Arch(d)ive: SOPs of the IRL; Return to the Gathering Place

As you emerge from the cavern of an only recently—only intellectually—abated slo-mo catastrophe, you may catch a strange note on the air. Some sense pulsing in the ether. But it isn’t ethereal, it’s here. On the ground. Mass desire: we want out. Back out there. Again and enough that even the more cautious among us may actually begin to go, despite risks. Risks that now have the potential to count as calculated. There’s a mostly reliable basecoat of information. A crude formula has emerged. Into it one may pour data to predict notional outcomes within a range of relative probability. This is new.

It feels exhausting to talk about because it is, but after a couple years worth of Zoom readings and online book launches and futzing around in the cloud (a cool place, which like all cool places, warms) there is a growing collective sense that the people would like to go out now. Into the world to do things. There are more readings, open mics, and book launch parties happening in Cleveland this fall than at any other time in our recent anecdotal memory. A lot more than there were pre-quarantine. Attendance, even when low, has felt markedly enthusiastic. It feels good to be glad to be here. We know the limits better now. We now better know.

*Michael Joseph Walsh, Olivia Lott, Katherine M. Hedeen; Friday night lights*

On Friday, September 30, 2022, the Poetry Center hosted its first on-campus in-person reading in more than two years, celebrating the launch of Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence and Raúl Gómez Jattin’s Almost Obscene, translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott. Thanks to all who came. The event felt and was marked by its difference. The work done by so many presses, authors, and readers to pluck so much independent literary culture and programming from the IRL so it could perch comfortably in the cloud without incurring unnecessary danger is part of many ongoing collective shifts in standard operating procedure. There is no normal to return to, but last weekend the familiar awkward thrill of assembling with friends and strangers in a room to hear poetry (writing) read aloud from a book (the page) had not lost any of its emotional, psychic, or ceremonial power, and perhaps had only increased, charged up to glowing by the advent of such a protracted absence. When the time comes the last one out will remember to turn off the lights. In the meantime something’s plugged back in.

Live readings and in-person events have been a cornerstone of the CSU Poetry Center’s mission since before the formation of the press itself. Local readings create free public access to new, high-quality, and, we believe, exciting and important literature and cultural experiences that are not otherwise easily accessible. (Our books are not for sale everywhere. They couldn’t be. The modes and means of what we publish are not the purview of the norm. The purpose of the small, independent press is to exist outside and provide for the further afield, imagining the other possible, extending the field itself.) We organize readings and literary programs not because they move units but because we believe poetry, literature, and the book are actual gathering places. Places where we can be under a purposefully different set of conditions from those we elect and endure in other parts of life. Here, at a reading, we get to be in one together. For a few minutes the book is a room.

Digging in the trash (archives) over the summer, I discovered among the faxes and rubber band-bound clumps of email exchanges and contracts a small hoard of flyers from Poetry Center readings past. By no means comprehensive (mostly 2008-2010), this short stack of documents printed on textured (fancy!) sheets of 8.5x11 and poster stock offers an incidental history of who’d been here when they were, during brief windows when someone else thought to save something, a monument to advances in graphic design practices and print technology as much as to the Poetry Center’s place in the history of contemporary poetics and independent publishing.

These events took place long ago but are worth remembering now. For old headshots and proof there was a past, if nothing else. In cautious celebration of the IRL, with credit to that past and hope for this future, here is a slice of that monument.

*Local pals: s/o NEOMFA, LitYoungstown, Ted’s ongoing archival work with the Poetry Center*

Oh yeah, and if you’re ever on the fence about going to a reading, if disillusion should start to creep in and all hope for poetry seem lost, just remember:

See you out there.

—Zach Peckham, Managing Editor, CSU Poetry Center

Arch(d)ive: SOPs of the IRL; Return to the Gathering Place

AND COULD THEY HEAR ME I WOULD TELL THEM (JORDAN STEMPLEMAN)

AND COULD THEY HEAR ME I WOULD TELL THEM (RACHEL ABRAMOWITZ)