Entries tagged with This

February 7, 2021

Archive 11: On Going Down Dignified

Working through has never had a clearer usage than to “work through an archive,” which is now my task virtually on a daily basis. Things emerge from files and folders with breathtaking immediacy, though in actuality they have been there all along—a form of latency that is also a structure of the present. An archive, in my experience, is not a thing of the past; we are constituted in the present by our archives. This notion of archive is distinct from memory—a memory can pop up at any time, prompted by as little as a similarity in sound or image or even a proximity in neural networking. I remember walking to our black Chevrolet in a San Leandro parking lot coming out of a Five and Dime store with my mother in 1956. An archive is more logically or interpretively or thematically structured; it has a filing system that is a product of labor, vertically organizing materials in their lateral connections to form a network that begins in the archived past but extends to the present. Just so, I was organizing a set of files to be accessed under subhead 5.3.3.1 “Discussions and controversies: literary/artistic,” of which I have seen many. I open the file marked “Georgia Review” to organize/distribute its contents in three records:

5.3.3.1. controversy (1981). NEA/Georgia Review
letters following publication of “Go Down Dignified: The NEA Writing Fellowships” [see also 5.2.2.1981.1–1982.1]
MASTERS and WILK articles, w introduction, xer, 14 pp.
D’SOUZA article, sent by FRANK CONROY to MARY MACARTHUR and LYN HEJINIAN, xer w notes, 9 pp.
BW > GEORGIA REVIEW, tcb, 5 ppl.; drafts, tcb, 3 pp.; > BILL HENDERSON (PUSHCART PRESS), tcb, 1 p., 1 cp.; > JEANETTA JONES MILLER (SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION), tcb, 1 p.; > BILL BERKSON, 2 tcb, 3 pp.; > THOMAS M. MEYER (attorney), tcb, 1 p.; DAVID WILK, tcb, 1 p.; FRANK CONROY (NEA), tcb, 2 pp.; STANLEY W. LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW), tcb, 3 pp., 2 cp.
BERKSON > GEORGIA REVIEW, tcb w BW edits, 10 pp.; > LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW), 2 tlx, 5 pp.; > BW, als and tls, 2 pp.
LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW) > BW, tls, 1 p.; > BERKSON, 2 tlx, 3 pp.
WILK > BW, tlx, 2 pp.
HEJINIAN > HENDERSON (PUSHCART PRESS), tcb w hm note, 1 p.
HENDERSON > BW, tls, 1 p.
JENNIFER MOYER (CCLM) > BERKSON, tlx, 1 p.
MARY MACARTHUR (NEA) > BW, tls, 1 p.
BW notes, hm, 1 p.; mailing rects, 5 pcs.

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August 27, 2020

Archive 05: Olson in This

The first issue of This (1971) included a short photo essay and memorial to Charles Olson by photographer Elsa Dorfman, who died in May 2020. Bob Grenier, co-editor and mentor, had moved to a small house by the cove in Lanesville, Mass., on Cape Ann, and would have been in contact with Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, and, through poetry connections, Elsa Dorfman. Olson had recently died (10 January 1970) and I was in the thick of his influence, visiting Gloucester that summer and organizing a reading group on the “modern epic” at Iowa in the academic year 1971–72 that included renowned scholar Sherman Paul, who credited the group discussion in his book Olson’s Push (1978). A signal moment in that seminar was unfolding the Coast and Geodetic Survey map of Gloucester harbor, which I bought when I visited, to provide a “spatial reading” of the otherwise cryptic poem: “In the harbor // Can 9 Nun 8 / Nun 10 Can 11 //// Charles Olson / Friday, November 23rd //  #1” (Maximus IV V VI, n.p.; Maximus Poems, 302). From the map, one can track a sequence of buoys in the harbor (termed “cans” and “nuns” from their shapes, presumably) that transposes the subject-centered experience of sighting the buoys to a sequence of signs in space. It is tempting to imagine that Language writing was born right there, though there were many converging influences, never reducible to a moment of origin. In fact, it was the gap between what Olson was seeing and what his poem and the map record that signified, a way of reading that makes clear why the poem had to be written as it was. Many of the short poems from the second volume of Maximus, along with Creeley’s Pieces, were objects of fascination then. … More