could look up the
citation information for one footnote in a book I am working on. I
had the date of a quotation from an issue of An t-Ultach in 1978. I
needed the Volume Number, Issue Number, and page number of the
quotation. Unfortunately no one on the staff of this Celtic
Collection knows even one word of Irish, so I had to go and check it
myself. A rather expensive trip for less than five-minutes of work!
St. Thomas has thousands of treasures in its Collection, but finding
those treasures can be very difficult. They ignore all diacritics
when cataloguing. And they have not added the "h" as they ignore some
of the older diacritics in older books. The search-system itself
directs that you NOT use the word "the"; however, since none of the
staff know any Irish they have catalogued the word "An" not knowing
that it is "the"! The result is a total jumble of confusion, and
wasted time.
Another huge Celtic Collection is at St. Francis Xavier University in
the province of Nova Scotia, Canada. There too the staff do not know
any Gaelic, with predictable confusions.
In Ireland, we might expect some continuity of heritage and culture.
But what about Atlanta, Georgia? The site of Emory? There isn't and
there never was an Irish or Irish-American population-base in Atlanta.
And, for better or for worse, the United States is following its own
social and political and cultural evolution.
With the passage of time, as well as social and economic shifts, will
Irish poetry collections be trashed by people who don't really
understand what they are or why they are keeping them?
Finally, Andrew, I would be pleased to chat with you about Thomas
Kinsella, back-channel or front-channel, as you please. I am very
happy that someone is doing a thesis on him!
Best regards,
Séamas Cain
http://alazanto.org/seamascain
http://seamascain.writernetwork.com
http://www.mnartists.org/Seamas_Cain
_______________________
On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 9:27 AM, Andrew Browne <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Most Irish poet's papers are held in the US. Boston College and Texas have
> huge holdings. It's a shame that the Irish universities, amidst our recent
> economic success, did not secure more of them for our own researchers.
> Instead we have a huge steel spike on O'Connell Street to remind us of the
> heroin problem amongst our economically displaced. Can't really blame the
> poets for selling to the highest bidder; it's not like their poetry sales
> provided them with huge salaries. Most, like Kinsella, spent a good part
> of their lives teaching in the US (Temple and Illinois).
>
> I'm in the final stages of a PhD thesis on Kinsella. Would love to chat to
> you more back-channel if your interested.
>
> Andrew
>
> --
> Andrew Browne, AA(Pen. Coll.), BA(DCU), MPhil(DU)
> IRCHSS Government of Ireland Research Scholar
> Department of English
> National University of Ireland, Galway
>
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