An alternate version of a humbling lecture-performance by the poet Susan Howe, first given at an event organized by the CEL for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Drawn from Howe’s experiences searching in archives and special collections (including the Emily Dickinson Collection at Amherst College, the William Carlos Williams Collection at SUNY Buffalo, the Ratti Textile Center at the Met, and both the Jonathan Edwards Collection and the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library), SPONTANEOUS PARTICULARS: The Telepathy of Archives mines the moments when the materiality of research in physical archives brings the past into what Howe calls our “looking-glass hands.” This presentation is an adaptation of her book by the same title, published by New Directions also in 2014. (GH)

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