“For the Archive!”: Editor’s Discussion, May 2022

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the first Poem of the Day “Editor’s Discussion”! I hope that this newsletter, along with other coming changes in the Poetry Foundation online archive, invites you to join in discussion with us and with one another.

My name is Robert Eric Shoemaker and in April of this year I joined the Poetry Foundation as Digital Archive Editor. Poetry excites me as an interdisciplinary artist because of its shape-shifting capacity. Theatre, history, gender studies, translation, and journalism are some of the fields I work in and have found poetry in and through, both as a conduit for big ideas and as an outlet for expression. One of the things I want to bring to you as a reader and to the poetry communities that we strive to include in our archive is the humanistic quality of archival work. As a poet and scholar, I work to open boundary-crossing conversations on inclusion and representation with an interest in transparency and growth; I do this as a person hoping to connect with you, another poetry lover. Poem of the Day is just one way in which we as a team are able to connect and share with you.

Poets are a large, diverse community with lineages and long histories tied to cultural shifts. In the last several years, each of us has experienced different global and cultural shifts – not just including the COVID-19 pandemic – that have changed us, our collective definitions of “normal,” and our ideas of community. The Poetry Foundation has changed, too. In the interest of community engagement as a method to facilitate further change, I want to invite you to the archive.

“For the archive!” is a rallying cry that is handed down from poet to poet at Naropa University, the disembodied poetics brainchild of Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and other outrider poets. As an MFA student at Naropa, this phrase was uttered at panels and readings before community members asked questions of those assembled. Often, these questions were provocative and challenging to answer (or to hear), and this was their beauty and importance. Poetry is important because it challenges. Poetry is beautiful, too– but that beauty is complex and can cause a stir. I invoke this poets’ cry as a gesture of hope towards what we can do together.

Behind each poem featured in Poem of the Day or in the archive is an array of choices made by people who want to reach out and communicate their love of language. The poet chooses “the best words in the best order,” according to Coleridge, physically takes off the top of the head, as Dickinson put it, and “tells the truth,” in the words of June Jordan. The archivists, curators, and editors choose to share those truths, words, and feelings with you the reader. The reader’s job, in one sense, is to respond. In the coming months, I look forward to offering you direct ways in which to respond and join in conversation with us. 

Enjoy this month’s selections!

Power to Poetry,

Robert Eric Shoemaker, PhD
Digital Archive Editor

Dear Reader,

A recent unsubscriber from the Poem of the Day newsletter explained that May’s poems were “too depressing” for them to want to read on. I know how productive difficult poetry can be, and this reader’s comment gives me an opportunity to unpack some reasoning behind Poem of the Day and the archive writ large, especially in light of the first poem you are receiving this June, as well as poems to come.

This month begins with Paul Celan’s “Ashglory” in Pierre Joris's translation from Breathturn into Timestead (2014). Celan’s stark, stunted language is striking: two to four word lines open the first stanzas with unfamiliar terms including “pontic” and the compound word “ashglory,” creating a consuming and bleak grayness. The speaker says, “I dug myself into you and into you” on the “vertical breathrope,” extending like a stretched throat up and up, craning and perhaps expecting death. This poem feels alien and alienating. The speaker is grasping and digging for something – for what? – into “you.”

I chose this poem for June 1st’s Poem of the Day to mark the anniversary of the devastating, yet necessary, revelation of the first confirmed Nazi camp at Chelma by the newspaper the Liberty Brigade in 1942. June is also LGBTQ+ Pride Month, and I am thinking about how we remember those who we have lost to oppression: how we celebrate and how we mourn. I believe it may be part of our job as poetry readers, writers, culture workers, and appreciators of the Humanities to take deep care with those around us and the world we live in. Deep care is painful and transformative, and despite these “painknots” that we endure, we have to remember that it is better to dig the dirt out of the wound so that it may fully heal.

I recently learned that the word “curate” comes from “curare,” a Latin root meaning “to attend and to care for." I’ve long had an aversion to the terminology of “curating” an archive, since that word is used frequently out of the context of the difficult and important work with which I associate it. After learning this root’s meaning, though, I feel that “curate” may be a more compassionate word⁠— or could certainly be used with compassion. With their roots in care-work, curators gather and provide materials for others to varying degrees of effect. For all of you, we hope to care for poetry and to share it out. Some of that ongoing work is difficult and painful – depressing, perhaps. Take care of those feelings, and of each other, and share the poems that help you to do so.

Power to the People and to Poetry,

Robert Eric Shoemaker, PhD
Digital Archive Editor