Appraising Newness: Whiteness, Neoliberalism & the Building of the Archive for New Poetry

Abstract

The Archive for New Poetry (ANP) at the University of California San Diego was founded with the specific intention of collecting alternative, small press publications and acquiring the manuscripts of contemporary new poets. The ANP's stated collection development priority was to acquire alternative, non-mainstream, emerging, "experimental" poets as they were writing and alive, and to provide a space in which their papers could live, along with recordings of their poetry readings. In this article, I argue that through racialized understandings of innovation and new, whiteness positions the ANP's collection 1 I would like to thank Michelle Caswell for inviting me to be part of this special issue and for being a formidable source of knowledge and inspiration. Harryette Mullen and Ryan Wong generously shared their ideas and histories with me.