''A poem among the diagrams'': Poetry as archival work in Muriel Rukeyser, Susan Howe, and M. Nourbese Philip

"A Poem Among the Diagrams: Poetry as Archival Work in Muriel Rukeyser, Susan Howe, and M. NourbeSe Philip" presents three case studies of contemporary women poets' sustained interventions in conventional methods of archival recovery. Focusing on Muriel Rukeyser, Susan Howe, and M. NourbeSe Philip, this project seeks to understand how poetry becomes a tool for and critique of academic work in the archives. Each chapter examines how the poet not only intervenes in the reading of manuscripts, but also disrupts the scholarly history around these documents. In doing so, the poets open their archival subjects to new arrangements of form and new possibilities for telling the history of the subject under examination. In addition to the hoped for recoveries of various sorts, these poets not only change the nature and definition of what constitutes official archival work and the production of historical knowledge (even what constitutes an archive), but they also point to limits to recovery's potential. Their use of poetry in the work illuminates a sense that knowledge is always relational and never to be final or complete---as, too, for the archives. In this sense, Rukeyser, Howe, and Philip forgo narrative structures that seek complete legibility in order to open alternative arrangements and experiences of historiographic work that can accommodate ambiguity, illegibility, and conjecture. The examination of Rukeyser, Howe, and Philip's portraits of alternative modes of archival work situates these poets within the discourse not only of a history of women's poetry as a site for critical interventions but also of the broader discussion of feminist research methodologies that question how and where historiographic recovery takes place.;The first chapter examines Muriel Rukeyser's Traces of Thomas Hariot (1971), and her production of the, at the time, buried life of the Elizabethan explorer, scientist, and mathematician. Rukeyser uses poetry to recover those aspects of Hariot's past that are more ambiguous, complex, and unverifiable. Through this recovery, she disrupts the discourse of specialization in her crossing of poetry and scientific histories. Chapter two focuses on Susan Howe's sustained engagement with the Jonathan Edwards archive at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library in Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007) and THAT THIS (2010). Howe's poetry stages a counterpoint to archival science and authorized archival work by exploring Edwards' manuscripts as both a material and spiritual practice, thereby drawing attention to the experience of text, texture, and the visualization of the archive in print. Chapter three evaluates Philip's direct confrontation with the legal record of the slave ship Zong. The chapter traces how the documents and subsequent representations of the Zong trial inform the public memory of the slave trade, but also block or occlude voices of the Africans on board the ship. Philip's poem, Zong!, incorporates fragments of Ifa divination language and verse structure in order to re-present a historiographic vision that emphasizes ceremony and ritual.