The University of Arizona Poetry Center is excited to announce the launch of the LaVerne Harrell Clark Photographic Collection! This online gallery features more than 1,000 digitized photographs consisting of portraits of poets by the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s first director, LaVerne Harrell Clark. Many of the portraits were captured on site at the Poetry Center and other locations in Tucson, and many are previously unpublished. Dating from ca. 1960 to 2007, the collection portrays many of the twentieth century’s leading poets, often at unguarded, intimate moments. These poets include Ai, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Ted Berrigan, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, June Jordan, Agha Shahid Ali, Czeslaw Milosz, Joy Harjo, W.S. Merwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nicanor Parra, Jorie Graham, Philip Levine, Amiri Baraka, Carolyn Kizer, and Robert Duncan, among many others.
The LaVerne Harrell Clark Photographic Collection began as approximately 12,000 film negatives and photographic prints generously donated to the University of Arizona Poetry Center by LD Clark for the estate of LaVerne Harrell Clark. An additional generous gift from LD Clark supported the digitization of negatives from the collection. The photographs in this collection can be used and reproduced under Creative Commons licensing, which allows for use by anyone given they use the attribution line provided on the website.
Poetry Center Librarian Wendy Burk, speaking to the time and effort that has gone into this launch, said, “Presenting this collection to the public in an online gallery has been a labor of love for the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Eight years ago our former director, Gail Browne, drove from Texas to Tucson with a car filled with the boxes of Kodak envelopes in which LaVerne Harrell Clark stored her photographic collection. Ever since 2008, volunteers, interns, staff members, and archivists at the Poetry Center have been steadily working to preserve the collection, describe its contents, digitize more than a thousand negatives, and place those portraits online for the public to enjoy.”
Wendy especially wanted to recognize the work of archivists Erin Renee Wahl and Pamela Pierce, former interns at the Poetry Center.
When asked about some of her favorite images, Wendy said, “The images of Ai and Agha Shahid Ali are very special. Both Ai and Agha were students at the University of Arizona (Ai was an undergraduate student in the 1960s and Agha was a graduate student in the 1980s). Their portraits, taken in Tucson in 1972 and 1985, respectively, seem to say "I feel at home here," as well as give a glimpse of the depth of the writing that they were to create. I've been admiring their images ever since I started working at the Poetry Center eight years ago, when work on the collection was just beginning.”
