Ode to the Past

I think I should be creating more poetry so lets start with this. Following a twitter flurry over a badly named project, Kill The Archivist, I decided I should turn my talents to writing about the archives I work in. To celebrate the inspiring stories and documents held in the collections. This is the first draft of a poem prompted by the idea of minute books being essential in recording the lives of ordinary working men and women. Our history is full of the rich and famous. Studying documents that were written by and about the common man ensures that their struggles, lives, and deaths are not just recounted in history from the perspective of the politicians or big business. This is a poem in first draft but it has hopes of being good one day.

Minutes

Turning the leaves of the past

You find the people

Black dust under the inked skin

This is the frontline now

They won’t stay silent

 

Witness blistered marchers feet

Wrench blood from the ground

Keening again widows’ songs

 

Inking the turns of progress

Remembering pasts

The seasons’ leaves whispering

This is our frontline now

We won’t stay silent

Rant On

Warning: Early morning ramblings. Literary content and grammar dubious (except the poem which despite being a work in progress has hopes of being good one day)

How lucky am I?! I know it every afternoon when I metaphorically clock on to literally the best job I've ever had. The Richard Burton Archives took me in and gave me shelter and told me to look after interesting stuff and help other people look at interesting stuff. So that's a layman's explanation at the simplest level of what my job entails (but this is written in the early ours as I procrastinate from writing a conference paper or two). A few weeks ago a job was advertised somewhere over the English border, under the project title of Kill the Archivist. WRONG ON SO MANY LEVELS. Obviously this was no jihad being declared on the profession (though it is worth remembering that through history, even to recent times, archivists and curators have indeed been killed for trying to protect historical manuscripts and works of art). But the controversy sparked a debate over a worrying trend that I noted when at a conference in Galway over the summer. Archivists are viewed as gatekeepers with Thou Shalt Not tattooed on their hearts. Somehow they are thought responsible for preventing access to the interesting things locked away in their vaults - like Smaug resting on their golden hoard. Worse still there is an idea that archivists dictate a version of history by their cataloguing and categorising, inflicting a hidden nomenclature barring the way to the common folk and their voyage of discovery through their own subjective histories. Imagine there were no archivists. Wouldn't it be great to be allowed to rummage around collection in your own merry way. Imagine what you could find unimpeded by those pesky key rattling archivists. This is all tommy rot. Without archivists over centuries protecting documents and ephemera there would be no manuscripts to view. I have heard stories of local archivists climbing into skips where a building was being renovated, to rescue minute books and correspondence that will reveal the history of South Wales to future generations - what is the living memory of strikes and struggles recorded as tomorrows distant history. Recorded by the ordinary (and extraordinary) man and woman. Their histories protected now thanks to the dedication of archivists. Or then there is the case of the family torturously finding a home for their loved relatives records - the beloved also being a celebrated figure in local life or a writer of international acclaim. Not sold off piecemeal into private collections the papers pass instead into the hands of a public body - an archive where historians, family and academic, can read the penned words of the famous. There is so much to learn so much to be excited by. But do away with the archivists? No. For the sake of the future and for the sake of the past. They are not gatekeepers but custodians. Kill the archivist? Come on if you think you're hard enough...