Literary Hub's 'Book Marks' Interviews University of Buffalo Poetry Collection Curator, Alison Fraser

Have you ever wondered who helps to curate the University of Buffalo's Poetry Collection? It's Alison Fraser, that's who! After earning her PhD at Buffalo, she moved on to coordinate the inner workings of the storied collection. In conversation with "Book Marks," Fraser explains that she decided to become a librarian after spending "three happy days in Buffalo in January (which is not something you hear often!)." Picking up there: 

On my last day, then-Curator Michael Basinski appeared from the stacks holding a manila envelope, sent to the Poetry Collection from Coolidge but not yet opened. He laid it on my table and announced, "Here you go, young researcher!" That was the moment I decided I wanted to become one of the curators of the Poetry Collection, which is the library of record for twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry in English. A few years later, I returned to Buffalo to do a PhD in Poetics and worked for several years as a student assistant in the collection, and now, eleven years after my first visit, I hold a curatorial position in the Poetry Collection. I feel lucky to work with one of the largest modern poetry libraries in the world and share its holdings with students, faculty, and the public.

The excitement and thrill I had when looking through the envelope of newly arrived materials from the poet I was studying is repeated every day as I work with our print and archival materials, which include the world’s largest and most comprehensive James Joyce Collection, and major collections of Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Duncan, and the Jargon Society, along with less well known but equally exciting collections like those of Hand and Flower Press, Jean Starr Untermeyer, and Helen Luster. Sharing our cultural heritage with students, faculty, and the community (local and international) is the most rewarding aspect of my job.

BM: What book do you find yourself recommending the most and why?

AF: I love recommending books from our Poetry Objects section because they are books you are unlikely to see anywhere else. Favorites include Tyrone Williams’s Trump L’oeil (Hostile Books, 2017), which is a crushed tissue box containing poems written in response to the 2016 presidential election; M. NorbeSe Philip’s The Book of Un with Undex (Container Press, 2018), which is made from a Rolodex transformed by materials found in Philip’s kitchen; and Karen Randall and Cole Swensen’s The Leyden Jar Project (Propolis Press, 2018), which is an acrylic box that holds twelve glass jars wrapped in copper and attached to a microprocessor: the book can only be read with the reader’s touch. Uniquely, The Leyden Jar Project comes with a wall plug-in cord and a solar panel to recharge the microprocessor. These book objects challenge the idea that the book can only be a codex, insist on new dimensions to physical books, and highlight the status of books as physical objects.

Read on at Literary Hub.