Watching Black Women Writers in the SFSU Poetry Archives

At work on a Black Women Writers in the Archives curriculum, Arisa White discovered recordings of established and soon-to-be poetry legends in the archives of the San Francisco State University Poetry Center. Via Literary Hub:

In the Spring of 2016, I received an offer from San Francisco State University to work as a visiting scholar in the Poetry Center on a Black Writers in the Archives curriculum. Creating a curriculum was a tall order for only one semester, considering there are 200-plus recordings, starting as early as the 1950s, of writers who can be classified as black. I began going through the catalogues—some were kept by hand, typed, and written into a ledger; another was nicely printed and bound; and there were Excel spreadsheets for the 90s and 2000s. As I thumbed through the pages, I found my interests pulled toward Alice Walker, Erica Hunt, Harryette Mullen, Ntozake Shange, Rita Dove, Toi Derricotte: the women. I had intellectual and artistic connections with these poets. I broke bread with Walker at her dining room table; I admired the muscle in Hunt’s poems; after my first reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, Bob Holman had recommended Mullen’s Sleeping With the Dictionary; For Colored Girls made up a significant portion of my undergraduate senior conference paper; about Dove I wanted to know more; and Derricotte is the co-founder of my own poetry home, Cave Canem.

Most of the original recordings are organized in what Steve Dickinson calls the Vault—a temperature-controlled room that disintegrating 44mm film leaves smelling like vinegar. There’s bright fluorescent lighting, 7-foot rolling metal shelves full of VHS tapes, cassettes, reels of film, columns of DVDS, and masters and duplicates. I was able to find the original DVD of myself reading with Raina J. Leon on April 9, 2015. Some shelves are still empty, and that space is for the future: for poets who will one day read at The Poetry Center, for the many black female poets who will continue this lineage along. I felt part of something that was regenerative, something that gave my body the security of a back-presence—a posse of poets with the conviction of their word. This allowed me to feel rooted in the now, to feel a greater presence.

Continue at Literary Hub.