The following is a guest post by Shea’la Finch, Managing Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. The project publishes chapbooks of “genre-bending works by important 20th century writers” that have been unearthed and edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center. The complete series is also available at the library.

Archives: whether they are personal or institutional, housed in basements or climate-controlled environments, located in Albuquerque or Algeria, they are the resources we mine for the materials at the core of every Lost & Found chapbook. With focus on figures central to New American Poetry and their ever-expanding universe of affiliates, these rediscovered texts—correspondence, lectures, manuscripts, manifestos—are accompanied by new essays, annotations, and other contextualizing materials written by our editors. Founded by Professor Ammiel Alcalay and based at the Center for the Humanities, Lost & Found is edited by students and fellows at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry: 1945 – 1960 serves as a starting-point to understanding the foot-print of New American Poetry. Published in 1960, it offers a survey of the post-World War II vanguard poets. These poets are commonly associated with Black Mountain College, San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, the Beats—or elude any affiliations at all. Their friendships and migrations leave trails that build into constellations of genre-defying texts and influences. To approach researching the sometimes splintered and dizzying archives of these poets, Lost & Found editors adhere to one guiding principal: Follow the person. The person will reveal their own authentic path and their communities, often while dismantling previously held assumptions along the way.

In our most recent series, editor Zohra Saed followed Langston Hughes to the Soviet Union where he veered off from the “official” trip to meet with author and journalist Arthur Koestler before venturing together on an extended journey through the newly formed republics of Central Asia. Saed’s research brought her to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her chapbook, Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan, made available previously unpublished materials drawn from Hughes’ notebooks, photographs, and collaborative Uzbeck translation projects.

In the same series, editor Kai Krienke followed Algerian revolutionary and poet Jean Senac from Algeria to Paris and back again. Krienke’s research extended from the Jean Senac Archives in the National Library of Algiers and Alcazar Library of Marseille, to the personal archives of Senac’s friends and family. The resulting chapbook, Jean Senac: The Sun Under the Weapons, included excerpts from a pre-war correspondence with Mohammed Dib, a manifesto written during the height of the Algerian war, and notes from a meeting of young poets 10 years after the revolution.

In just five years of publication, Lost & Found editors have researched in over 50 archives in the U.S. and abroad, with seasoned editors often returning to mentor new ones. Just recently, Megan Paslawski, editor of Michael Rumaker: Selected Letters, accompanied a group of new editors to the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center in Storrs, CT to begin surveying materials for potential publication. As Paslawski once wrote in an article for American Book Review, “Lost & Found replaces a territorial anxiety about rare books and the establishment of definitive literary interpretations with the greater possibilities provided by restoring unseen and unacknowledged texts to the public.”