Mary Jo Bang Reflects on Poetry in the Digital Age
What is the future of poetry archives in the digital era? What actions can we take toward preventing future losses of these archives in a rapidly evolving digital landscape—especially when dealing with bodies of work and creative processes that are often hybrid and extraordinarily complex, created by a community that is itself heterogeneous?
These questions are at the center of the Libraries’ Born-Digital Poetry Project, a Mellon-funded, interdisciplinary project that brings together poets, scholars, and library practitioners, including archivists, curators, and others. The project strives to prevent the loss of creative practices when materials only exist in digital form—materials vital to the humanities, especially given how poetry documents the cultural, political, environmental, and social questions of our time. How can we sustain the longevity of these works?
The Mary Jo Bang Papers serve as the pilot project for this initiative, revealing many fascinating insights into how both digital and analog materials can be preserved, as well as the risks of their potential loss. As both forms are considered archival materials, archivists have demonstrated the importance of creating a bridge between them, especially since, as the project has shown, poets often work across both digital and analog formats.
Mary Jo Bang, a professor of English at WashU, began placing her papers in the Modern Literature Collection in 2014. They include drafts, notes, correspondence, ephemera, and more. She has also contributed extensive digital materials, which, like their analog counterparts, document multiple versions of her published works in earlier stages.
With over ninety boxes of analog materials and over 125,500 digital files, Bang’s extensive collection has provided a unique opportunity to develop methods for archiving poetry on this scale.
The analog and digital drafts allow for the tracing and documentation of the complexity of her creative process, both in her own poetry, such as her most recent collection, A Film in Which I Play Everyone and in the translation of others, such as Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso (to be published later this year), and A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, co-translated with Yuki Tanaka.
At the core of Born-Digital Poetry lies a deeper question: How does one poet decide to entrust their work to such a collection? Bang shared her personal experiences with archives, and the unique approach of the Born-Digital Poetry Project, and offered advice for poets who may want to curate their own personal collection.
For Bang, the decision to contribute her materials to an archive was driven by her recognition of the significance of preserving not just finished works, but also the creative process itself. When asked what motivated her to contribute her work to the Modern Literature Collection, especially in terms of sharing such an intimate aspect of her creative process, she said:
“When Kymberly Taylor and I were in the MFA program at Columbia in the early ’90s, we took the train up to Poughkeepsie to look at Elizabeth Bishop’s poem drafts at Vassar College. It was inspiring to see drafts of “One Art” evolve from a rather artless expression of unrequited love into the poem we know today. It taught me that revision is an act of obsessive perseverance, not a waiting game for divine inspiration. Archives show how writers create through trial and error, refining ideas to capture psychological resonance in language. I wanted my work to possibly offer that same experience to others.”
Bang’s decision to add her work to the Modern Literature Collection stemmed from her belief in the importance of tracking the creative process, and revision itself—a belief shaped during her time at Columbia University, where she studied with poet Lucy Brock-Broido, whose correspondence with Bang is included in the collection. Reflecting on an experience from her MFA days at Columbia, Bang shared:
“I’ve always valued archives, and this project made me more aware of the challenges libraries face in preserving digital drafts. For years, I’ve mainly composed on the computer and I rarely print out individual poems, often waiting until I have a more complete manuscript. Now, I realize I should be printing individual drafts as I go and keeping them in chronological order. It’s easy to assume that everything written on a computer is forever retrievable, but I’ve learned that’s not the case.”
In her advice to other poets, Bang emphasized not only the personal significance of conserving one’s creative work but also its historical and cultural significance. The act of curating one’s work for posterity, she suggested, is incredibly important for future generations who may one day seek to understand the social, political, and creative climate of our time.
“I would recommend that poets, and anyone really, keep both paper and digital records of their work. The writing we leave behind can be precious, not only to our families and loved ones but also to future generations who might want to understand what it was like to live in this moment.”
Bang’s willingness to share the intimacy of her creative process—across both digital and analog materials, from a restaurant receipt with an inspired line for a future poem scrawled across its back, or an early draft of a poem in a digital file, to correspondence using both letters and emails—offers an example for poets, translators, and artists in all disciplines. Her support of Born-Digital Poetry reflects her commitment to advancing our knowledge of how poets, scholars, archivists, curators, and others can better preserve the creative processes that shape our cultural landscape.
To learn more about this project, contact cfuborndigitalpoetry@wustl.edu.