If you've expressed interest in a photocopy of Poems by Joan Murray (see discussion at Silliman's blog yesterday), give me a few days. Rather than continue to photocopy it dozens of times a year, I have decided to make the book available as a free PDF and perhaps as a printed Lulu.com book, sold for cost. It's long out of print, and Yale University Press apparently did not extend the copyright after it lapsed in 1975.I should be able to get the PDF up this weekend.
What I'd really like to do eventually is to create a restored edition, revise my paper for the introduction, include poem variants and perhaps a few letters or notebook pages. In 2002, I plowed through all of Murray's papers at Smith College, and discovered that Grant Code, the editor Murray's mother hired to prepare the book for publication, made significant revisions, which naturally the deceased author could not approve. I found myself disagreeing with many of the so-called improvements! It's a really interesting story. A drama-queen mother; a morose, deeply weird deceased daughter; a verbose, overbearing editor-for-hire; the staff of a prestigious university press; and Auden, who eventually told everybody to bugger off.
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