Dating from the earliest days of the University, the Contemporary Literature Collection (CLC) is the oldest and largest collection in Special Collections and Rare Books. In 1965, the English Department and charter faculty member and Charles Olson scholar, Dr. Ralph Maud, began building a special collection comprised of little magazines, pamphlets, chapbooks, and ephemera representing the New American poetry and allied modern avant-garde literature for the period 1945–1965, with an emphasis on poetry.

The CLC grew from this nucleus. In the early 1970s, the English Department and SFU Library agreed on a policy to guide the development of the collection. Over the years it has evolved into a focused, in-depth, research collection of 20th- and 21st-century avant-garde, experimental, formally innovative, and "underground" writing in English. The collection consists predominantly of post-WWII postmodern writing—especially that of the various American groups identified in Donald Allen’s influential 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry. This includes movements like the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, and the Black Mountain poets, led by Charles Olson.

Additionally, the CLC includes kindred Canadian poets/avant-gardists, such as the TISH and Coach House Press groups, and a number of British experimentalists. While emphasizing postwar "open form" writing, the collection also includes various early-century modernist precursors—such as Ezra Pound, W.C. Williams, Gertrude Stein, the Objectivists, and H.D.—as well as later poets seen as descendants of the mid-century groups, including the Kootenay School of Writing and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.

The CLC is a rich research resource for students and scholars of postwar and contemporary North American poetry. The CLC includes books of poetry, prose, criticism, anthologies, translations, bibliographies, reference works, little magazines and other literary periodicals, chapbooks, broadsides, limited editions, ephemera, and rarities. It also has extensive archival holdings representing numerous West Coast poets and publishers. Major fonds include those of Robin Blaser, Christian Bok, Frank Davey, Adeena Karasick, Roy Kiyooka, Daphne Marlatt, Michael McClure, bpNichol, Lisa Robertson, Warren Tallman, Fred Wah, Open Letter, and Talonbooks Publishers.