'The Live Archive' - Methodology Poem

Here's my methodology / introduction poem to my project; The Live Archive

Listen to the poem here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XpvYcx7gVU5MrXchmxoiJEU3RctQFImj/view?usp=sharing

Welcome to The Live Archive

A living breathing poem -

event, idea, method, inquiry, feeling and emotion

I’m Erin: artist / researcher

Reality unearther

Archivist worker

And social-justice-searcher

I make music out of language

Translating words I’ve nurtured

And I’m here to share my research

I’ve been looking at how poetry can be used as research

How art can contribute to more alternative, accessible, decolonial, non-traditional unimaginably re-positional forms of research

What education can look like I am reimagining,

As well as who it can include and what traditions we are challenging

It’s important to understand this work is not just my own

Here lies a history far bigger than what can easily be known

This is a legacy so deep I am trying to break open

So with each word that is spoken

Please hear not just my voice

Hear everyone and everything that influenced this choice

See all the images not archived, excluded and left out

Taste the blood of papercuts of pages turned and sources found

Feel the grief of every soul with seeds but no soil left to sprout

I have the privilege of being heard in a way that many others have not

So let this research be for every single story that was lost

Now My method and approach to this was

Actually…non-existent

I led with intuition, and with my ancestors guiding me

I watched this project and my process bloom into fruition

I attended lectures and seminars and dug into the curriculum

I met with teachers, library staff, friends, phd’ers, poets, researchers, students and artists,

Amongst the living I also met the dead

Through library books, archives, images and poems,

And before my eyes and in my soul my purpose was set in motion

It was clear my research was action-based, art based and fast-paced, intense and overwhelming, and ancestral as my heart raced

I began my first big step; poem transcriptions,

I took these chunky theoretical texts academics had written

I transcribed them into poems, breaking down theories into sound and spoken word

Which were then added to the curriculum and in class discussed and listened

Next I took on articles, weaving poetry within

Selecting sources, finding nuggets of knowledge and trying to tye them in

I held intentional conversations with Black academics,

Taking notes and undoing themes

To uncover rigid seams

Of the academic world and its colonial-cast schemes

I spent time in the archives, renting and reading works

Travelling in time through the pages as history was stirred

I presented my research at the Stuart Hall Researchers' Workshop

And independently hosted 5 workshops of my own

And by asking participants at the end for 1 word

I created 3 collective ethnographic poems from the experiences I'd heard

I made 5 mini zines reflecting 5 mini moments

Telling 5 different tales of activist-based omens

I collected this and more and creatively poured

My work into an archive, digital and physical

And speaking of the physical, do you see what I’ve done

I’ve spun this on its head and presented everyone

This is The Live Archive

It’s sitting on my tongue

This is The Live Archive

Take what you’ve learned and tell someone

This is The Live Archive

And it has only just begun