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Okay, it may be Wednesday...



I wasn't going to jump into this discussion, but after limericks were
used, I felt I just MUST put in my bid for true poetry dedicated to
Archives and Archivists.

Way back in 1979 while working for the Cornell University Archives I
wrote this:

With true apologies to Walt Whitman:

"Song of the Archives"

from stanza 6--Song of Myself

A researcher said WHAT IS ARCHIVES? questioning me
with outstretched hands;
How could I answer the researcher? I do not know what it
is any more than he.

I guess it must be the text of my history, out of aspirations
recorded.
Or I guess it is the notation of the Politicians,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly donated,
Bearing the accession number somewhere in the corner,
that we may see it and remark and say WHOSE?

Or I guess the Archives is itself a researcher, the concen-
trated thought processes of our ancestry.

"Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,"
And it means, Revealing alike to undergrads and graduates,
"Disclosing among black folks as among white,"
#754, #927, #2116, #1/2/2, I research them the same,
receive them the same.

And now it seems t me the bountiful sheaf of indexed papers.
Tenderly will I use you curling pages,
It may be you transpire from the minds of Cornell
professors,
"It may be if I had known them I would have loved them"
It may be you are from the Older Persons Records, or tapes
from Oral Histories,
And here you are the tradition.

This archives is profound to be from the spidery print of
alumni
More profound than the scrawled hand of scholars
Profound to come from the bound books, marbled black
and white.

O I perceive after all so many written manuscripts,
And I perceive they do not come from the hands of thinkers
for nothing.

I wish I could study the notes of the catalogued young men
and women,
And the clippings about old students and co-eds, and the
graduates taken soon out to the world.

"What do you think has become of the old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and c
children?"

They are accessioned then requested in the Archives,
The smallest collection shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was, it led toward liefe, and does wait to be
further searched,
And pursued the moment researchers appear.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
recorded!

Cheers,  Geri Solomon

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