Lost & Found on Harriet

I love this interview with Ammiel Alcalay and Ana Bozičević, and not just 'cause it gives the history of a class I took with them at the CUNY Graduate Center last fall (though it feels very Lost-&-Found to give a history of this class!).

There's lots of great thinking and writing about New American Poetries in the interview, and here's something I especially loved from one of Ana's responses:

Naming is powerful and we should question how we name poets. Something di Prima emphasizes in her work is the personal, rather than collective, approach to poetic heritage – and following that trail back with her was incredibly rewarding. It did lead me to the collective eventually – to her peers and precedents – but by a different route. The scenic route traced by the person who built the road. It was a way to recontextualize her path on its cultural and political map… Once such work of re-classification that came out this year is Duncan’s amazing The H.D. Book. This is the sort of work I think Lost & Found is looking to do. Canonization strikes me as a process similar to beatification – an exceptional individual is made idol. I hope some of the materials we publish can reverse that process, and the reader may find themselves scratching their back with the poet-saint’s fibula. Somewhere between the dumpster and the reliquary is the living archive.