University of Notre Dame faculty member Matthew Kilbane has been awarded a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and a long-term Newberry Fellowship to research his book about 20th-century poetry from the perspective of community-based writing workshops.

“Awards from institutions like the Newberry and the NEH provide the support to spend long stretches of time in archives, doing the sometimes-tedious, sometimes-exhilarating work of combing through box upon box of materials for the buried insights that — just maybe — promise to change our sense of literary history,” said Kilbane, the Glynn Family Honors Assistant Professor of English.

“With a project like this one, that’s where the magic happens.”

That magic for Kilbane has already taken place in collections and archives at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas and the John Hay Library at Brown University. This fall, he’ll write in South Bend and, in the spring, he’ll conduct more research at The Newberry library in Chicago.

For Kilbane, magic also happens in writing workshops.

“Whenever I’ve participated,” he said, “whether as a facilitator or writer, I’ve found it to be a transformative experience.”

His book’s tentative title, “The Ends of Poetry,” reflects his interest in new uses and meanings — or innovative ends — for poetry discovered in libraries, coffeehouses, and bars. One chapter highlights the Folsom Prison Creative Writing Workshop. Another focuses on workshops instituted in Nicaragua after the socialist Sandinista party took power.

While Kilbane initially thought these two case studies were unconnected, he later uncovered an improbable link.

In the late 1970s, media outlets covered the shutdown of the Folsom Prison workshop, which was led by Pancho Aguila, an imprisoned convicted murderer and Nicaraguan poet. Kilbane said the Nicaraguan government subsequently petitioned, and failed, to extradite Aguila, presumably to carry on the work of the Folsom workshop in a country transformed by revolution.

His book’s tentative title, “The Ends of Poetry,” reflects his interest in new uses and meanings — or innovative ends — for poetry discovered in libraries, coffeehouses, and bars.

“Though these workshops can seem local and improvisatory, instances like this point toward broad international networks of solidarity and collaboration,” said Kilbane, who is also a faculty affiliate of the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society and the History and Philosophy of Science doctoral program.

Community-based writing workshops can be challenging to study, Kilbane said. It’s difficult to talk about the process of writing, and processes that don’t result in published poems often elude literary scholarship and may not be in archives.

“To identify what it means to write a poem — whether this poet is a member of a prison writing workshop or a teen writing in a public library program — we must first learn how to read not only written things, but the processual techniques of poetic writing,” he said.

In addition to the book, Kilbane plans to build a public-facing digital archive to help poet-teachers learn about community-based workshops.

The NEH stipend and the Newberry Fellowship are the second and third awards that he has secured in support of the book project.

Last summer, with funding from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA) he attended the National Humanities Center’s Summer Residency Program in North Carolina, where he completed a chapter and a prospectus.

Kilbane’s first book, The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media, won the Northeast Modern Language Association 2021 Book Award in Scholarship.

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on August 07, 2024.