In the Archives
Christopher Arigo, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Claudia Keelan
My second collection of poetry, In the archives represents a bridge between my first collection of poems, Lit interim, and my newest, Myths and miscellany. In In the archives, the central metaphor is that of the archives: which can be a metaphor for memory, for how we store and organize knowledge, a metaphor for the place where poetry is made. In this collection, my concerns with formal characteristics of the poems is beginning to fade, though there are still remnants of such concerns, particularly in the serial poem, "Tracking sites," whose location on the page is determined by the dominant preposition in the almost Steinian repetition of those words. Other themes of organization, such as inventories, variations, briefs, sites, imperatives, and versions dominate the work, as if they could perhaps offer some insight into how we think, how we create, how poesis happens; This collection takes as its backdrop the current war(s) in the Middle East, living in a Western city, strange libraries occupied by half-presences, tulip bulbs struggling from their winter stasis, and strange worlds inhabited by unnamed barbarians up to some unclear crimes against humanity. These are poems struggling to free themselves from the mechanized world, poems that wish to return to a more pastoral version of themselves. Perhaps, though, such a return is impossible.
Archives; In The Archives; Original writing; Poems; Poetry
American literature; Literature, Modern
Arigo, Christopher, "In the Archives" (2007). UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations. 2781.
http://dx.doi.org/10.25669/zjbt-c7hc