Archives of Loss: David Antin, Susan Howe, Vanessa Place

Abstract

Through considerations about poetic work, from three very different authors, David Antin, Susan Howe and Vanessa Place, the article reconsiders the significance of the archive in contemporary poetic creation. Archival preoccupation signals a concern with the present, and its flitting quality: the modes of improvisation in Antin thus offer formal options for a recording of the present as the locus of loss. In Howe, the archival impulse seems to stem from a desire to rewrite history and put forward the issues of historiography: manuscript material from intractable archives generates poetic constructions that become archival material in turn: chaotic typographies evidence what is lost in archivization, rather than focus on what is preserved. Archival gestures might eventually emerge as part of our (lost) fight against radical loss and death: Place’s expansive work on documenting death and the morbidity of social practices is nodal, reaching a paroxystic dimension in Last Words, a project centered on the death penalty, and the electronic archive of the last words of the executed inmates of Texas. In the dialectics outlined by the works of these three poets, the paradox of the archive unfolds as it grows exponentially while remaining incomplete and defective, a sign of the fault in the dialectics of “archive fever” as it inexorably fails to counter our mortal condition.