LETTERS
Poetry in the stacks

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Richard Mertens's account of the Poetry magazine archives (August/01) brought back rich memories. During my first year in the Graduate Library School I had a part-time job in Special Collections, then under the benign direction of Bob Rosenthal, to catalog the manuscripts in that archive.

Except for the Pound papers, organized in a long series of boxes along one wall of the closed stacks, all the documents that had been deposited up to that time (1955) were in my charge to sort, read, date, and put in order. I still recall the thrill of picking up the slim Eliot file and finding the manuscript of "Prufrock"! Some themes came up again and again in the letters-appreciative comments from authors on the way their poems looked on the printed page (which has made me forever skeptical of the computer printout as a valid substitute for a book), pleas to publish their latest submissions soon so they could pay their bills, debates over grammar and capitalization (e.g. an exchange on that point between Harriet Monroe and e. e. cummings), and so many outpourings about their private and professional lives. I will be first in line to buy a copy of Dear Editor and hope that Messrs. Parisi and Young are at work on a second volume.

Joan O. Falconer, AM'57
Iowa City, Iowa

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