OHIO Archives

Ohio University Libraries Archives & Special Collections

Processing the Dave Smith Collection

By Kate Wiselogel, English ’27, Fall 2024 Manuscript Archives Intern

A watercolor painting divided into five sections and featuring five separate images. The largest image is a portrait of Dave Smith. To the right of Smith are three smaller images depicting (from bottom to top) a train, a baseball glove, and a casket. Across the top of the painting is a horizontal image of a green landscape with mountains and trees.
An illustration of Smith by Joe Ciardiello for a 2006 profile in John Hopkins University’s Arts & Sciences magazine.

This semester I’ve had the opportunity to work with the Dave Smith collection and create a new, revised finding aid for it. This has also included working on the general organization of the collection. The main objective of my work this semester was to completely add all of the collection’s items to one easily searchable spreadsheet. The current finding aid has become outdated since its creation 20 years ago, so the creation of an up to date finding aid will help people to find what they need from the collection whether that’s archivists or scholars.

Dave Smith is an awarding winning poet who has published several collections of poetry, edited multiple anthologies, and written many essays and novels. He has also worked as a professor of poetry for many years and is currently the Poet in Residence and a Visting Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. He received his PhD in English from Ohio University in 1976. Much of the collection is materials acquired from both Smith himself and from his close friend Robert DeMott, a retired English professor who taught at Ohio University for many years. The collection contains items such as drafts of Smith’s novel, Onliness, Smith’s essays, and poetry as well as various types of correspondence (personal, business, academic) both to and from Smith.

At the beginning of the semester, my task was to familiarize myself with the collection and make sure none of the boxes were too full nor too empty. One of the first things that I did was remove all of the paper clips from the collection, since they usually add extra bulk. I always felt very satisfied looking at the pile of clips that I had accumulated at the end of each day.

a small pile of colorful paperclips on a white background
One of the piles of paperclips.

After making sure that the collection was generally well-organized and that all of the boxes were in good shape, I went about the process of renumbering each of the boxes and their folders. This was important to the process of organizing the collection because many folders changed boxes during the process of organizing and prior to the change the boxes hadn’t been numbered continually, making it more difficult to write about them and find them. Once all of the boxes and folders were renumbered it was time to move on to the bulk of the work that I’d be doing this semester: the spreadsheet.

Most of my work this semester has been creating and refining the collection’s spreadsheet finding aid. The creation of the spreadsheet involved going through the entire collection on an item-by-item basis and looking for titles, dates, or other descriptive factors regarding each item. I would then add each series, sub-series, folder, and item to the spreadsheet and include the details about them. This process was painstaking, but it already has helped me (and hopefully others in the future) to quickly find items in the collection.

Interesting Finds

There were a lot of aspects of this collection that I found interesting and enjoyed being able to look at. My favorite part of the collection is all of the different pieces of correspondence. I think that there’s something so interesting about reading other people’s letters. This is partially because I am a very nosy person but also because I enjoy the intimacy of it and the tangible reminder of people’s relationships. When looking at the letters, I really enjoyed seeing the little doodles or other random pictures that had somehow made their way to the bottoms of different letters.

A detailed black and white depiction of Walt Whitman, he has his hands on his hips and is wearing a wide-brimmed hat
A portrait of Walt Whitman at the bottom of a letter that was sent to Smith.
A postcard sent to Smith with three sections, the middle section features a small image of a bird
A letter to Smith that folds three ways and features various pictures of birds.
A small doodle of a man in the margins of a letter, he is wearing a tie and smoking
A drawing of a man in a tie smoking found on the side of a letter in the collection.

Because this collection centers the life and work of a poet, and I am an English major, I was also very moved by and interested in a lot of the actual writing content of the collection. One of my favorite moments while working on this collection was reading a letter that had been sent to Smith, not looking at the name of who had sent it and loving the writing only to realize that it was from Louise Glück, one of my personal favorite poets.

I have also learned a lot about the process of publishing from working on this collection. Being able to see just how many drafts a poem or a book goes through prior to publication was really fascinating. I had known that there is inherently a lot of revising within the process of writing but tangibly seeing all the different versions of the same text was different to me. I really enjoyed seeing all of the thought and detail that is put into every aspect of making a book, from the draft covers to the annotations in each galley.

Two copies of the same poem by Smith, one with handwritten annotations one without
An example of some of the drafts in the collection, notice how the adjustments made in the annotations on the left are added into the copy on the right.

I have greatly enjoyed working on this collection this semester. I have learned so much about the process of writing and how much time it takes seeing the tangible products of it. I feel like this project has helped me to be more detail-oriented while also keeping in mind the bigger picture. Working on a project such as this one requires individual focus on each folder/item while also thinking about the bigger picture regarding the collection and the finding aid. I have always enjoyed reading poetry, so it has been really interesting to learn about the process that goes into creating it and being able to see the web of connections Smith has made in the poetry and academic community. I have really enjoyed getting to know this collection and I am excited for everyone in the future who will be able to more easily access it. Hopefully the existence and maintenance of this collection and others like it will encourage people to continue learning about and enjoying poetry for many years to come.

For more about the collection visit the updated description here. Archives and Special Collections also contains over 200 volumes by Smith in the rare book collection.

 

Greta Suiter

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