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Here is the library, not just as a place that houses books, but as an experience. Fifteen poems celebrate the thrill of getting your first library card, the excitement of story hour, the fun of using the computer, the pride of reading to the dog, and the joy of discovering that the librarian understands you and knows exactly which books you'll love. The poems, compiled by noted poet and anthologist Lee Bennett Hopkins, pay homage to the marvels of books and reading. Accompanied by Jane Manning's colorful, imaginative illustrations, this collection lyrically celebrates the magic of libraries.

Information science was a burgeoning field in the early years of the Cold War, and while public and academic libraries acted as significant sites for the information boom, it is unsurprising that McCarthyism and censorship would shape what they granted readers access to and acquired. Wild Intelligence traces a different history of information management, examining the privately assembled collections of poets and their knowledge-building practices at midcentury. Taking up case studies of four poets who began writing during the 1950s and 1960s, including Charles Olson (1910-1970), Diane di Prima (1934-2020), Gerrit Lansing (1928-2018), and Audre Lorde (1934-1992), M. C. Kinniburgh shows that the postwar American poet's library should not just be understood according to individual books within their collection but rather as an archival resource that reveals how poets managed knowledge in a growing era of information overload. Exploring traditions and systems that had been overlooked, buried, occulted, or censored, these poets sought to recover a sense of history and chart a way forward.

Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, \"English meter\" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

Collecting contemporary poetry is often a low priority for libraries, but interest in poetry is rising, and many library patrons have the potential to become poetry readers. Building a collection of poetry chapbooks can maximize the impact of a renewed poetry collecting effort because the poetry chapbook is an accessible, high-interest, and often low-cost form that captures the cutting edge of the poetic field. I introduce the poetry chapbook and its creative and social functions and describe various avenues for building a chapbook collection, including acquisition strategies, examples of digital initiatives such as participatory chapbook repository projects, and notes on promoting engagement. The community-building potential and links to higher-level goals such as diverse collecting, local interest, and cultural preservation allow chapbook collections to add unique value to a variety of public, academic, special, and school library contexts.

Medieval Sex Lives examines courtly song as a complex cultural product and social force in the early fourteenth century, exploring how it illuminates the relationship between artistic production and the everyday lives of the elites for whom this music and poetry was composed and performed. In a focused analysis of the Oxford Bodelian Library's Douce 308 manuscript-a fourteenth-century compilation that includes over five hundred Old French lyrics composed over two centuries alongside a narrative account of elaborate courtly festivities centered on a week-long tournament-Elizabeth Eva Leach explores two distinct but related lines of inquiry: first, why the lyric tradition of \"courtly love\" had such a long and successful history in Western European culture; and, second, why the songs in the Bodleian manuscript would have been so important to the book's compilers, owners, and readers. The manuscript's lack of musical notation and authorial attributions make it unusual among Old French songbooks; its arrangement of the lyrics by genre invites inquiry into the relationship between this long musical tradition and the emotional and sexual lives of its readers. Combining an original account of the manuscript's contents and their likely social milieu with in-depth musical and poetic analyses, Leach proposes that lyrics, whether read or heard aloud, provided a fertile means of propagating and enabling various sexual scripts in the Middle Ages. Drawing on musicology, literary history, and the sociology and psychology of sexuality, Medieval Sex Lives presents a provocative hypothesis about the power of courtly songs to model, inspire, and support sexual behaviors and fantasies.

This article explores the theme of the alchemical interpretations of medieval iconography through the life and the writings of Esprit Gobineau de Montluisant (c.1590–between 1652 and 1665). This French alchemist and poet indeed composed a dissertation on some of the ornaments on the main facade of Notre-Dame de Paris, in which he asserted that the sculptures that adorn it conceal alchemical allusions. This curious thesis, written by a practitioner who was in contact with leading political figures of his time, such as the diplomat Léon Bouthilier (1608–52) or the marshal Abraham Fabert d’Esternay (1599–1662), did not emerge from nothing. It is part of an exegetical literature that combines alchemical theories, scriptural allegories, and a sense of heritage for Gothic monuments that were often in disrepair at the time. Far from being anecdotal, Gobineau’s treatise continued to be studied and read over the following centuries by alchemists, writers, art critics and even archaeologists. This influence, albeit discreet, justifies rediscovering his life and his dissertation. It also reminds us of the need to consider works linked to Western esotericism in the study of European cultural and scientific history.

Serajoddin Qomri Amoli is a powerful poet of the 6th and 7th centuries. He has a collection of poems emendated by Yadollah Shokri. His Divan's emendator believes that Qomri, like Naser Khosro and Sanaei, had two stages in his life. During his first years of poetry, he was footloose and luxurious up to his middle age, but then he repent and becomes a devout. However, this view does not seem justified considering his poems. This article using the library method and Qomri's poems aims to show that Shokri's claim is not right and Qomri was a Panegyrist poet up to the end of his life. In his old age, he also communicated with the kings and ministers and praised them asking wine, clothes, rice, cows, and so on. Introduction Knowing about poets and writers' life is very important from the viewpoint of literary history because it can help to understand their poems and writings better. In Tazkares, we can find several words about poets and writers and so many of them are incorrect or may be incorrect. Today, it is common that if there is no trace in poems or writings about confirming words in Tazkare, such words cannot be accepted. Such type of research has not been done regarding the life of Qomri Amoli. Yadollah Shokri, the emendator of Divan, just according to one trace composed of some distiches of his Divan judged him in such a way that he hated his forecast as he became old and repented and become a devout. It seems that Shokri commented so because of neglecting the two factions, while we can find several traces to disapprove this judgment. The writers of this article try to answer the question of whether Serajoddin Qomri, as Shokri has mentioned, had two stages in his life being a eulogist poet who repented at the end of his life and becomes a devout. Materials & Methods This research studied Qomri Amoli’s poems based on the library method to show that he did not have two stages in his life (according to the poems from his old age), and Qomri adulated the grandees of the crown and king and asked for a prize. Discussion of Results & Conclusions The corrector of Qomri’s Divan has used some symbols and pieces of evidence of Qomri’s Divan in his introduction to confirm that he had two stages in his life. Although the discussed distiches relate to his repentance, several pieces of evidence in his Divan show that he had a good relation with grandees and kings and asked for prizes: pointing to the adduction to the kings in a qasida about praising Sheikh Seifoddin Bakharzi (died in 629 HG); asking for fur from Khajeh Mohammad ibn Abelghasem (Fakhreddin Dehestani) minister of Jalaleddin Menkabarni Kharazmshah; praising Sayyedolvozara Jalaleddin Ahmad, the minister of Shamsolmolouk Shah Ghazi Rostam ibn Ardeshir, the 8th king of Bavandieh Espahbodieh catena; praising Fakhreddin Abulfazl Dabou, one of the commanders of Dabouygan catena. Moreover, the poet points to his drinking in his old age and shaving his face to look young. But the clearest piece of evidence is some distich from Mathnavi Karname, a poem in which Seraj has mentioned the name of one of his friends and said: “Both of us were used to drink, we didn’t pray or fast. I don’t know whether he quit it or not, but I am still doing that, whether old or young and now I am even in a worse condition than before.” According to these pieces of evidence, we can conclude that Yadollah Shokri’s word about two stages in the life of Qomri is not verified and unlike his viewpoint, Qomri did not quit drinking, praising the kings, and asking them his needs.

On Thursday 14 May 2020 Maynooth University Library hosted a seminar via Zoom, entitled 'Irish Libraries and COVID-19: First Reflections'. The seminar explored the response of the library sector to the global pandemic that has impacted every aspect of life. This article presents the case studies from the seminar.