Poetry [x] the Archive          

Stephanie Anderson

This talk explores some of the multiple intersections between poetry and the concept of the archive. The “[x]” in the title is meant to suggest a placeholder for a number of possible words: in, of, with, as, and so forth. I draw from both my critical and creative work to propose a series of investigations or provocations instead of advancing a particular argument. Some of the talk’s threads include: how different disciplines conceptualize the archive; the archive’s recent trendiness; the poetic urge to document, how several American poets (Hannah Weiner, Bernadette Mayer, and Larry Eigner) use transcription; the archive and the self; the temporality of the archive; archival materiality; and the archive’s relation to language, genre, and seriality. In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida writes, “The archive is not a question of the past but of the future, the question of the future itself…” What does this future, comprised of the past, look like, especially in, of, with, and as poetry?

 Stephanie Anderson is the author of four books of poetry as well as several chapbooks. Her interviews and articles have appeared in Chicago Review, The Conversant, Mimeo Mimeo, and nonsite.org. She has been the recipient of a Mellon Foundation B-Side Modernism/Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Fellowship, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation-Year Fellowship (for her dissertation “Hope in Dates: Toward a Calendrical Poetics, 1935-85”), and a Stuart Tave Teaching Fellowship. She received her MFA at Columbia University and her PhD at the University of Chicago. She co-edits the micropress Projective Industries and lives in Beijing, where she is a member of the Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows in the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures at Tsinghua University.