Archives, moraines and excavatory poetics

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the ideas and processes of an ‘excavatory’ poetics and its interrelation with archaeological fieldwork, archives and exhibitions. I first focus on notions of authorial intent in the collage poetics of Susan Howe, suggesting that her interrogation of archives has an excavatory quality which reveals a concern with the articulation of provenance. I argue that Howe’s work repositions the reader at the site of artefactual discovery, before the object has been sanitised, removed from its context, and provided with an authoritative interpretation. The article then documents my own work, The Cult Revived, which, by drawing on Joseph Campbell’s image of a ‘moraine of myths’, assembles a ‘word moraine’ from which a series of poetic excavations are made. I argue that, despite there being no ‘great lost form’ to reconstitute, meaning-making can arise through the archaeological methodology of arranging textual shards on the museum table of the page. Despite the provisional status of such ‘findings’, I suggest that The Cult Revived reflects the broader instabilities and uncertainties inherent in archaeological endeavour, when set against the inscrutable and intractable agencies of deep time.