Wild Intelligence: Poets' Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America by Mary Catherine Kinniburgh (review)

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• Wild Intelligence: Poets' Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America by Mary Catherine Kinniburgh
• Weishun Lu

Wild Intelligence: Poets' Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America. Mary Catherine Kinniburgh. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022. vii + 192 pp.

By examining the evolving libraries and book collections of minor and radical poets in postwar America, M. C. Kinniburgh shows how writers at the social and political margins develop a shelf of one's own and create alternative possibilities of knowledge creation outside of elite institutions. The title Wild Intelligence is fitting in describing this phenomenon given that the book "traces a different history of information management that is structured not by the needs of government or institutional organizations but by the idea that a life of poetry is an act of political and spiritual survival" (6). The metaphor "wild" describes the need for some poets to explore extra-governmental and ungovernable ways of seeking knowledge. "Intelligence" inspires a broadened definition of knowledge—that is, knowledge is not simply the sum of the information available but a result of human curation, classification, and manipulation. Importantly, Kinniburgh's book develops the concept of poetics of information, which shifts our assumptions about the basic unit of poetry and the timeline of poetic composition. Under her new framework, poetry is not a product but a practice, and this practice begins long before the moment a poet lays down their first word on the page. By implication, poetry is an epistemological tool for contemporary poets such as Charles Olson and [End Page 177] Audre Lorde, who figure prominently in this book: if we seek to study such writers' poetics thoroughly, Kinniburgh argues, we ought to pay attention to when, where, and how they gather, organize, and transform information throughout their creative process.

Departing from close reading, which is typical in poetry studies, Kinniburgh adopts the methods of a book historian and resists the tradition of treating "the book rather than the library [as] the unit of analysis" (12). Each chapter of the book focuses on a poet's "library." The quotation marks are necessary here because almost all of these collections are ever-evolving (both during the poet's lifetime and after their death) and because these collections are not just physical, but also conceptual.

The first chapter examines the Maud/Olson Library (MOL), a collection resulting from Ralph Maud's attempt to recreate Charles Olson's library. One of the most fascinating qualities of MOL is that it is a special collection with "the gesture of open stacks" (38). This collection's manner of taking up space physically and of materially prompting viewers and readers reflects Olson's belief that the body and embodiment are an important site of knowledge. More importantly, the question of what constitutes a library becomes salient in this chapter. Is a library defined by the conceptual knowledge gathered therein or by its material ownership? Kinniburgh's emphasis on the distinction between conceptual knowledge and the physical infrastructure of knowledge is an important one in the Information Age and the Digital Age, where the process of knowledge organization is increasingly hidden from the public eye. The radical transparency of MOL, by contrast, epitomizes the wildness of Olson's approach to writing and learning as it enacts a form of protest against institutional conventions of sanitizing (or taming) the messy reality of knowledge production.

The second chapter takes readers to Audre Lorde's relationship with books and libraries. One can no longer physically locate "the Audre Lorde Library" (which the poet developed but could not be maintained as a stable collection due not only to life circumstances that forced her to sell her books, but also to natural disasters that damaged or destroyed them). Given this backdrop, Kinniburgh proposes to read Lorde's poetry as an "information architecture" (55) that illustrates her relationship to books and her awareness of the fraught relationship between libraries and the state: knowing that state-backed knowledge often fails [End Page 178] marginalized communities, Lorde prioritizes intuitive knowledge. Poetry becomes such a site for intuitive knowledge-gathering, as evidenced in, for example, the presence of a glossary and bibliography in Lorde...