Today we dip into our archives to revisit Lytle Shaw's 2008 lecture, "Olson's Archives: Fieldwork in New American Poetry," delivered at the Kelly Writers House as part of the Theorizing series.
Delivered on October 22nd of that year, "Olson's Archives" would eventually appear as a chapter in Shaw's 2013 book, Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (here referenced under its working title, Field Authorities). In the essay Shaw examines "site-specific poetry and art as forms of experimental historiography and ethnography," tracing the shift from "a future-oriented poetics of place" (as seen in Williams and Olson) to a contemporaneously lived aesthetic (he cites Creeley, Baraka and Snyder as examples). In particular, Shaw is "interested in the way that poets who wanted to account for actual empirical places found themselves having to trespass beyond poetry proper to poach some of their authority from other disciplinary fields."
You'll find Shaw's lecture on his PennSound author page, alongside eight other recordings, starting with a 1999 reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Other readings include a trio of Segue Series readings — two from the Bowery Poetry Club (in 2004 and 2009) and a 2014 set at Zinc Bar — plus a 2002 reading at The Kootenay School of Writing, a 2006 appearance on Cross-Cultural Poetics, and his contributions to a "Barbara Guest Praise Day" at the BPC during the same year. In addition, you'll want to be sure to check out the Line Reading Series, which Shaw curated at the Drawing Center in New York from 2000-2006.
