The University of Arizona Poetry Center is among the nation’s finest and most extensive collections of contemporary poetry. It is the largest such collection which is "open shelf."

History of the Collection and the Center

The University of Arizona Poetry Center was founded in 1960 by Ruth Stephan as a place "to maintain and cherish the spirit of poetry." The Poetry Center's mission is to promote poetic literacy and sustain, enrich and advance a diverse literary culture. Now an internationally renowned poetry library, the Poetry Center sponsors numerous programs, including readings, lectures, classes and workshops, writing residencies, writers-in-the-schools, writers-in-the-prisons, contests, exhibitions and online resources, including standards-based poetry curricula.

An area of special emphasis within the College of Humanities, the Poetry Center is open and fully accessible to the public. In Fall 2007, the Poetry Center moved into a landmark building named for Tucson arts patron Dr. Helen S. Schaefer. The Poetry Center's new building, designed by Line and Space, LLC, makes the Center's entire collection of contemporary poetry fully accessible for the first time in decades. The 17000 square feet (1,579.4 m²) facility also provides beautifully designed meeting and gathering spaces for the Center's extensive literary programs and activities.

Ruth Stephan and the Early History of the Poetry Center

Ruth Walgreen Stephan (1910–1974) was a writer and philanthropist who began visiting Tucson in the 1950s. She grew up in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, the daughter of Charles Rudolph Walgreen

Charles Rudolph Walgreen

Charles Rudolph Walgreen was an American businessman who founded Walgreens.-Background:He was born in Galesburg Knox County, Illinois, the son of Swedish emigrants. When his father, Carl Magnus Olofsson, came to America from Sweden, the family name was changed to Walgreen...

 (the founder of the national drug store chain Walgreens

Walgreens

Walgreen Co. , doing business as Walgreens , is the largest drugstore chain in the United States of America. As of August 31st, the company operates 8,210 locations across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Founded in Chicago, Illinois in 1901, and has since expanded...

) and attended Northwestern University

Northwestern University

Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

. Her first notable publication, a poem titled "Identity," appeared in Harper's Magazine

Harper's Magazine

Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...

 in 1937. Her work soon began appearing in other leading magazines, such as Poetry

Poetry (magazine)

Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...

and Forum. In the 1940s and 1950s she wrote both poetry and novels (The Flight and My Crown, My Love) and with her husband, the artist John Stephan, published an influential international quarterly of art and literature called The Tiger's Eye. After spending a year in Peru, she compiled and translated the first English-language collection of Quechua

Quechua languages

Quechua is a Native South American language family and dialect cluster spoken primarily in the Andes of South America, derived from an original common ancestor language, Proto-Quechua. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of probably...

 songs and tales. She also produced a series of records, The Spoken Anthology of American Literature, for international audiences. She lived in Japan for a while and made a documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 on Zen Buddhism

Zen

Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán , which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state."Zen...

.

In 1954 Ruth Stephan began spending winters in Tucson, staying in a cottage near the University of Arizona

University of Arizona

The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...

 campus. In 1960, she presented the property to the University. If the Poetry Center's initial home was modest, its founder's vision was not. She wanted to create a welcoming place and a distinguished collection that could encourage students, faculty and community members "to encounter poetry without intermediaries."

In 1960 Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...

 arrived in Tucson by train to read at the dedication of the new Poetry Center on November 17. Ruth Stephan presided at the dedication with Arizona Congressman Stewart Udall

Stewart Udall

Stewart Lee Udall was an American politician. After serving three terms as a congressman from Arizona, he served as Secretary of the Interior from 1961 to 1969, under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B...

 and University President Richard Harvill. During this historic visit, Congressman Udall asked Frost to consider reading a poem at John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy

John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....

's upcoming Presidential inauguration.

For decades after her initial gift, Ruth Stephan made additional donations of land, stocks, cash and books to the Center. In 1963 the University of Arizona awarded Ruth Stephan an honorary PhD for "high achievement as a poet, novelist, translator and editor with an international reputation and as a sponsor and patron of imaginative literature." She served as an active member of the Center's Advisory Board until shortly before her passing in 1974.

The Library Collection

Ruth Stephan seeded The Poetry Center's collection with a gift of several hundred books. Her collection focused on contemporary poetry in English and also included translations of great poets from around the world. In her "Notes on Establishing and Maintaining a Poetry Collection," Stephan wrote:

The collection should consist of poetry, of biographies and bibliographies of poets, volumes of poets' letters and of prose and plays by poets. There should be no books of criticism or essays on poetry unless these books were written by poets: for example Francis Thompson

Francis Thompson

Francis Thompson was an English poet and ascetic. After attending college, he moved to London to become a writer, but in menial work, became addicted to opium, and was a street vagrant for years. A married couple read his poetry and rescued him, publishing his first book, Poems in 1893...

's exquisite piece on Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...

, and T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

's essays. Occasionally poets have written novels, as did William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

, and these should be included for a rounded understanding of a poet."

Ms. Stephan's founding collection of books includes works by Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...

, Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen was an American poet and novelist. Though he denied any direct connection, Patchen's work and ideas regarding the role of artists paralleled those of the Dadaists, the Beats, and Surrealists...

, Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Jasspon Kunitz was an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000.-Biography:...

, W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...

, John Berryman

John Berryman

John Allyn Berryman was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry...

, Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet, playwright and feminist. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and was known for her activism and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work...

 and others, most of which are editions published in the 1940s and 1950s. Also included are a number of volumes of Asian and French poetry

French poetry

French poetry is a category of French literature. It may include Francophone poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France.-French prosody and poetics:...

 as well as classic works.

Intending the collection to have national and international significance, Ms. Stephan regularly shopped for books for the Poetry Center on her journeys, and she urged the staff to acquire materials demonstrating the widest possible range of poetry, from its known beginnings in chants and song to contemporary experiments. According to Poetry Center annual reports, the collection grew by 100 volumes during the 1962-1963 academic year

Academic term

An academic term is a division of an academic year, the time during which a school, college or university holds classes. These divisions may be called terms...

 and had reached 900 volumes by Spring 1963. By 1975 the total number of volumes had increased to 4,060 and there was "a large collection of poetry periodicals and poetry recordings."

The library collection, supported by an acquisitions endowment provided by Ms. Stephan and her mother Myrtle Walgreen in the mid-1970s, has grown to include over 65,000 items. These works include 36,500 books of poetry, 300 broadsides, 3000 photographs, and 1500 recordings, many of which record the Poetry Center's Reading Series

Reading series

A reading series is a recurring public literary event featuring writers reading from their work to a live audience. Some reading series are curated, some have themes, and some also feature music or other multimedia collaborations. Others simply focus on the act of listening to the written word,...

 (founded in 1962). The Poetry Center's catalog is accessible through Worldcat (OCLC). The collection is non-circulating.

Highlights of the Library Collection

The Ruth Stephan and Myrtle Walgreen Collection includes, on a representative level, the work of most poets writing in English in the 20th and 21st centuries. Poets from earlier centuries and translations into English are represented on a more selective level. Stephan's original vision for the collection has been maintained, with the addition of some acquisitions of critical works by major critics (e.g., Bloom

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

, Vendler

Helen Vendler

Helen Hennessy Vendler is a leading American critic of poetry.-Life and career:Vendler has written books on Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, and Seamus Heaney. She has been a professor of English at Harvard University since 1984; between 1981 and 1984 she taught...

, and Perloff

Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...

).

Audio-Video Collection
The Poetry Center is currently digitizing its collection of pre-1999 audio recordings of readings that took place under the auspices of the Poetry Center beginning in the early 1960s. Many of these audio recordings (and video recordings made since 2000) are currently available on listening/viewing stations in the library. A significant portion of the audio-video collection will be made available through the Internet in the fall of 2010. The Poetry Center also holds a large number of commercially produced recordings, including the Lannan Literary Videos, Visions and Voices series, and recordings from the San Francisco State Poetry Archive.

Rare Book Room
The Rare Book Room safeguards the treasures of the collection in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment, preserving them for future generations of researchers and readers. Limited-edition works, books which are central to the poetry tradition, and artist-made books and collaborative book projects are included. In this archive, scholars will find materials only available in a few libraries around the world.

Children's Corner
The Poetry Center's children's collection includes hundreds of volumes of poetry for young people, as well as an assortment of curricular and pedagogical materials for use in teaching poetry to children, including the Poetry Center's own publication VERSE! Poetry for Young Children. Activities for children, school groups, and community organizations and families are regularly presented in this area.

Exhibitions
The Jeremy Ingalls Gallery in the reception area of the Poetry Center features permanent and regular special exhibitions highlighting work from the collection and the Rare Book Room. The Wall of Poets features a selection of black-and-white photographs of writers who have visited the Poetry Center since 1960. This photographic tradition, started by the Poetry Center's first director, LaVerne Harrell Clark, continues to this day.

Readings, lectures, and symposia

Beginning in 1962 with readings by Stanley Kunitz and Kenneth Rexroth, the Poetry Center has presented over 1000 writers, including most major U.S. poets of this era, significant international visitors, and emerging writers. Lectures by visiting and local writers and scholars are held throughout the year. Symposia with visiting and local writers focused on a wide variety of literary topics are also presented. A complete list of readings is available on the Poetry Center's web site.

Residencies and the Tradition of the Poet's Cottage

Part of the Poetry Center's first home was a small house reserved for poets and writers visiting Tucson. The residence, or "Poet's Cottage," has always been a part of the Center's special character. The Fieries and Snuffies wrought-iron

Wrought iron

thumb|The [[Eiffel tower]] is constructed from [[puddle iron]], a form of wrought ironWrought iron is an iron alloy with a very low carbon...

 legend displayed over the door refers to the creative process. Ruth Stephan wrote that poets and writers "work in fiery bursts of creativity and snuff out most of the results with an eraser." In 1993, the Poetry Center inaugurated a residency program to offer emerging poets and prose writers a month-long opportunity to develop work and enjoy access to the Center's archives. The residencies are awarded through a national juried competition, with full details available at the Poetry Center's web site. The residence in the new Poetry Center building carries on the tradition of the Poet's Cottage by providing a secluded studio apartment

Apartment

An apartment or flat is a self-contained housing unit that occupies only part of a building...

 and private garden patio within the complex.

Poetry Center Educational Programs

The Poetry Center administers a diverse range of programs and educational activities that create poetic literacy and cultivate a wide literary readership.

Adult Programs
Throughout the year, the Poetry Center offers non-credit creative writing

Creative writing

Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...

 workshops as well as classes and seminars on poetry and prose. Shop Talk discussion groups

Internet forum

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...

 offer mini-lectures on featured poets, followed by a conversation on the poet's work. The Closer Look Book Club provides an opportunity for in-depth conversation about prose literature. The Poetry Center also provides support to the Arizona State Prison Creative Writing Workshops founded by University of Arizona Regents' Professor Richard Shelton and supported by a grant from the Lannan Foundation. Inmates attend weekly workshops, write, edit and submit work to a dedicated journal, The Walking Rain Review, which is available at the Poetry Center.

Pre-K to 12 Programs
The Poetry Center offers a monthly Poetry Joeys activity program for children aged 4–10 and their families. It also sponsors a K-5 writers-in-the-schools program in collaboration with the UA Creative Writing Program and offers online poetry resources and lesson plans for teachers of all grade level

Grade level

Often, people are educated through a series of educational stages, such as primary school and university. They vary around the world, and not every person will attend the same stages...

s. High school outreach includes a statewide Bilingual Corrido Contest and Southern Arizona

Southern Arizona

Southern Arizona is a region of the United States comprising the southernmost portion of the State of Arizona. It sometimes goes by the name Baja Arizona, which means "Lower Arizona" in Spanish.- Geography :...

 support of the National Poetry Out Loud

Poetry Out Loud

The Poetry Out Loud: Recitation Contest was created in 2006 by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Poetry Foundation. The contest was created to increase awareness in the art of performing poetry, with substantial cash prizes being awarded to schools that participated as well as...

 Competition.

Contests
The Poetry Center sponsors a number of annual contests to benefit and reward writers. In addition to the Corrido Contest, the Center sponsors the Mary Ann Campau Memorial Fellowship for local poets, a national emerging writer's residency, and writing contests for University of Arizona graduate and undergraduate students.

The Humanities Seminars Program

The Poetry Center and the University of Arizona Humanities Seminars Program formed a partnership to provide a permanent home for the Seminars within the new Poetry Center. Founded by Dorothy Rubel in 1984 to satisfy the intellectual needs of the growing adult population of Southern Arizona, the Humanities Seminars Program offers non-credit courses led by University faculty throughout the year.

Location

The University of Arizona Poetry Center is located at 1508 E. Helen St. in Tucson, Arizona

Tucson, Arizona

Tucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States. The city is located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The 2010 United States Census puts the city's population at 520,116 with a metropolitan area population at 1,020,200...

, 85721. More information on the University of Arizona Poetry Center and its programs may be found at the Center's web site, by phone at 520-626-3765, or by email at poetry@poetrycenter.Arizona.edu.