Poetry, Representation and the Archive Special Issue: Editor’s Introduction

This article reads the poem ‘Spilt Milk’ by the British poet Sarah Maguire (1957–2017) in light of material held in the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA). By examining the drafts of the poem, it shows how the feminist poetics of ‘Spilt Milk’ developed in parallel with Maguire’s first-year undergraduate studies at UEA in 1984–85, from a history essay on Anglo-Saxon adultery law to a creative-critical coursework essay in which she asserted that ‘the silence around the text’ in literary studies and deconstructionist theory was a silence about the female body. The sexual encounter described in the poem is read as the corollary of Maguire’s critical assertion that ‘for women to write poetry, to authorise desire, it’s necessary to move from being the object of poetry to being its subject’. The cultural significance of the poem’s challenge to the male-dominated poetry culture of late twentieth-century Britain is reconstructed, and Marianne Moore’s phrase ‘the raw material of poetry in/all its rawness’ is used to argue that one of the valuable functions of a poetry archive – and also poetry itself – is to preserve the historical and social context of the moment of writing. A final section introduces this special issue on poetry, representation and the archive as the outcome of ‘New Ways of Collecting, Collaborating and Curating: Towards a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive’, a Mellon-funded research project and conference on poetry archives undertaken at UEA in 2022–23.