I applied for early leave this winter break to do the following: head back to Canada for a few days; enter the US to do a month-long research fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago; take a break from that for a few days to attend AWP in Kansas City; return to tie up loose research ends; and, finally, fly out of O’Hare to arrive in Wuhan 36 hours before teaching my first class of the new term.
I don’t recommend trying to pull off this kind of three-country juggling act, but somehow I’ve survived. And I have here a few casual observations about the experience.
After flying through seemingly the entirety of Russian airspace without incident, I landed in Frankfurt and was told to place all my stuff in the basket, etc. I asked if they needed my belt. Nope! Next stage, older German guy in a suit: “well well well, I am told you do not want to scan your belt.” After some belt acrobatics and having one of my shoes broken, I was cleared to go to Toronto — finally, I’d escaped Siberia.
Thanks to Air Canada canceling my flight at the last minute (keep being you, Air Canada), I obtained not one but two J-1 visas to the United States of America. I’m not sure which one was validated. Finally, the Newberry awaited.
I was lucky enough to be awarded a short-term fellowship to investigate Midwestern modernist poet, editor, translator, novelist, and anthologist Eunice Tietjens. I was out of my comfort zone given that my primary areas of study are Canadian literature and more recent American poetry. The project was originally about Tietjens’ unique ideas about the Chinese language and how, exactly, one ought to go about translating Chinese poetry into English. Some of her feuds with Ezra Pound were available online, as was an interesting two-part essay in Poetry that described the Chinese language as not “more primitive than ours, because it is not inflected” but rather “to have gone through our inflected stage almost before the dawn of history. So that our method of speech became too simple for the Chinese thousands of years ago, and their language went on around the circle to the point where it is found today, in which root ideas only are used, and the rest is left to the imagination.”1 Going through the manuscripts in special collections, I found a few interesting letters; some odd children’s books and drafts thereof; a barely legible travel journal that also included pages of Tietjens’ practicing Japanese writing; and lots and lots of mundane correspondence, as most of those who have been through archives will be familiar with.
I ended up spending a lot of my time there going through just the regular holdings: books I couldn’t find in libraries in the US or Canada, even if I’d been based there regularly. I read illustrated children’s books about Arabia and the South Seas; the often eccentric introductions in Tietjens’ anthology, Poetry of the Orient; and still stranger travel guides to China, Japan, Korea, and Formosa (I’m using her terms).
There was also a series of seminars and colloquiums I was somewhat required to attend. They were all very interesting, but they reflected the disparate (also somewhat eccentric!) nature of the library’s holdings. I was required to make intelligent comments on papers ranging from justifications for Indigenous slavery to 17th-century Iberian pen-masters to the taxation policies behind the transfer of power during the French Revolution (sorry, Rafe, I’m a fool). They also had something called the Crap-Map Table, which held discarded copies of the numerous historical maps in the Newberry’s collection. I myself departed with a reproduction of a wonderful 17th-century Ottoman map of the Black Sea.
Then, in the days leading up to the Super Bowl, I skipped out for AWP in Kansas City. This was a completely different trip — I’m grateful to have had a cheap two-day stay in some kind of Midwest-Gothic AirBnB a friend had booked. After two nights of sleeping on a throw pillow on the couch, I experienced the worst acne breakout I’ve had since high school. I spent a fortune on books and then left Chiefs Kingdom the day of the big game. I’m left with the impression (and suggestions from some quarters) that maybe the best way to experience AWP is… not registering for AWP? Obviously this isn’t great practice, but registering as an attendee is incredibly expensive and I just didn’t get much from the panels I attended. Writers grew up somewhere, they usually ended up somewhere else, they know other writers and went on retreats with them… it was often difficult for me to see much substance. I’ve never done a creative writing degree or even really interacted with that world… I will cautiously say that a format loosely akin to an academic conference maybe isn’t the best look for this field. Hence I heard of some folks doing the book fair and offsite readings only. The few of the latter I attended were fantastic. As was the book fair, though less fantastic for my wallet. At any rate, it was soon time to return to Chicago.
Since my family was never religious and because I’m a spaced-out person in general, holidays tend to hit me out of nowhere every year (Easter especially). So oh boy, was I unprepared for Presidents’ Day, during which the library was closed for a full Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. My perfectly planned schedule ended up requiring me to condense four days of research into two. Alas, I had to skip a seminar on citrus fruits in the early modern period (to which I could have contributed nothing). I got photos of most of what I might need for a future Tietjens article, I think. At any rate, my iCloud storage is full, even after deleting pics of hotdogs, paninis, and cemeteries. That has to count for something.
“On Translating Chinese Poetry: I.” Poetry, vol. 20, no. 5, Aug. 1922, pp. 268-73.