Archive of the Now
the source for British innovative poetry
The Archive of the Now is a digital collection of over 100 poets performing their own work. Based at Queen Mary University of London, it hosts many specially commissioned recordings unavailable anywhere else, all of which can be downloaded free of charge.
TODAY'S POET
Carol Mirakove
Born in Queens, New York, my love of poetry began at a young age and ignited while studying at University of East Anglia in Norwich. Following a mentorship with Lee Upton at Lafayette College I earned my MFA at George Mason University with Carolyn Forché as my advisor, during which time I became involved with the very vibrant poetry community in Washington, DC, organized by Mark Wallace, Rod Smith, Buck Downs, Joe Ross, and Heather Fuller.
I am a founding member of the subpress collective, with whom I published Fractured Humorous by Edwin Torres. I lived in NYC from 2001-2009, during which time I was a workshop leader at The Poetry Project and I served the arts newspaper Boog City as ...
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NEWS
1 May 2013: Sophie Mayer has been appointed poet in residence in the Archive of the Now for one year.
Sophie will provide twelve monthly responses to the Archive, lead projects to develop access to the site, and host four workshops at QMUL for key stage 3 and 4 students to explore the poetic uses of digital technology. These workshops will draw on their experience of media, migration, multilingualism, and how they affect their bodies and emotions.
“I’ll be looking at the Archive of the Now in relation to its potential as an archive — what it’s preserving and how, and what kind of research that makes possible — and as an unusual archive conceived as a snapshot of the “now,” to consider what the poetry recorded by the Archive says about how we live now,” she says. “As well as digital technologies, I’ll be thinking about other inventive forms of communication in the Archive: poets’ use of jargons, slangs and multiple languages reflecting changing conversations. Experimenting in ways of speaking and recording our experimental lives at a time of rapid social and material change, the poems that make up the ever-expanding Archive offer immediate and provocative ways of thinking about questions that concern us all.”
