Every Thing In It

The Poetry Foundation goes into the Shel Silverstein archives.

From the piece...

“He wrote on everything,” says archivist Joy Kingsolver. She has pulled a flat box labeled “Work in Progress” down from a shelf, set it on a table, and—pushing her gold-rimmed glasses up the ridge of her nose—opened it to reveal a heap of scrap paper covered with narrow, urgent handwriting. “He wrote on menus, napkins, restaurant placemats, paperbacks. Anything that was available.” She leafs through the box and picks up a bank deposit slip. In the upper left-hand corner, it reads SHEL SILVERSTEIN in blocky type. A few lines of lyrics are scrawled across it: a quick sketch for a song—or maybe a poem—about a bank robbery.

This little piece of paper is one of Joy’s favorite artifacts in the whole Silverstein Archive, a collection of the author’s manuscripts, sketches, demo recordings, and ephemera that she helps to oversee. “I imagine him standing in line at the bank, bored, and composing it,” she says. “He just continuously wrote and wrote and wrote. There’s a constant creative flow. It never seemed to stop.”

Most of the physical relics of Silverstein’s restless creative energy—which fueled his work as a globe-trotting Playboy cartoonist, an iconic children’s author, and a songwriter for the likes of Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show—are held in this archive, housed in a big, chilly room on the sixth floor of a windowless warehouse on the near southwest side of Chicago, Silverstein’s hometown.