E-mails don’t have the inky charisma of handwritten manuscripts, but they’re more and more a part of literary archives. For instance, when the British Library announced this week that it has acquired the poet Wendy Cope‘s archive, it made much of the hybrid nature of the material, which includes thousands of e-mails.
“Retrieved from ‘the cloud’, the collection of approximately 40,000 e-mails dating from 2004 to the present is the most substantial in a literary archive acquired by the British Library to date, affording among other things a fascinating and extensive insight into writerly networks,” the library said. The acquisition cost £32,000 (nearly $53,000), according to the announcement.
“It’s new territory for us,” Rachel Foss, lead curator of modern-literary manuscripts at the British Library, told The Independent newspaper. “This is the second major e-mail acquisition we’ve made, after Harold Pinter’s archive in 2007, but contains more material than that. We are increasingly acquiring digital material; this is going to be the norm as we move forward, and we are going to get to the stage where e-mails replace physical letters.”
In another sign of how institutions approach contemporary hybrid archives, the library also pointed to what it called “enhanced curatorial activities” surrounding the acquisition. Library personnel took digital photographs of the poet’s study to create a panoramic digital view of it. They recorded an interview with Ms. Cope “in which she reflects on her archive and the writing life it represents.” All that “will allow researchers to reconstruct a retrospective context for the physical and electronic records acquired, as well as recording for posterity the space which informed the creative process,” the library said.
A wry and popular poet known, among other things, for her parodies of figures such as Philip Sidney and T.S. Eliot, Ms. Cope is the author of four collections, including Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis. (The very brief title poem includes a famous line: “Some kind of record seemed vital. “) Her most recent book, Family Values, was published this year.
The library saluted Ms. Cope’s work as representing “a female creative response to the male poetic establishment, inscribing a significant counterpoint to the postwar poetic canon.” That doesn’t quite do justice to poems like her limerick-parody of Eliot’s The Waste Land:
In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful …
See an assortment of Ms. Cope’s love poems here; read her case for abolishing the job of poet laureate here.
According to The Independent, Ms. Cope downplayed the literary interest of her e-mails. She told the paper that many of them “are not interesting at all.”
While some news reports and the library itself highlighted the digital component of the Cope archive, there’s a good deal of old-fashioned literary material for researchers to contemplate as well, including school reports and 67 poetry notebooks. Dating from 1973 to the present, they form “the core of the archive,” the library said, with “drafts of poems, jottings of ideas, notes on form and rhyme scheme juxtaposed with transitory glimpses of everyday life, for example in the meticulous ‘to do’ lists.”
Have a favorite Cope poem? Let us know in the comments.
