Wild Intelligence: Poets’ Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America

by M. C. Kinniburgh, University of Massachusetts Press, 2022, 224 pp. 
Hardcover, $90.00; Paperback, $28.95 
ISBN: 9781625346568 

Wild Intelligence: Poets’ Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America is a fascinating study at the intersection of library science and literary studies, or more precisely bibliography and poetics. Kinniburgh elaborates these two central terms with examples drawn from case studies of poets’ interactions with collections of books and other texts, asking “What if we looked to poets for our history of libraries and information management in the twentieth century?” (6). It is an audacious question, especially given the ephemerality and incomplete documentation of many of these collections, the difficulty of fitting them into institutional schemas and official histories, and what Kinniburgh calls their “indeterminate relationship to academic research” (8); this difficulty is part of the book’s subject. The libraries documented here are not necessarily tied to institutions or physical collections, nor even to any single person’s home collection or lifetime of reading. Some represent speculative reconstruction after the poet’s death, and all depend on the context of communities and networks in which books, poems, letters, and conversation circulated.  

Kinniburgh explores concepts from two scholarly fields, but her approach is grounded in the specificity of four twentieth-century American poets’ careers and libraries. Beginning with the assumption that gathered texts “made meaning among each other, through their placement in the house or by extension, the poet’s life, and relationship to the poet’s idea of what it meant to collect knowledge and information,” Kinniburgh seeks “an alternative history of information management” that can account for a range of serious, non-academic culture work whose anti-disciplinary gusto or “wild intelligence” she sees as a response to a Cold War narrowing and stiffening of official scholarly fields (x). With this orientation towards open-ended meaning making, Kinniburgh’s primary method is attentive and systematic description, allowing the materials and their circumstances to speak for themselves. In particular, the final chapter on Gerrit Lansing’s home library is both a theoretical defense and a practical demonstration of a descriptive method that tries to preserve the complex, messy, and ambiguous reality of such collections without forcing them to serve predetermined concepts and schemas, whether bibliographic or poetic.  

The book’s four chapters address the libraries of four significant twentieth century U.S. poets born between 1910 and 1934—Charles Olson, Audre Lorde, Diane di Prima, and Lansing—whose lives and poetics intersect in significant ways. Lorde is likely the best known today, as a Black feminist theorist as well as a poet, but Olson was a galvanizing figure in mid-twentieth-century poetry whose poetry and scholarship had a huge influence on the “New American Poetry” of the 1950s and 1960s. Lorde and di Prima were high school classmates and remained close as adults, with di Prima publishing Lorde’s first book and Lorde helping to deliver one of di Prima’s children. Both di Prima and Lansing corresponded closely with Olson in the 1960s, and later with one another; both shared a lifelong scholarly interest in occult traditions. All four had wide-ranging intellectual interests that informed their poetry and their other work—including teaching, publishing, critical and theoretical writing, bookselling, social activism,  and in Lorde’s case, librarianship. These poets’ interests did not fit neatly into academic disciplines or established scholarly practices and required them to seek and preserve information from diverse sources, ranging from scholarly publications to mimeographed newsletters, photocopied manuscripts, and cassette recordings. 

Each chapter describes a collection and sketches one poet’s personal relationship to, and shaping of, a heterogenous and heterodox body of knowledge. The first traces Olson scholar Ralph Maud’s decades-long project, the “Olson/Maud Library,” which began as a bibliography of everything Olson was known to have read but grew into a massive collection of actual books. The chapter on Lorde looks at her relationship with libraries (and information more broadly) over the course of her life, including childhood experiences with libraries and professional work as a librarian between 1955 and 1968. Lorde’s personal library was destroyed by a hurricane, and its loss—its absence from Lorde’s final years, and its absence from the book as an object of study—is highlighted in contrast to the much more fully documented (if not actually preserved) libraries of the other poets. The third chapter focuses on the “occult library” that di Prima collected over several decades and stored in her garage, reflecting her long engagement with the global history of magic and spiritual traditions, as a poet but also as a teacher in both academic and non-academic contexts, and as a highly informed contemporary practitioner.  

The fourth chapter, on Gerrit Lansing’s library, is the only one that attempts to comprehend and describe a poet’s entire home library. This is a complicated task for several reasons that help to illuminate Kinniburgh’s overall method and interests. Like all the collections studied, Lansing’s was in continuous flux during his life. It grew and changed according to his activities as a poet, researcher, and bookseller, and it was never organized according to institutionally legible categories. At the time of his death, several booksellers who had known Lansing spent weeks documenting and sorting his library. Lansing’s books were kept throughout his large house, and Kinniburgh uses the rooms of the house to organize her detailed description of the library. This chapter is rich with lists—of authors, titles, publishers, and topics—that give a sense of Lansing’s working life among books and of the relationships he saw, across continents and centuries, among workers in literature, the arts, and the occult. The chapter also provides a firsthand account of a library’s afterlife and the attenuated forms in which it can be said to survive the poet’s death. Lansing was well known and influential in multiple areas of English-language poetry over half a century, but ignored by academic institutions and major publishers. His collection and archive have obvious research value and contain rare and unique items, but there was no immediate way of placing them with an institution. 

Wild Intelligence is unique in the way it bridges two separate scholarly areas. Each chapter is simultaneously an intervention in literary history and in library and information science. The whole book demonstrates the possibility of a scholarly practice in which bibliography and poetics are parallel and inseparable, in the same way that, for the four poets studied, practices of research and reading were inseparable from practices of writing—or, for that matter, from lifelong involvement with esoteric magic, queer love, revolutionary politics, and non-institutional teaching. 

Sam Lohmann, Washington State University Vancouver