Engaging the Ordinary

I come from collectors, women who collect other women made of and for art. Additionally, my husband is a junker. His father was a junker. His father’s father … a junker. This means our house is filled with talismans, rituals, and altars––baseballs, rubber wrestling figurines, dog teeth, antlers, half bones, driftwood, tourmaline, postcards, factory patches, mixtapes, folk-art snakes, oyster shells, tiny silver rings, camphor, porcelain black cats, corn husk women, and flour sacks. It is a sort of living museum of trinkets. Our living space ebbs and flows, the stuff taking over our 700-square-foot home and then being relegated to carefully organized bins in the garage that hold more stuff. We cycle the stuff from the garage into our apartment based on holidays, visitors, and moods. A discussion we often have is how, for us, renter’s insurance is irrelevant. These are things that cannot be replaced. And we do not own them for the thing that they are, the sign. We own them for the signified. “Stuff” is a tether to less of a memory and more of a possibility. “Once was” becomes “future potential” becomes “visionary.” Take it old, take it often, make it new. 

Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist says in his essay “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits” that the archive “… is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and of selection, which, in the end, results in the granting of a privileged status to certain written documents, and the refusal of that same status to others, thereby judged ‘unarchivable’. The archive is, therefore, not a piece of data, but a status.” Via selection and curation, the archive decides what is worth remembering and knowing and how we remember and know it. Perhaps more importantly is that the archive is historically controlled by white, wealthy, male bodies and institutions. This lack of diversity and dependence on capitalism problematically narrates history and knowledge. Artists, intellectuals, and historians often work to subvert the traditional archive in their work. And so, by simply privileging our own clutter, we too are challenging the archive with a self-archive of “unremarkable things.”

I’m being quite literal here with the words clutter and stuff. This is the stuff of ours that perhaps feels unpoetic and even burdensome. Yet, the stuff around us is arguably more representative of who we are than any epic story we may have to tell. Furthermore, artifacts of clutter and trash beg a sociopolitical class critique of the power of the archive. As though only outcasts thrift and hoard, or that art must be on expensive canvases or poetry written by trained poets. I propose that the modal generosity of the lyric (free, formal, self-taught, self-understood) provides an inherently an-archival space. Poetry can be boundless and linear, embodied and opaque. Poetry is innately juxtaposed and metaphorical while the archive relies on the typological and literal. Furthermore, poetry is free and accessible, whereas many archives aren’t even open to the public. With poetry you only need yourself. Writing materials help but are not required. Poetry is the most radical!

Questions to consider when engaging “Suggested Reading”:

How do self-archives, trash-art, dumpsters, collections, piles, and clutter work to disarm the ethos of “high art”? Can we consider these things an-archival? And if so, what does an-archive (process and product) look like? What are the limits of the archive, and how do stuff/clutter/trash complicate those limits? Is it possible to deform the traditional archive via an-archiving? 

Suggested Readings:

These readings illustrate what a somatic and/or domestic self-archive might look like within the world of the lyric. The writing activity below offers a starting point for this exploration. 

• Brenda Coultas, A Handmade Museum
• Jennifer Scappettone, The Republic of Exit 43
• Lonnie Holley, “Art is Life”
• Thomas Lux, “Refrigerator, 1957”
• Pablo Neruda, “Ode to My Socks”
• Ursula Brookbank, She World, “Bessie Lecture” 
• Kate Durbin, Hoarders
• Henry Goldkamp + Dani Leal, “T R A S H T A L K”
  • Denver Quarterly, Vol. 54, No.4, 2020

• Dorsey Craft, Plunder, “Domestic Poem”
• Kaia Sand’s work (all of it!)
• A few theoretical texts: Achille Mbembe’s “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits;” Phil Cohen’s Archive That, Comrade!; Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History

Writing Activity:

Go to your desk, your nightstand, your dresser, your kitchen counter, your coffee table, or your garage (a small landscape of YOU). Choose only one. Take a photo of that scene with your phone to take to your writing space or write within that space. Use the stuff in this space as inspiration and material for your poem. You might use one object; you might use several.

Choose from the following forms: Ode, Persona, Hybrid (image + text), prose poem, list poem, or collage/erasure (perhaps a document in that “landscape of you” that you want to perform an erasure on), and write a poem that catalogs the self via one to several of these items. You may choose to write a persona poem from the perspective of an object. Or, like Brenda Coultas you may choose to list your items lyrically and associatively. You could write an Ode like Neruda or like Scappettone, (and if material is textual) perform a collaged erasure. Whatever form you choose, the poem should metaphorically confess, divulge, accuse, and/or purge.