Poetry collection given to UW-Madison

An extensive collection of poetry has been donated to UW–Madison libraries.

The collection, called the Bemis/Flaherty Collection of Poetry, represents nearly 1,600 authors, including poets from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and modern America. Some 1,000 separate works, plus dozens of anthologies, magazines and journals, are included.

The collection provides a permanent record of ephemeral material: limited-edition publications that come from small presses and are not widely distributed. It will be housed in the Department of Special Collections in Memorial Library.

The materials, many of which are by or about gays, were collected during the last three decades by Michael Bemis, himself a librarian in Madison.

“I hope the collection assures a place for these materials in scholarship about gay history and in the history of print culture,” he said.

According to Yvonne Schofer, humanities bibliographer at Memorial Library, “The collection complements long-standing efforts at UW–Madison to collect ephemeral materials in its extensive Little Magazine and small press collections.”