Poor Yorick Journal

Photography: Narcissism and Realism

by Kevin Hudson – In March of 1839, Samuel F. B. Morse was in Paris attempting to secure a patent on his new electric telegraph. During his stay, he met with Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, an inventor who had worked under Nicéphore Niépce, the father of photography. Morse invited Daguerre to a demonstration of his telegraph, and Daguerre showed Morse images produced from his copper plates. Daguerre had discovered how, using mercury and salts, to develop and fix an image that had been produced with very little exposure time. The day after witnessing the results of this groundbreaking process, Morse wrote a letter to his brother claiming that “no painting or engraving ever approached it.”1 The French government bought the technology from Daguerre with a 6,000 franc annuity. With this arrangement, on August 19, 1839, the French government offered the newly developed technology to the world. The news spread quickly. On September 30, the New York Herald published a detailed, six-step process of the “new art.”2 Within a year, self-taught photographers were taking pictures of the pyramids in Egypt and the Parthenon in Athens.3 Light was a much more precise artist, if one knew how to capture it. There is a direct connection between […]

Posted: May 14th, 2017 ˑ 2 Comments
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Earth Day

In 1975, when I was ten years old, my parents drove my three older brothers and me down to Sandusky, Ohio, to Cedar Point Amusement Park. We lived just north of Detroit, and Sandusky was only an hour south as the crow flies. Lake Erie borders that corner between Michigan and Ohio, so we had to drive two and a half hours to bend around the huge lake. I remember driving down I-75, the mid-August humidity filling our station wagon like a bag of wet cement. There was no escaping the heat; air conditioning was not standard in those days, neither were seat belts. I was the youngest, so I sat in the way-back of our Ford LTD station wagon. From there, I stared at the great lake, which emerged into view shortly after traveling through downtown Detroit. Growing up in Michigan, I thought all lakes were giants. Lake Erie is the smallest of the Great Lakes, and yet it stayed in view for the entire last hour of our drive to Sandusky. Our family made the trip to Cedar Point every summer. We went there to ride the roller coasters, especially the Blue Streak, which was the fastest wooden […]

Posted: April 19th, 2017 ˑ No Comments
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Why Marjorie? by Laura B. Hayden

The roundabout road that led me to start digging deep at the Woody Guthrie Archives began well over forty years before the site opened…

Posted: February 14th, 2017 ˑ No Comments
Filled under: Featured, Uncategorized

Interview: Kathryn Hujda, Assistant Curator

A Q&A by Melissa Gordon Kathryn Hudja is an assistant curator for the Performing Arts Archives and Upper Midwest Literary Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections. MG: I am so curious about the John Berryman papers! Are you able to share an approximate number of people who visit this archive yearly? Are there any immediate plans to make his papers available online? KH: Berryman’s archives are perhaps one of our most well-used collections. Manuscripts, drafts, correspondence, teaching notes, photographs, and books from Berryman’s personal library became part of the Upper Midwest Literary Archives not long after the poet’s death. In the past year, we had approximately twenty different researchers use the collection. About half of those researchers had questions answered via email, while the other half visited the archives in person, sometimes for weeks at a time. Unfortunately, there are no immediate plans to digitize the entire collection, mainly due to barriers to digitization such as permissions, time, and resources. MG: In a conversation I had with you previously, you mentioned archives being a great place for initial discovery. I have recalled [your words] many times when thinking about archival research. Can you expand on […]

Posted: February 14th, 2017 ˑ No Comments
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Digitization in Archives: An Interview with Kathryn Hujda

Kathryn Hujda is an assistant curator at the Performing Arts Archives and Upper Midwest Literary Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections. This is the second part of a two-part interview. Click here to read part one. MG: What is a special collection? KH: Special collections contain materials that are unique or rare, and, therefore, subject to specialized storage and security measures. Unlike the books in a circulating library, materials in a special collections library can’t be checked out or loaned like ordinary library books. Instead, they must be accessed in person and/or under staff supervision. These stricter policies are put in place because the objects in archives or special collections are irreplaceable. Typical formats include manuscripts and drafts, correspondence, diaries, still images, moving images, rare books or books with marginalia, and other ephemera. MG: Once an archive is established for a particular person, institution, etc., are materials added to the collection? KH: Yes! And more often than one might suspect! It’s not uncommon for writers (or their families) to discover letters squirreled away in odd places or boxes forgotten about in the basement, months or years after a collection is initially established. Some donors prefer […]

Posted: February 14th, 2017 ˑ No Comments
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Mrs. Tinkham’s Cabin by Joanie DiMartino

A captain’s wife struggles with seasickness.

Posted: February 14th, 2017 ˑ No Comments
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Museum Spotlight: Mark Twain House and Museum

Poor Yorick is excited to share the news of its partnership with the Mark Twain House and Museum, located in Hartford, Connecticut. Designed by New York architect Edward Tuckerman Potter, the house was home to Samuel Clemens–also known as Mark Twain–his wife Olivia (Livy), and their three children, Susy, Clara, and Jean. During the seventeen years that the Clemenses lived in the home, Mark Twain created some of his most famous works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). According to Mark Twain, Hartford was one of the most beautiful cities he had ever seen, so it only made sense to build his home and raise his family there. The house, which is a national historic landmark, and its surrounding property are spacious and breathtaking. Adorned with a large, wraparound porch and a verdant conservatory filled with exotic plants, this 25-room brick red house was everything the Clemenses wanted. Many of the Clemenses’ original belongings still reside in the house today. Items such as Mark Twain’s billiard table and the dining room silverware, engraved with Livy’s maiden name Langdon, live on to tell the story of the family. But […]

Posted: January 18th, 2017 ˑ No Comments
Filled under: Museum Spotlight

Rediscovered Stories: Mrs. Tinkham and Her Sister Sailors

By Beth D. Man “Why am I sad? Oh! lonely ever / Mourn I all afar from me / The foreign land is fair, but never / like my pleasant home can be.”1 This lonely verse is part of a poem titled “A Song of Home,” by Sarah Tabor. She wrote it on board the Alice Frazier, a whaling ship, in 1841.2 The mid-nineteenth century was a time of opposing realities for men and women. For men, it was a time of exploration and freedom. For women, it was a time of constraint and obliteration. Perhaps, nowhere else was this dichotomy more prevalent than in the lives of husbands and wives involved in the whaling industry. Whaling was a man’s world, a world of glory and achievement. There was nothing glorious about whaling for women. They were not allowed on board as part of the crew and certainly not as a captain. Excepting extreme emergencies or rare instances of disguised gender, women on whaling ships only participated in subservient roles: prostitute, captain’s wife, or captain’s daughter. Daughters were not permitted to be participate in the running of the ship once they reached teenage years, and captains’ wives needed their husbands’ […]

Posted: December 13th, 2016 ˑ No Comments
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Angelus Novus

Holly Iglesias’s ekphrastic poem about Angelus Novus: “To ease the pain, he frees the Klee caged in his mind…”

Posted: November 3rd, 2016 ˑ No Comments
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Bob Dylan and Horace Purdy: Two Writers Who Teach Us about History

In 1961, after moving from Minnesota to New York City, a singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan was looking for a deeper perspective on America’s past. He found it at the archives of the New York Public Library. In one of the rooms on its upper floors, Dylan read through 100-year-old newspapers on microfilm. His interest was the Civil War. Dylan wanted a sense of the daily life and culture of the period. In his memoir Chronicles, Dylan states he wasn’t looking for issues but was “intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times.” In studying those times, he found the “full complexity of human nature” but still wondered how “such people united by geography and religion can become bitter enemies.” Dylan wrote, “Back then, America was put on the cross, sacrificed and resurrected,” and “there was nothing synthetic about it.” By “resurrected,” Dylan did not mean cleansed. One only has to look at the news today to see that America is still divided on many levels. Dylan reveals that the complexity of those times would serve as the “all-encompassing template for everything [he] would write.”1 Dylan does not say whether he looked at any other contemporary sources, like letters or […]

Posted: September 20th, 2016 ˑ No Comments
Filled under: Poor Yorick Blog