Brain Waves
Richard Wilbur, Mark Strand, W.D. Snodgrass and Other Poets to Gather at Woodruff Library for Celebration of Poetry

Some of the country’s finest poets, including two former U.S. poet laureates, gather at Emory April 2-4, 2008, for “A Fine Excess: A Three-Day Celebration of Poetry.”

Dana Gioia, poet and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts,
will open the celebration, which will include poetry readings by the distinguished American poets Richard Wilbur, Mark Strand and W.D.

Snodgrass. The three-day program will include readings by 10 additional poets, including readings by the 2005 and 2006 winners of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, Morri Creech and Erica Dawson. The Hecht Prize, named for the late Pulitzer prize-winner, is awarded each year to recognize the best first or second collection of poems.

“It was John Keats who wrote that poetry should please by a fine excess, a message that Emory has taken to heart in organizing this rich program,” says Steve Enniss, Director of Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Enniss is co-organizer of the program with Philip Hoy publisher of the Waywiser Press.

In addition to more than 10 readings over the three days, the celebration will also include interviews with Richard Wilbur, Mark Strand and W.D. Snodgrass, and two exhibitions that highlight Emory University’s extensive poetry collections.

“Democratic Vistas: Exploring the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library” is curated by Kevin Young, Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, and draws on the 75,000-volume Danowski collection of English language poetry, donated to Emory in 2003. This exhibition, accompanied by a published catalog, includes rare editions of some of the 20th century’s most important works of poetry, ranging literally from A-Z, from W.H. Auden to Louis Zukofsky.

A companion exhibition curated by Jennifer Brady, “Visions and Revisions: An Exhibition of Poems in Process,” traces the creative process through 16 sets of manuscript drafts, including the worksheets of Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath and Natasha Trethewey.

Poets participating in the celebration include: Morri Creech, Erica Dawson, Jeff Harrison, Joseph Harrison, J.D. McClatchy, Eric McHenry, Mary Jo Salter, W. D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, Deborah Warren, Clive Watkins, Richard Wilbur and Greg Williamson.

“A Fine Excess” is sponsored by the Emory Libraries; The Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; Emory’s Creativity and the Arts Initiative; Emory's Creative Writing Program, Humanities Council, and English Department; with additional support from The Waywiser Press; and the National Endowment for the Arts. For more information or to register to attend, visit the Fine Excess website.

Library Joins Pilot Organizational Climate and Diversity Assessment Survey

The staff of the Emory University Libraries will soon be part of a select group of ten research libraries selected to participate in a pilot focused on assessing our organizational climate and diversity. Called ClimateQUAL (not to be confused with the university-wide climate assessment of a few years ago or with LibQUAL), the pilot is being launched by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in partnership with the University of Maryland Libraries.

In addition, it nicely builds on what we have already learned about ourselves from prior surveys such as the university climate survey. For the General Libraries, it is an important follow up to the internal organizational assessment conducted in Summer 2005. The survey comes at a time when all of Emory's libraries are learning to work together in new ways in order to implement the libraries’ strategic plan and improve work environments and enhance customer service models.

The Organizational Development Group within the General Libraries, comprised of Susan Bailey, Melanie Bunn, Eric Bymaster, Susan Klopper, Frances Maloy and Linda Nodine, as well as the University Librarians Council, helped worked out the details of the process for the Emory libraries.

The libraries’ participation will help shape the development of a useful assessment instrument for research libraries. A major outcome of ClimateQUAL participation is the development of a large database of norms to help libraries benchmark and interpret their results. Especially helpful will be the opportunity to share experiences and interventions and build a set of resources to improve the effectiveness of participating libraries.

The online survey will conducted during a three week period beginning March 10th. Survey responses are anonymous and will be received by servers at the University of Maryland. An informative podcast about the survey project taped by Dr. Hanges, one of the faculty members who developed the survey, appears at http://www.lib.umd.edu/ocda. Additional information will be provided in upcoming staff information sessions.

This is an exciting opportunity for us to continue our growth as an organization and to establish benchmarks against which we can measure our own improvement and how we compare to our peers.

Southern Spaces Publishes New Pieces

Photo: Postcard from Ponce De Leon Amusement Park, Atlanta, Ga., circa 1910.

Southern Spaces, the interdisciplinary online, peer-reviewed journal managed out of the Woodruff Library, has recently published the three new pieces that may be of particular interest to library staff. Southern Spaces explores the real and imagined places of the American South and their connections with the wider world in areas such as geography, southern studies, regional studies, African American, Native and American Studies, women's studies, LGBTQ studies and public health.

This essay explores Ponce de Leon Park, a popular turn-of-the-last-century amusement park two miles east of Atlanta, through postcards, photographs, video and historical analysis. Now long gone, the park once served as a gathering place for weekend picnics, concerts, performances and rides, and served as a microcosm for an emerging modern southern city with evolving social relations. The electric lights and mechanized rides on display at Ponce de Leon Park offered Georgians a playful glimpse of new technology, which developed in step with the growing metropolitan area that surrounded it. While Atlanta’s first baseball stadium eventually rose on the site of the park, this essay explores transportation, technology and social interactions at Ponce de Leon Park from 1870-1920 — a period of electrification, modernization and the rise of Jim Crow.

This film documents an abandoned greenhouse, built around 1919, that was once part of the Georgia Mental Health Institute (GMHI), and is now part of Emory’s Briarcliff campus. GMHI operated between the years 1965 and 1998 in Atlanta. Filmed and edited by Robert W. Woodruff Library fellow Matt Miller.

An excerpt from a short film produced by the Community Ideas Stations in partnership with the University of Virginia in 2005, “Rising Up” shows challenges to segregated spaces in 1960 Richmond, Va.