The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2007
Poetry Collection is Heart and Soul of New Center
by Margaret Regan
photo by Jacob Chinn
Almost a half-century ago, in November 1960, Robert Frost chugged into Tucson by train. The most famous American poet of his day, the New Englander had traveled all across the country to dedicate the brand-new University of Arizona Poetry Center with a reading of his poetry.
At the ceremony, Congressman Stewart Udall took the opportunity to ask Frost to read again, this time at the upcoming inauguration of John F. Kennedy. Frost accepted, and the rest is the first piece of poetry history midwifed by the Center. That cold January, the dashing young president paid respectful homage as the white-haired old poet declaimed his verse.
Fast-forward 47 years, and the Poetry Center is getting still another dedication, in October. The Poetry Center that Frost visited was in a pair of charming bungalows donated by the Center’s founder, the writer Ruth Walgreen Stephan. This one is a 17,000 square-foot structure gleaming in aluminum and masonry, equipped with state-of-the-art archives and a glass-walled library that soars two stories high.
“It’s a contemporary building but people will still have a sense of welcome and comfort,” says director Gail Browne.
The new building is sorely needed, Browne says.
“We’ve never had space before for our administrative work. Someone was always working in the bedroom or pantry.” Even more importantly, “This is the first time in 30 years we’ll have our collection under one roof.”
The 60,000 piece poetry collection, one of the largest in the nation, consists of books (including first editions by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman), journals and broadsides.
“The collection is the heart and soul of the Center,” Browne declares.
It’s now housed on shelves in the new library and in a state-of-the-art archive. Readers can browse to their hearts’ content in the library reading room, where windows open up to views of a walled meditation garden below and the sky above.
“The design is a progression toward silence and solitude,” Browne says. “The building opens and invites – it makes you question things the way poetry does.”
The collection also has non-print materials that document the multiple poetic moments that have followed up on the Frost one. Scores of well-known poets, from Lucille Clifton to Denise Levertov to Robert Penn Warren, have come to read their work at the Center over the years, and those sessions are preserved in audio recordings. Visitors can tune in to the poets’ words in new “listening” stations in the reading room.
The Center has long extended its reach into the community through classes and poetry projects in the local schools, and it also sponsors the prison creative writing program run by Richard Shelton, a former Poetry Center director. But the new building, on Helen Street north of Speedway, will help the Poetry Center do even more.
Creative writing classes are already meeting in a glass-walled room upstairs, and readings have been staged in an outdoor “odeum,” a tiny stage shaded by an old mesquite.
“The building will allow us to do new things – we’ll have more activities for a wider range of readers,” Browne says. “We’ll do things during the day for university staff. It’s a place of great beauty for gatherings.”
Designed by Line + Space, a Tucson architectural firm headed by Les Wallach (who also designed the Hillel Center on campus), the building was shepherded through completion by Jennifer DaRose, architect of record. It’s essentially two long rectangles joined by a covered breezeway. The Poetry Center proper is in the east building, while the one-story building to the west houses an apartment for visiting poets and scholars. It’s also home to a 100-seat auditorium to be shared with the UA’s Humanities Seminar program.
Directed by David Soren, a Regents professor of classics, the Humanities program offers non-credit classes in the mornings, primarily to senior citizens. It “has been about homeless for many years, going from place to place,” Soren says. The new place, he adds delightedly, has “the latest in audiovisual equipment (and) the acoustics are really great.”
The auditorium has a wall of windows that open up fully to the breezeway; with the addition of more chairs, it becomes an indoor-outdoor space that seats 250.
The best-known authors in the reading series will probably continue to speak in the large UA Modern Languages Auditorium across campus, but the Poetry Center will stage smaller readings in the new auditorium.
“We’re eager to be self-sufficient,” Browne says. “We’ll be here as much as we can.”
Browne prides herself on the center’s relative financial self-sufficiency as well. The building cost $6.8 million, but the UA provided just $1.9 million, while donors gave $4.3 million. The Humanities Seminar program — including some of its students — kicked in $500,000. As of late August, Browne still had to raise another $700,000.
The complex bears the name the UA Poetry Center at the Dr. Helen S. Schaefer Building, as a tribute to the woman who chaired the development committee and helped raise much of the money.
“Helen Schaefer deserves so much credit,” Brown says. And the auditorium is named for Dorothy Rubel, a Humanities Seminar founder and board member.
Standing in her shimmering new domain, Browne pronounces herself satisfied.
“The Poetry Center is the best-kept secret in Tucson,” she says. “I’m hoping to change that.”
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