»Sounding Archives – Poetry between Experiment and Document«

»Poetry can extend the document.«
Muriel Rukeyser

The twentieth century nestles inside the twenty-first century like a matryoshka, whispering from the inner archive. Open it, and line up the dolls: Some have mutated or are encrypted, some have been put back inside as smaller matryoshkas. Jacques Derrida said the archive is a matter for the future, not the past. Poetry, as Muriel Rukeyser wrote, can extend the document.
Poets have always interrogated history, have always researched sources. Yet with the political upheavals of the past thirty years, with increasing nationalistic isolation, with climate change and the destruction of resources, with our dataflow subject to intensified Orwellian scrutiny, we find a stronger experimental and documentary poetics pushing its way into verse.
Poetica 7 would like to ask: How does contemporary poetry extend the archive? How does poetic thinking decode, document, give voice to newly revealed traumatic content? Conversely, when poems themselves are opaque, tonal archives, how do they extend our insight into what is witnessing, what is deciphering, what it means to understand reality? Is sound itself a chamber of memory, can it save what the archive forgets?

- Uljana Wolf