Archive of the Now

The Archive is hosting a poet-in-residence for one month until 17 March.

Cristina Judar is a writer from São Paulo, Brazil with a postgraduate degree in Cultural Journalism. Her first book, Lina, came out in 2009 and received the Cultural Action Grant in the Graphic Novel category, awarded by the State Secretary of Culture in São Paulo. In 2011, she published her second book, Vermelho, Vivo [Red, Live], which also received the Cultural Action Grant. Her latest book, Roteiros para uma vida curta [Scripts for a Short Life] received an honorable mention at the 2014 SESC Literary Awards. Cristina also writes Luminescências nas Pickups [Luminescence on Pickups,] a blog dedicated to fiction and is working on her first novel Oito do sete [Eight of seven].

This residency has been sponsored by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and the British Council. She is developing a literary project for the Archive of the Now which fuses prose and poetry inspired by interviews with Londoners. This will culminate in a pop-up exhibition on the QMUL campus in the week of 9 March.

Welcome to the relaunched Archive of the Now!

Over the past few months, the Archive has been completely redesigned.  We hope you’ll enjoy the richer content on the Author index pages, which allows you to sample a bit of poetry before you listen.  We’ve also added a page of Responses, where you can see what people have been saying about the Archive, including a survey of contributors and the essays by our Poet-in-Residence, Sophie Mayer.  Sophie’s essays are a good way to start navigating the Archive if you’ve never been here before.  We’ve also updated our Links page – please send us your own links to add here using the Contact Us form.  And you can use the Recent Additions page to see who’s new at the Archive.

To celebrate our relaunch, we’re very excited to announce new readings by Richard Barrett, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Jason Camlot, cris cheek, Sarah Crewe, Fiona Curran, Tom Jenks, and Sandeep Parmar.

We’re also looking forward to the first of our secondary school workshops, which Sophie will be leading at QMUL on Wednesday 6 November.  This workshop has proved immensely popular and was fully booked within a few hours, so we’ve added another date in November, and further workshops will take place in January.  We’re also planning a big surprise event to celebrate Sophie’s residency and involving all the students – more information on that will follow.

Sophie and Andrea are also leading a project, funded by the Innovation Fund at QMUL, to research metadata protocols for digital archives.  We have assembled a working group of postgraduate students and are thinking about how other digital archives catalogue and tag their assets.  We hope to be able to publish our findings and help to establish some standards for digital archiving, as well as to create a detailed database for the Archive which will allow you to play with our collection in new ways, using playlists, mixing tools, and apps.  We’ll update you on our progress over the next six months.

We are also in the process of recruiting undergraduate interns, who will help to enter data into that database, as well as take charge of contacting poets, making new recordings, and editing sound files.  The good people at the Centre for Digital Music are going to give us access to their sound studios so we can improve the quality of our recordings.  Against a background of record youth unemployment and spiralling student debt, we’re also aware that young people need extra support to get their careers going.  We will provide lots of training to our interns, so that they can help develop transferrable skills which will help them when they are job hunting.

We’re also preparing for a visit from Christina Davis in the spring, to lead a workshop with QMUL’s own undergraduates on poetry and performance.  Christina is Curator at the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University’s Lamont Library and we’re looking forward to collaborating with her in the future.

So, there has been a great deal going on behind the scenes at the Archive. As always we welcome your feedback.  Please get in touch to let us know what you think of the new site and what you’d like the Archive to do in future.  Thanks for listening.

Andrea Brady

Director, Archive of the Now

http://www.qmul.ac.uk/undergraduate/schools/docs/OnQ/114498.pdf

The Archive and the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary are hosting two poetry and performance workshops in November for year 13 students.

These workshop will be led by poet-in-residence and lecturer Sophie Mayer and will use familiar new media to engage students with excitingly unfamiliar poetry. Through the twists and turns of listening to the Archive, students will hear how poetry makes things new, and by hearing the variety of language use and ideas, they will grow in confidence in asking questions of literary texts and learn new strategies for answering them. This will be an exciting and fun introduction to poetry that will enhance students’ understanding of the curriculum. Students don’t need to be English literature specialists but some interest in poetry would be beneficial.

The workshop on Wednesday 6 November from 3-5pm is now fully booked but there is space available in the workshop for 23 November 3-5pm.

For more information contact Dr Andrea Brady at a.brady@qmul.ac.uk.

To book a place, please go to:

9 January 2014: workshop for year 11 students ONLY: book at http://aon091.eventbrite.co.uk/

23 January 2014: workshop for Year 12 students ONLY: book at https://aon231.eventbrite.co.uk.

You can now watch Marc Atkins and Rod Mengham’s collaborative film and poetry project via the Archive.

The internationally acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson was a distinguished visiting fellow at Queen Mary University of London in October 2012, during which time she gave this extraordinary performance, recorded for the Archive by Jacqui Johnson.

Now added: new readings by James Byrne, Justin Katko and Samantha Walton.

James Byrne is a British poet and Editor of The Wolf magazine whose collections include Blood/Sugar (2009).  His poetry has been translated into several languages, and he has performed in Syria and Serbia, among other places.

Samantha Walton has lived in Edinburgh and London, and in 2012 completed a PhD on psychology, law and selfhood in inter-war women’s writing. In 2011 she co-organised an experimental poetry conference and festival – ConVersify – at the University of Edinburgh and the Scottish Poetry Library.  Her publications include the duplicate book (2012), City Breaks Weekend Songs (2011) and tristanundisolde (2010).

Following an impromptu poetry festival at 73 Cobden Road, Brighton, the Archive is pleased to present readings by:

• Alan Hay
• Ed Luker
• Joe Luna runs the Hi Zero reading series and edits Hi Zero magazine.  Crater Press published the letterpress fold Google Song in 2011; a new book, ASTROTURF, is forthcoming.
• Verity Spott is a musician who runs regular music and poetry events including Horseplay and DYMI/DYMX/DYMII/PW4 as well as the Iodine poetry press. Verity is one half of the infamous Binnsclagg noise/poetry duo; collaborations include works with Christopher Buckley, Francis Crot and Timothy Thornton. Poetry publications include a figurative ‘translation’ of ‘the’ Iliad.
• Keston Sutherland teaches at the University of  Sussex and is co-editor of Barque Press. He has been heard just about live in  London, Cambridge, Brighton, Bolton, Paris, Val de Marne, Marseille, New  York, Boston, Mainz, Edenkoben, Guangzhou.
• Timothy Thornton

Applications should be sent as hard copies to: Dr Andrea Brady, Schoolof Englishand Drama, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London. E1 4NS.  Application enquiries should be directed to a.brady@qmul.ac.uk.

A confirmation email will be sent acknowledging receipt of all applications.  The deadline for receipt of applications is 1 December 2012.  Interviews will take place at the beginning of January.

 Valuing Diversity & Committed to Equality

‘The Archive demonstrates that the prestige presses and predictable prizes don’t have a monopoly on publication or literary value. The UK has an old and venerable tradition of keeping its most startling, exciting and ground-breaking work on the down-low, in the little magazines and small presses, the reading series in dilapidated pubs and tiny galleries and schools and towers. Over time, these activities become central to what British poetry can be. In recognition of the importance of the public reading, which draws in new audiences and makes new poets, sharpens lines and breaks open complacencies, the Archive is soon to include recordings of important historic reading series from throughout the UK. In that way, the Archive testifies that there are other ways of being a public writer than achieving commercial success. It is one of many places held open by poetry, where we can still hear each other and ourselves.’

Read more about the Archive in an editorial by the Director at the Poetry School.

Some exciting events are afoot at the Archive. For the next eight weeks, the Archive is Now on Penn Sound radio – listen here.  The Archive has also begun to host video – check out these collaborations by Marc Atkins and Rod Mengham.