{"id":17728,"date":"2024-04-10T14:39:49","date_gmt":"2024-04-10T14:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/?p=17728"},"modified":"2024-05-09T13:12:24","modified_gmt":"2024-05-09T13:12:24","slug":"a-view-from-the-vault-the-floating-bear-newsletter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/2024\/04\/10\/a-view-from-the-vault-the-floating-bear-newsletter\/","title":{"rendered":"A View from the Vault: The Floating Bear Newsletter"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jeannette Schollaert, Digital Initiatives and Preservation<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cA View from the Vault\u201d showcases some of the unique, notable or rare items that are a part of the Special Collections and Museums holdings at the University of Delaware. Each month, we highlight a different item and share interesting facts or intriguing histories about it. If you are interested in seeing any of the materials featured in person or want to learn more about anything showcased in the series, please contact Special Collections and Museums at AskSpec<\/a> or AskMuseums<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

A poem from issue no. 34 of The Floating Bear newsletter. Click to enlarge.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Floating Bear<\/em> newsletter<\/a><\/p>\n

Issues No. 1-38, 1961-1971<\/p>\n

PS301.F58<\/p>\n

The Floating Bear<\/em> literary newsletter included poetry, articles, reprints, translations and artworks, and is one of many materials in Special Collections that reflects the work of 20th-century American poet-activists. The range of subject matter spans from anti-war action and critiques of police brutality to reviews of theater and concerts.<\/p>\n

Poets Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones) printed the majority of the issues together. The list of featured writers reads like a who\u2019s who of Beat poetry legends and luminaries from various schools of 20th-century poetry, including Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, Stephen Jonas, Gary Snyder and Victor Hernandez Cruz.<\/p>\n

Issue no. 34 of the newsletter includes a poem that resonates with the contemporary fascination with artificial intelligence and computer-generated text. Among contributors like Jack Kerouac and Frank O\u2019Hara, there is a poem credited as, \u201cPOEM, by a computer at M.I.T., which was fed the elements of English Grammar, and directed to produce sentences.\u201d<\/p>\n

While clunky, the poem includes occasional, if uncanny, poignance. There is very little shared about the technical process of creating the poem \u2013 a noticeable absence of information amidst today\u2019s concerns with the details and ethics of generative AI.<\/p>\n

Some contemporary poets engage with AI to explore and critique the use of technology in our daily lives, but this poem from 1967 \u2013 published in a poet-activist newsletter, printed with a mimeograph \u2013 shows that even as technology changes, the will to create and push the boundaries of language remains.<\/p>\n

The complete run of <\/em>The Floating Bear newsletter has been digitized and will soon be publicly available as part of the Poetry as Activism Project<\/a>, a UD Library, Museums and Press initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jeannette Schollaert, Digital Initiatives and Preservation \u201cA View from the Vault\u201d showcases some of the unique, notable or rare items that are a part of the Special Collections and Museums holdings at the University of Delaware. Each month, we …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":17730,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4,15,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-poetry-as-activism","category-special"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-06 19:21:06","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17728"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17798,"href":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17728\/revisions\/17798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.udel.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}