“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