At Dispatches, we will be revealing, near future, a poetry hoax that has been circulating for many years, unchallenged, as an authentic work of poetry. It was published by one of the world's most prestigious presses, which to this day presents the work as perfectly authentic and venerable, and no one, apparently, has noticed otherwise.

The editors of this leading press are either unaware of the hoax, or they have purposely peddled the work as Real for a very long time, now. If the latter scenario is the case, some assumptions and past indignant stances may need to be reevaluated and tweaked in certain poetry-police circles.

I'm more of book person than a ms. person. So I was very impressed a number of years ago (10 now probably) when it was reported that 2 and a half tractor-trailer loads of poetry books (including many rare and first editions) were delivered to the Emory Library...courtesy of Raymond Danowski:

https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/danowskipoetrylibrary/danowski-biography/

I'm glad such places exist. I hope people in a hundred years still care about books. I imagine if I rolled up to my local library with just small panel van filled with poetry books, they'd probably turn me away. Not interested, they'd say...we're reducing shelf space and expanding our digital media lab.

I tried to get into the Emory Library poetry and ms. collection last fall when on a biz trip to Atlanta. But after making my way to top of the library, I was met with signs that it was closed for renovation and improvement. The guard who checked me in at library's door didn't seem to know that the top floors were closed off for renovations. Maybe next time I'll be luckier.

Finnegan

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Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2016 18:38:19 -0400
From: Pierre Joris <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Have any of you prepared for posthumous recognition?

Quote found on Emory U library (Heany & Rushdie papers among many others):

"Early to the Feast : The Archival Education of Undergraduates: I would guess that 99 percent of undergraduates in U.S., U.K., and European universities never darken the doors of their special collections library. Indeed, if they even know the location of such uninviting rooms, they may look upon them from the outside as alien inner sanctums inhabited by a strange cadre of dour graduate students and cadaverous old professors—a view inimitably universalized for them by Yeats: “All shuffle there; all cough in ink; / All wear the carpet with their shoes.” “

As news of Emory’s acquisition of the Salman Rushdie archive spread, the Director of Emory’s Special Collections received the following note of congratulations from Seamus Heaney, another writer whose papers are also in Emory’s Manuscript, Archives & Rare Book Library: “When John Keats compared a stack of books to a garnering of ‘the full ripened grain,’ he could have been thinking of Emory’s Manuscript, Archives & Rare Book Library. This is one of the world’s most important word-hoards, and the acquisition of Salman Rushdie’s papers—the gleanings of yet another ‘teeming brain’—is further cause for rejoicing in the work being done here and the work that will be done by scholars and writers in the future.”