Into my seventh decade as a published author/editor/critic. Books and little magazines and manuscripts and photographs and ephemera on the 3rd floor have been building up, containing multitudes. It feels like forever that I’ve been talking to friends and family about “de-accessioning” to special collections libraries and museums around the country. Easier said than done…
…but now — this harbinger spring morning — three boxes of research material from Legends of the Plumed Serpent: Biography of a Mexican God went out to the Museo de las Americas in Denver.
Eight more boxes jammed with Yucatan field notes, Zonas Archaeologicas and anthropological treatises in Spanish and English for the Museo will follow; then I will move on to the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives at the Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati; they are taking four boxes of editorially marked-up drafts, pasted-up pages, art work and 1920s pamphlets on “The Jewish Question” saved from my labors on Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass-Production of Hate. When they move into their new home in Times Square in January 2026, The Martha Graham School will be gifted hundreds of books I drew from during fifteen years’ writing Martha Graham – When Dance Became Modern. Decades of American poetry, first editions, small press publications, diverse periodicals containing my translations, poems and criticism — as well as my correspondence with James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions Publishing Company during the ’70s when my colleague Steve Meyers and I were at work on the descriptive catalogue of the WIlliam Carlos WIlliams archive at SUNY/Buffalo — will be headed to the Special Collections Library at Wake Forest University. (That’s going to take many carloads of visits to the UPS Store.) And I’m anticipating that a varied and exotic gathering of monographs, exhibition catalogs, taped interviews, and vintage photographs amassed during the creation of Man Ray – American Artist will add several linear feet to the International Dada Archive in the University of Iowa Library.
Driving home after dropping off the first shipment, I was overtaken by nostalgia swirling with regret and hope.
I walk past gaps in my shelves; I miss thousands of oft-leaved pages of inscrutable (at times, insightful) marginalia.
Nevertheless, I am consoled, imagining students and scholars of the future re-envisioning the past.