audio archives

How to speak the archive

A cross-pollination with Eleni Sikelianos

Several rows of banker boxes and legal sized boxes set out in rows — Archival processing of a backlog. Photographed by Jaime Groetsema.

We invited all of the panelists from the June 11, 2012 “Archival Poetics and the War on Memory” event at Naropa to respond or expand on their contributions to the panel, as well as to respond to the Naropa archives and their poetic practice. Here are Eleni Sikelianos’s comments.

Jaime Groetsema/Amanda Rybin Koob: How has working with the Naropa Archive changed/influenced your understanding of archives/archival theory/archival practice?

Archival poetics pt. 3

Building an archive with Eleni Sikelianos: memory, vision, body

Jaime Groetsema and Amanda Rybin Koob

Empty shelves, tables, and metal cabinets surrounding a storage space. — Photo of archives storage by Amanda Rybin Koob.

Rybin Koob: Eleni Sikelianos, poet and teacher, follows Steve Dickison’s reflection on archives and naming during the 2012 Naropa Summer Writing Program panel Archival Poetics and the War on Memory:

01:03:02: I want to underline Anne’s call here, to go and listen to the archives here. Amazing, amazing things, available just a few feet away.

Archival poetics at Naropa, part 2

Baraka at the American Poetry Archives

Jaime Groetsema and Amanda Rybin Koob

People surround Amiri Baraka who speaks at a table in front of an open window. — Unattributed photo from the Naropa Archives. Photographed in the archive by Jaime Groetsema.

Steve Dickison, writer, teacher, and Director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State, manages a large collection of audio recordings dating back to 1954. He begins his contribution to the 2012 Naropa Summer Writing Program panel “Archival Poetics and the War on Memory” by discussing the difficulty of cataloging recordings so listeners don’t have to just “wade in unknowingly.”

Just in case it could last

Archival poetics at Naropa

Jaime Groetsema and Amanda Rybin Koob

Columns of copymaster cassette tapes from the Naropa Archives in a drawer — Copymaster cassette tapes in the Naropa audio archives, photographed by Amanda Rybin Koob.

It would be a worthy metaproject to attempt to trace instances of this concept of “archives” in the JKS SWP audio and video archive — patterns, evolutions, and contradictions — but here, we look just briefly at one potent recording, the 2012 JKS SWP opening panel “Archival Poetics and the War on Memory” (this panel takes its name from Steven Taylor’s June 2007 essay “Remember the Future: Archival Poetics and the War on Memory” published in Beats at Naropa (Coffee House Press, 2009).

Recording (Naropa’s archive): Archival Poetics and the War on Memory
Date: June 11, 2012
Featured panelists: Anne Waldman, Stacy Szymaszek, E. Tracy Grinnell, Steve Dickison, Eleni Sikelianos, and Steven Taylor

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Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

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The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

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Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

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Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

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Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza