Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Eclectic is the word for this week's edition of Saturday Sharing, which features links to the Alexander Graham Bell papers at the Library of Congress, a vast collection of poetry holdings at the University of Buffalo, a place online to make anonymous apologies, and the trailer to a wonderful documentary about Russian avant-garde art secreted from the KGB.

✦ Contemporary poetry of the American South is the focus of The Southern Poetry Anthology, a multi-volume print series of the work of emerging and established poets, published by Texas Review Press. The project, which may comprise as many as 16 volumes by the time it's completed, will feature work by poets in all the southern states, plus the "border" states of Texas, Florida, Kentucky, and Arkansas and the "sub-regions" of the Appalachian South and the Gulf Coast. Volumes already have been issued for South Carolina, Mississippi, and Contemporary Appalachia. Forthcoming are volumes for Louisiana (2011), Georgia (2012), and Tennessee (2012). An interview with series editor William Wright is here. (My thanks to NewPages for the heads up.)

✦ The Library of Congress has digitized the notebooks of Alexander Graham Bell. Part of the LOC's "American Treasures" collections, the notebooks are among approximately 130,000 items and documents donated by Bell's heirs in 1975. Included are his lab notebooks documenting his experiments in text and sketches. The online version of the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, 1862-1939 offers a selection of more than 4,600 items, from correspondence, blueprints, scientific notebooks, and articles to photographs. Included are pages describing Bell's first successful experiment with the telephone and a design sketch and model of Bell's telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell, Design Sketch of Telephone, ca. 1876

For more information about the image, go here.

Library of Congress on FaceBook

✦ Ondrea and Stephen Levine have created on their Website a public but anonymous "Apology Page" to which anyone may contribute a reflection that anyone may read. The page is intended to be a way to allow people to "let go" of their pain and to ask forgiveness of others and themselves. A video on the page explains more fully the concept and intention of apology.  The Levines are the authors of Breaking the Drought: Visions of Grace, Who Dies: An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, Embracing the Beloved: Relationship as a Path of Awakening,  A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last, A Gradual Awakening, and numerous other books. Stephen Levine is a poet, counselor for the terminally ill, and meditation teacher. 

✦ An extraordinary collection of more than 140,000 titles of 20th and 21st Century poetry in English and English translation is housed in The Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo. Some 6,600 broadsides, as well as a selection of first editions, literary magazines, anthologies, audio recordings, and visual art are included. Founded by Charles Abbott in 1937, the  holdings comprise working papers, correspondence, publishing records, manuscripts, and ephemera of such poets as James Joyce, William Carlos Williams,  and Robert Graves. Of special interest is Mail Art, a large selection of which is online (at the link, see the section titled Pathfinders for libraries and archives, artists' pages, publishers' sites, online magazines, and general mail art Web pages). 

✦ We all know this is the Year of the Rabbit, and a few of us also know it's the International Year of Chemistry, but how many claim to know that 2011 is the Year of the Short Story (YOSS)? Go here to read the YOSS Manifesto and here to learn how you, too, can help promote the short story form. Fans may download the YOSS logo to post on their personal blogs or Websites.

✦ The fascinating story of how the Savitsky Collection, some 40,000 works of banned 20th Century Russian avant-garde art, came to be rescued and stored in a museum in the desert of Uzbekistan is the subject of the documentary The Desert of Forbidden Art, the trailer for which is below, written, directed, and produced by Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev. An initiative is under way to raise $100,000 to create and distribute a book about the collection. 

The Desert of Forbidden Art on FaceBook and Twitter

Nukus Museum of Art (The Savitsky Karalkapakstan Art Museum), Nukus, Uzbekistan