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

Kai Fierle-Hedrick

Born Toronto, Canada. A mixed-media writer whose research interests circle around collaborative, community-engaged practices. Kai holds an MPhil in Architecture and the Moving Image from Cambridge University [UK] -- and has worked as a Project-Assistant for the interdisciplinary consultancy General Public Agency, spent two years developing and facilitating cross-disciplinary writing workshops for the East-Side Educational Trust, and from 2006 to 2007 also taught as a visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. She now currently lives and works in New York City as a Program Manager at the non-profit Free Arts NYC, and is the Managing Editor of How2. Contact: www.orium.org.  

Read more about Kai Fierle-Hedrick »

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.”