The Evolution of the University of Arizona Poetry Center

The University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tuscon is on the cusp of its 60th anniversary, writes Ann Brown for the Arizona Daily Star, and the organization has undergone quite the evolution. More:

“When you walk into the Poetry Center, you are in the presence of more than 5 million poems,” says Alain-Philippe Durand, dean of the UA College of Humanities. “That’s a profound experience that isn’t possible in the same way anywhere else.”

The Poetry Center has one of largest collections of contemporary poetry in North America. Its collection contains more than 50,000 volumes of poetry as well as chapbooks, journals and periodicals, and 5,000 photographs.

The reading series launched in 1962 with Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), who won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and was the U.S. poet laureate in 1974 and again in 2000. The center has hosted and recorded major U.S. poets ever since.

You can listen and watch those readings through Voca, voca.arizona.edu, the center’s audio-visual archive. It houses over 1,000 recordings of poets reading their work, says Sarah Kortemeier, who oversees the Poetry Center Library. Readings between 1963 and 1999 are audio; readings after 2000 are video.

In the early years, visiting writers could stay in the Poet’s Cottage, one of the original little houses.…