A valued addition to the history of the Fort Worth poetry scene has recently been made accessible at TCU. The Special Collections department of the library has acquired the papers of Mabel M. Kuykendall and they are now available to research or peruse. Ms. Kuykendall was a local poet as well as an advocate for other poets. The Poetry Society of Texas was the first to publish one of her poems. She co-edited the anthologies, Poetry out Where the West Begins: A Collection of Poems by Fort Worth Authors (1949) and Divert the Interim (1940), with her long-time friend and fellow poet Grace Ross. Together, she and Grace published and edited Quicksilver, a quarterly poetry magazine, for nearly 15 years in Fort Worth, TX.
Ms. Kuykendall served as the president of the Fort Worth Poetry Society for about five years in the late 1940’s. She was also the head of the Fort Worth chapter of the Texas Council for the Promotion of Poetry during which time she petitioned the mayor of Fort Worth for a signed proclamation to recognize an official day of poetry. She promoted poetry on the radio as well, spending four years broadcasting the programs “Local Color” and “The Poet’s Tabloid” on Fort Worth’s KFJZ. In 1961, Mabel and her husband James moved to Taos, New Mexico where she wrote a weekly column in The Taos News, called “Adobe Diggings,” for three years. Mabel died in Taos in 1994.
This collection is arranged in three series. The first series makes up the bulk of the collection and includes the materials related to Quicksilver, the quarterly poetry magazine published from 1948-1962 in Fort Worth, TX. The second series includes some of Ms. Kuykendall’s other work and the third series is comprised of various poetry and literary journals that Kuykendall collected over the years. It includes journals such as The Bard and The Buccaneer, both published in Dallas, TX in the early 1920’s as well as examples of 105 other journals produced in a myriad of cities and universities through 1976.
Entry by Amy Leslie