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Positioning these writers within an archival theoretical discourse will free their work from the limits of a strictly poetic movement such as the Language school and place their writing in a broader scholarly and political argument that is ultimately less confining. That Susan Howe defines herself as an antinomian, a word which means “forever disjunctive, interruptive, unclassifiable, undomesticated, heretical” is appropriate. Howe and Robertson open gateways into both archives and history and make true Robertson’s manifesto: “Soft Architecture will reverse the wrongheaded story of structural deepness. That institution is all doors, but no entrances”

Stream: Libraries

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

I am a librarian at Simon Fraser University, acting as liaison for the departments of English, History and Political Science, and a current graduate student in the Department of English. I will be completing my M.A., with a specialization in Print Culture, in April of 2006 and will conclude my studies by taking up a fellowship at King’s College London, studying the Mottram Collection in the College Archives for a month. Over the course of my career as a librarian and a student at SFU, my broad interest in modern poetics has narrowed to several related areas that complement my professional, scholarly and creative interests. My studies, particularly the writing I have done on the poets Susan Howe and Lisa Robertson during the completion of my M.A., have shaped my position for my Ph.D., as has my affiliation with SFU’s Special Collections and my interest in the Contemporary Literature Collection housed there. My research explores the political and artistic possibilities for these two writers who choose to work within the institutional structure of the archive. Is there a true ‘poetics of the archive’ that can escape the oppressive nature of the institution to finally create a work that is ideologically new and more politically powerful than the originals that inspired it? Referring to Derrida’s and Foucault’s theoretical positions on the archive, I will situate the American poet Susan Howe and the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson within an emerging argument, exemplified by Martha Nell Smith’s article "Because the Plunge From the Front Overturned Us: The Dickinson Electronic Archives Project," which views the product of scholarly work as separable from its material artifact.