Melissa Eleftherion's Blog, page 15

“jam bat echolocation”

 

Genital moths in these undercurrents sound

One zaps the other in a disco fight

In these frequencies the skin of light jumps

Echoes migration of cave etching

Sonographic teeth on the radio

 

Insects’ lips fight ultrasound with ultrasound

Feel it suck and bounce

Grab the spiny-legged

Rasp of a scaly abdomen

My species a one-click strategy

My sensitive species

 

Hunting we smash records vibrate vaginas

Any bat can squeak

Evolutionary arms race to the artificial version

Simple probing extremely simple

The pitch of a neuron crescendo

The courtship call we produce

 

source texts: 

http://www.nature.com/news/hawkmoths-zap-bats-with-sonic-blasts-from-their-genitals-1.13333

http://www.nature.com/news/moth-smashes-ultrasound-hearing-records-1.12941

http://www.nature.com/news/1999/990401/full/news990401-5.html

A Death’s Head Moth Visits California

I am trying to understand you, moth

Your brown blink of dun fur dotted white buzzing

You, dead on my office floor

You, taunting me on the house porch

Who do you carry?

 

The Internet tells me you bear a skull on your thorax

But I see a smiling pig snout as if you welcomed the down and out and muddy

Do I know you? Did we meet on the beached fishing boat in Monterosso?

I sense you have a message transcending statistical data

 

We are both honey-named short proboscis Medusas

Larvae for the undercurrent’s meat

Taxonomical aberrations

Pierce the wax, damage the fruit

 

The myth of my Italian heritage says I may have the malocchia  

To be stalked by a death’s head moth

To be stalked by wings I must carry a horn

Stout tongue of the stigma

If the oil forms an eye, your fur is mine

 

Myth says moths are dead souls

Your body was as intact as a specimen

As I set you in the wastebasket

Where is the apparition you’ve been carrying?

I want to talk to her.

 

image from http://greenbuzzz.com/wp-content/uplo... 

mama, turn out the light -

The eggs are laid in the galleries

We wander, plucking faces from white walls

The yolk demands its attachment

The yolk broadcasts the feed

 

A nest of small beaks, a nest of plumes

In circles, circles

Wingless, a shiny cadence

Tufted f-stop heart 

Lets light in, brave

 

The fight is feathery distance but we claw its shimmer of idea

A hologram that pops up strata with puffed chins and chest

The shooting gallery where we fire and fire

A high squealing wah wah wah

 

first and last lines quoted from 80′s era editions of Field Guide to Insects (Embioptera order) and Field Guide to Birds (White-Fronted Goose) respectively…

 

mama, turn out the light –

The eggs are laid in the galleries

We wander, plucking faces from white walls

The yolk demands its attachment

The yolk broadcasts the feed

 

A nest of small beaks, a nest of plumes

In circles, circles

Wingless, a shiny cadence

Tufted f-stop heart 

Lets light in, brave

 

The fight is feathery distance but we claw its shimmer of idea

A hologram that pops up strata with puffed chins and chest

The shooting gallery where we fire and fire

A high squealing wah wah wah

 

first and last lines quoted from 80′s era editions of Field Guide to Insects (Embioptera order) and Field Guide to Birds (White-Fronted Goose) respectively…

 

The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange: A Community – Curated Model

Following is a transcript of my talk at AWP 2014 where I presented on a panel commemorating 60 years of the Poetry Center’s Digital Archive. I presented the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange in its current manifestation as both archive and site for circulation of current work. I discussed its creation, development, and direction as digital repository; the importance of community curation, development of collaborative tools within a public space, and original notion of chapbook as gift–sharing poetry as opposed to ownership.

____________________________________________________________________________

 

How much agency do we have in deciding what gets saved to define a poetic history or lineage? When we talk about born-digital, electronic, or out-of-print books that exist only as PDFS or Word documents, there’s a huge risk for future data loss due to format obsolescence and bit corruption. Sometimes, these creative losses are a welcome relief – we don’t need to save everything after all nor is it possible to do so. But as communities of practice, it behooves us to participate in the telling of our shared history for future generations by collecting moments enough to define our time.

With the Poetry Center, I’ve taken a small step in this direction by creating an open-access digital repository to help expand and ensure sustained access to chapbooks. The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange is a community-curated archive created and developed for poets to convene, correspond, and collaborate via chapbooks: the currency of the poetry community. Our mission is to engage our poetry community by sparking dialogues between the chapbooks in the interest of collaboratively building a community archive.

The model for the chapbook exchange was catalyzed by the need to invigorate poetry collections in public libraries and was expanded to include extant poetry communities. This cooperative model has facilitated the compilation of a diverse and innovative collection of poetry chapbooks for public access. We began by inviting a select group of core contributors – and have grown our collection in just a few months to feature chapbooks from over 40 contributors.
Contributors are invited to share their chapbooks via upload and as such gain access to the chapbook repository. They are also invited to recommend another poet to contribute to the exchange. The model is “take a chapbook, leave a chapbook.” The chapbook exchange is a contributor-driven peer-to-peer environment that allows users to exchange chapbooks as a variation on the pay-to-play theme in that in this case, poetry is the currency required for participation.

Deploying Chapbooks as Community-Bonding Tools

Chapbooks have a long history of communicating impelling messages to communities. “From the 16th to early 19th centuries, chapbooks were mass-produced, cheaply made booklets sold hand-to-hand by traveling salesmen, or chapmen in Western Europe and North America.” (Craig, 2011) Today’s chapbooks are regarded as essential to the evolution of ongoing dialogues around poetics and poetry. “…[They’re] part of ongoing poetic conversations, as well as a practice of exchange that is ever present in the maintenance of community” (Craig, 2011). They are often handmade and sold cheaply or given as gifts. The message within often outweighs financial compensation for the author; often, what fuels their tenacity is a desire to contribute to a powerful lineage of poets as well as a commitment to correspondence and collaboration with peers.

A 2009 report from the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute via the Poetry Foundation titled Poetry and New Media: A User’s Guide – describes their “vision for engaging educators, institutions, and communities” and names the importance of open-access publishing and “working to increase the access of poets as producers.”

The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange aims to foster that ethic, by making available virtual hubs for collaboration and exchange of chapbooks. To augment existing print collections as well as build a virtual poetry collection sustained by global and local poetry communities. We’ve maintained an instrumental role by providing and moderating key access points to this portal to engage local writers. The open-access format is conducive to quick and efficient chapbook sharing, and can serve as a forum for writers and other patrons to communicate and share ideas. We’re interested in capturing the many ways we activate one another as writers in the community.

Currently, the site is in the early stages of what we hope will be a lively and vital cooperative space for poets to practice the continuum of reading and writing in the creative process. Contributing creative works in this forum also allows users the opportunity to generate creative responses to extant works in the collections. As such, this chapbook exchange might be a model for teachers wishing to employ emerging technologies in the classroom to highlight opportunities for both active and collaborative learning.

As a community-curated project, Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange participants are actively involved in the process of archiving their own work. Once they become active members, they also able to assign metadata (or tag) their books with pertinent descriptors to make their works more findable. In doing so, they become agents in the shaping of our shared history for future readers. Contributors also choose their own creative commons licensing attributes and permissions, and can permit or decline use in any number of ways.

The site was built using Omeka: “a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions.” (Ray Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, 2014). We chose Omeka as our trial platform because of the Roy Rosenzweig and Center for History and New Media’s great reputation for preserving and archiving creative works. Omeka enables participants to control how their work is presented, and offers tutorials to facilitate the user process. Omeka uses Dublin Core metadata standards and allows for user tagging which enables participants to define how items are remembered. It also hosts various plug-ins, which allows users to import myriad file formats.

Cooperative Archiving & Preservation

As archivists, it is incumbent on us to meet certain criteria to maintain our digital collections: digital objects must be controlled, i.e. findable, secure, readable, renderable, and authentic. Digital preservation necessitates the use of metadata by which to store and retrieve our digital objects. A collection must be safe and secured from both internal and external threats. We must also know when to upgrade our software and hardware to maintain readability of our collections. Congruent with readability is renderability; we must know how our digital objects should be displayed.

Though not without its limitations, the cooperative archiving model is an active means toward long-term preservation. First, by crowdsourcing descriptive metadata from the community to assign to our digital collections, we are improving chances for a file’s findability in 10 or 15 years by activating memories of individuals as well as the community at large. Through remembering nuances or details, we give voice to these subtleties and allow for the chance to re-experience lived events through the archive. In this sense we do indeed converse with the dead.

Another benefit of cooperative archiving is the use of community standard file formats, which will aid renderability later when we want to read files. Experts in digital preservation recommend opting for community standard or widely used data formats like PDF because there are greater chances that we’ll have the right programs to open files.
The LOCKSS system, which is also known as (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), may also help ensure that our peers or colleagues will have a copy of our book downloaded to their hard drive. While this is a common preservation method, it is not necessarily the most secure since LOCKSS lends itself to the possibility of copies being whittled down one by one for various reasons (unreadable formats, human error, etc). However, cooperative archiving does allow for more content to be saved due to sheer volume. Lastly, cooperative archiving encourages participants to share their diverse skills, knowledge, and expertise and facilitates opportunities to learn from others in the community.

Future Directions

Some future directions for the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange are to cooperatively bridge the gaps between the historicity of the archive and the currency of pen striking paper. We’re interested in what happens when communities come together to archive the now while also honoring historical conversations around poetics, art, and poetry that helped generate contemporary creative works. As archives are creative forces in themselves, we’re excited by the energetic possibilities for poets to further engage with the collection by producing new works and developing partnerships.

As a cooperatively curated site, the chapbook exchange can also be a self-sustainable method of disseminating the current arcs of various poetic movements and potentially may prove successful in engaging users all over the world. In fact, we recently added a bilingual chapbook to the collection from a poet living in Ireland who had written to us with interest.

Conclusion

Our sense of communing with the dead through the written word, our wonder and fulfillment at the dread and elation of writing – These are some of the reasons we feel called as readers, as writers, and also as archivists. It is this continuum that catches us in its legacy as we root with it. As we live and write we extend laterally to encompass the time we’re in, the currencies moving about, and we pulse on. It is also this vitality and community that we as writers can feel alienated from or urged to maintain. However, our combined resources are mighty – and with a little collaboration and cooperation – we may just keep this thing going.

References

American Library Association. (1996). Library Bill of Rights. Accessed May 10, 2012 from http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill

Andrade, Mary. 2012. Crowdsource your next program design. T+D, 66(3), 52-56.

Antonucci, Ron. 2004. A rhyme a day. Library Journal. Retrieved from http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/ljinprint/currentissue/871807-403/collection_development_quotpoetryquot_a_rhyme.html.csp

Caplan, Priscilla. 2009. Understanding PREMIS. Library of Congress. Retrieved from at http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/understanding-premis.pdf

Collins, K., Furman, R, & Riddoch, R. 2004. Poetry, writing and community practice. Human Service Education, 24(1), 19-32.

Craig, Ailsa. 2011. When a book is not a book: objects as players in identity and community formation. Journal of Material Culture, 16 (1), 47-63.

Dymoke, S. & Hughes, J. 2009. Using a poetry repository: how can the medium support pre-service teachers of English in their professional learning about writing poetry and teaching poetry writing in a digital age? English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 8 (3), 91-106

Fallows, D; Horrigan, J; & Lenhart, A. (2005). Content Creation Online. Washington DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, February 29. Accessed May 11, 2012: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2004/Content-Creation-Online/2-Content-Creation-Online/1-The-material-people-contribute-to-the-online-world.aspx

Grotke, A. 2011. Cooperative archiving: Event harvesting in perspective. Annual meeting with Library of Congress and National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Retrieved from http://search.loc.gov:8765/digitalpreservation/query.html?st=1&charset=utf-8&lk=1&nh=10&si=0&col=loc&qp=url%3A/http%3A//www.digitalpreservation.gov/&qt=revolution

Holley, Rose. 2010. Crowdsourcing: How and why should libraries do it? D-Lib Magazine, 16(3) 5-23.

Hughes-Hassell, S., & Miller, E. T. (2003). Public library websites for young adults: Meeting the needs of today’s teens online. Library and Information Science, 25, 143–156.

Jones, P. (2002) New Directions for Library Service to Young Adults. Chicago: American Library Association.

Lenhart, A., & Madden, M. (2005). Teen content creators and consumers. Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, November 2. Accessed April 27, 2011: http://www.pewInternet.org/PPF/r/166/report_display.asp

RLG. (2002). Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities: an RLG-OCLC Report. Retrieved from: http://www.oclc.org/programs/ourwork/past/trustedrep/repositories.pdf
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. About CHNM. Retrieved December 10, 2011 from http://chnm.gmu.edu/about/

SinhaRoy, S. 2011. Libraries tap into the crowdsource. American Libraries, 42(11/12), 22-23.

Smith, Aaron. (2010). Mobile Access 2010. Washington DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 7. Accessed May 11, 2012: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Mobile-Access-2010.aspx

Tyckoson, David. 2003. On the desirableness of personal relations between archivists and readers: the past and future of reference service. Reference Services Review, 31 (1), 12-16

 

Copyright

apoetlibrarian by Melissa Eleftherion is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

A Wrinkle in Time

 

Midst the Chaos of the last few weeks – laying out chapbooks, re-writing a panel presentation, prepping for 2 AWP readings, applying for jobs, planning my son’s birthday party, and steeling myself for a potentially major life-changing event – I re-read A Wrinkle in Time for the first time in 30-odd years. Oddly, there was never a more appropriate time for me to read it – thick in the maelstrom of the Black Thing (fears) as I am, learning how to fight back with more love, less anger.  It’s been a delight to feel whisked away from the subway cattle while en route to my own veal pen, to feel tessered, untethered, caught in the whirl, but temporarily giddy with it, not anxious. 

For a while now, I’ve felt called to return to AWIT as if it held a potency, a vastness, a key of sorts to return me to blacked-out parts of my childhood I can’t recall for some reason or another. To reconnect with a younger me connecting with the joy, vitality, resiliency, and anger of Meg – how it might have encouraged me to endure and trust myself as a teen. But – I don’t remember how I felt when I read it as a child. Just remember being lost so completely in stories that I felt dissolved – as though the corporeal me faded ever so slightly from the world, as though a book’s close allowed my body to re-inhabit rooms in a new way that felt brighter, buoyant. 

So – thank you, Madeleine L’Engle for helping me through yet another transition. Thank you, Aunt Beast. And thanks to Diane and Phoenix for the reminder.

 

little stem

 

 

My poem “little stem” is up at Finery, and will be one of seven postcard poems featured (in an extended version) in my upcoming Dusie Kollektiv chapbook: Prism Maps. “little stem” began as a postcard poem in conversation with the image above, and was mailed to a poet in the group. “A poet in the group” sounds ominous - alas, postcards are not cannibals; they’re a great catalyst for building momentum when you think you’ve no time for writing poems. (Catalysts, not cannibals.)

I have a soft place in the heartstrings for postcards and handwritten correspondence. So much can be said in the postcard space by diverse measures – dashed off fervently while waiting in line for groceries, exactingly laid down to enhance the postcard form, or scrawled to cover every inch of the text space. Postcards are a pithy and resonant form for the force, y’all.

 

 

Peer Review: Crowdsourcing Content to Promote Community and Collection Development in Public Libraries

Dear readers,

I just received the eprint link to my first peer reviewed article! I wrote this paper in preparation for the presentation I gave on the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange at AWP, and it was recently published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship (JERL).

The model for the chapbook exchange was catalyzed by the need to invigorate poetry collections in public libraries and was expanded to include extant poetry communities. Watching the project grow from a seed in my brain as a library student to a thriving and evolving community of poet exchanges has been very fulfilling!

I’ll be updating this talk for the upcoming AWP conference in Seattle where I will be presenting alongside my Poetry Center colleagues in celebration of 60 years of the Poetry Center’s archives.

If you’re interested in participating or learning more about the creation and development of the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange, please feel free to email me: melissa dot eleftherion dot gmail dot com. The site currently hosts a selection of readable/downloadable chapbooks in PDF format, and will be going totally live on December 1st – so stay tuned

 

 

postcard poem

Working girls get the butter

An inedible sea wall

Echolocates the rasp

Of insect ecology

A clasp of the spiny-legged

Mouths multitask

The ultrasound

A beam of genital strategies

postcard poem from me to you

Rooting wing of the Pegasus

How we holding on breaks

mis/ en/ scene

The snowglobe smashed

Reveals

What Is

All animals flailing in water