A poet walks through an archive: processing the poetic biography

This essay is an attempt to retrace some of my pathways through archives in order to understand the process behind and forms of my biographical texts. The anxieties and limitations encountered by biography writers have led me to turn towards the pleasures enabled by gaps and aporias, dwelling in the poetics of archives as a way to lead me not only to discovering (details on) the lives of my biographical subjects, but towards the form of the work itself. This is not to say that the archive dictates the shape and form of the biography; indeed, as most archive critics point out, the archive is traditionally a space in which authority and power dominate. Rather, I am interested in how an encounter with traces left in the wake of a subject-or a lack of traces, or moving 'against the grain' of the archive-affects the telling of their life story. This can not only be appreciated as a catalyst for biographical writing, but also celebrates the singularity of a biographical text-that is, where the definitive account is no longer taken for granted as a potential output, the biographer's archival research can be seen not (only) as a site for gathering traces of the past, but as a site for innovative biographical production.