Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from a regular writer for I&A’s blog, Cate Peebles. Cate is the NDSR Art fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, where she works with permanent-collection-related born-digital records.
In my last post, I focused on the prevalence of archival source material in popular recent true crime docuseries, including The Keepers, The Jinx, and Making a Murderer, and the active role of records as essential narrative components and aesthetic representations of the criminal justice system’s silences and revelations. Under the guise of entertainment, these often sensational tales offer mainstream audiences a glimpse of archives and records in action, with little to no mention of professional archivists. This inquiry has prompted the question: where else in cultural and artistic practice are archives and records used as both resource and aesthetic medium?
The image of historians and genealogists spending long afternoons in the reading room is a familiar one—backs hunched over a table as they leaf through finding aids and folders, culling primary source materials to investigate, reconstruct, and re-present personal and cultural histories. However, this is not the only outcome time spent in the archives. What about less familiar modes of archival research and representation of primary sources? In honor of April, National Poetry Month (and also the cruelest!), this post will blast through literary tradition, history, and trends to take a look at three recent books of poetry that repossess archival source material and reanimate it as lyric lines in a manner that is no less impactful than a biographer’s refined synthesis of research materials.
Since the early twentieth-century (think: Marcel Duchamp and other Surrealists), and more so since the rise of conceptual and institutional critique art in the 1960s, documents, archival practice, and research have become valid and popular mediums for artistic works. In conjunction with these movements, some contemporary literary artists, particularly poets, have adopted a mode of writing that places archival sources at the center of their work. The work is often labeled “experimental” for lack of a better nutshell in which to encapsulate this genre-fluid kind of writing. In some instances, and with certain writers in particular, the mode is referred to as “Documentary Poetry” and “Poetry of Witness”, which document a particular moment, event, or cultural movement through the use of primary sources, photographs, video, and testimonial accounts. [i]
Archival collections are often fragmentary by nature and structurally lend themselves well to the production of evocative, lyrical, and time-bending poems. Since the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923), which includes frenetic splicing of sources, “borrowed” fragments, and telltale inclusion of an extensive “Notes” section, many poets have been attracted to this fragmentary, academic style that highlights interaction with the past and places seemingly unrelated references, quotations, and text side by side, reverberating so to speak, to create new associative leaps through sound and image in the reader’s mind; the word “medium” springs to mind—pun intended.
Similar devices are used by other Modernist and Surrealist writers, including Andre Breton, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf. The incorporation of found language and images has become a powerful technique of giving voice to the previously silenced; it is a kind of time travel via linguistic stitching of the past into our present moment. As in archival work, voices from the past are brought into the present.
In the following three micro-essays – one below and two posted separately later this week – I share but three examples of recent books of poetry that exemplify this mode of “ripped from the archives” writing, each in its own distinct way.
[i] See: C.D. Wright’s One Big Self, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Carolyn Forché’s Angel of History, and Tyehimba Jess’ Olio. The common impulse in this mode is one of social activism and revising cultural erasures.
The Work-Shy
Blunt Research Group
Wesleyan University Press, 2016
Published anonymously under the collective authorship of the Blunt Research Group, a collective of writers, scholars, and artists, the book begins with a brief, expository essay: “The following poems operate under a strict constraint: they are composed entirely of phrases drawn from the case files of inmates in the earliest youth prisons in California between 1910 and 1925…The histories contained in these files were gathered and archived by the now defunct Eugenics Records Office” as well as testimonies from the “chronically insane” collected by the Prinzhorn Collection in Germany and the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York.
What follows in the book’s first section are the voices of predominately African American and Chicano youths, aged 12-17, many of whom were subjected to psychological and physical experimentation. Experiments which, a decade or two later, influenced the eugenics practices at Nazi concentration camps. Many of the book’s poems are named for the ward, whose words are italicized and spliced with the words of the “fieldworkers” who studied them. (The lineation is difficult to replicate here, sadly.)
Jose
Joe possesses
all the bad characteristics of all the boys
was heard to say
this is the last time
I’m coming in here
twice accused of murder twice acquitted
made a fool of himself
too much already
he wanted us to keep on goin’ with the bottle
at age 14 went out
to work in the fruit
(27)
The Work-Shy weaves together many voices, from multiple geographic and temporal locations, to build a chorus of the unheard and forgotten. The book calls out past wrongs that were once ignored by society at large and brings the reader face to face with the present, prompting us to take a closer look at the institutional systems of oppression that surround us yet.
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