FALES TALES.

I love Fales Special Collections, and I am going to most certainly miss all of its archival charm once big Bobst starts rejecting my NYU card come this fair-weather fall. My very first encounter with Fales Special Collections was back in the Fall of 2007, when I journeyed there for a class “trip,” or whatever you call those things. I was with my Walt Whitman course classmates and we took the elevator up to the third floor, walked down a hallway and then into a room filled with one long line of tables filled with old books and manuscripts. Amongst the weathered and preserved periodicals, novels and books were some first editions, self-published editions and other varying versions of Walt Whitman’s great Leaves of Grass. I think it was Mr. Mike Kelly who led us through these publications of the past, gingerly turning the pages and showing off some frontispieces.
The second time I found Fales, I was alone and bored before winter break took me back to the Midwest when curiosity, instead of killing the cat, got the best of me and brought me through those third floor doors. I had heard from my supervisors, over there at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, that poet and punk “musician”/icon, Richard Hell, had sold the entirety of his writing collection, publications, notebooks, papers, pictures and ephemera of the like to Fales only a few years before. So, of course, I had to go read all those secret scribbled sentences and type-writer typed letters in his earliest archived notebook. It was quite exciting because it was kind of like breaking the rules, but at the same time, I sat there obliging them, scribbling my notes in pencil lead and not with an ink pen.

Then our very own Life on the Square class tripped their way on over to Fales to have our own little meeting with Mr. Mike Kelly. He was as charmingly informed and knowledgeable about the collections as ever, except his whole book spread had completely mutated in to an array of various ephemeral pamphlets, neighborhood maps, carefully preserved novels and, my very personal favorite, stacks of self-published magazines like The Masses, Punk Magazine and my even more personal favorite, Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts by poet and publisher, Ed Sanders. I was not so disappointed with Mr. Kelly’s new arrangement of materials from deep within the bowels of Fales archives, but I was rather enchanted.

So, then I went back to Fales on my own, yet again. It was only partially for research reasons for class, but I don’t think I could have gotten myself out of my bed in the morning had it not been something I was really most honestly and devotedly curiously interested in. I was on the hunt for some of those legendary self-published magazines coming from the Lower East Side in the 1960s, including, Ed Sander’s charming little title, Fuck You, Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh’s Angel Hair, and Ted Berrigan’s C: A Journal of Poetry. These are the three self-published mimeographed poetry magazines I had really wanted to get my hands on, and because Fales exists, I did just that. I went back and forth to Fales for two weeks, three days each for several hours at a time, studying the manuscripts and poetry that were held in between those dusty old folders and held together by rusting falling out staples. However, time does not do those collections justice and I could only get through ¾ of the material from each collection before work, other homework, interning, and life stepped in my way and stomped out the fun. I want to get back to my mimeo magazine sleuth like studying as soon as school is really completely over, finals and all, but only ugly time will tell how many more swipes into old Bobst doors before I am let in for the very last time, my very last dance with Fales.