by Karen Rigby | Contributing Writer

I grew up, like many writers, haunting the aisles of my local library. When I read about Elizabeth Hoover’s poetry collection, The Archive is All in Present Tense (Barrow Street, 2022, winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Book Prize), I was filled with nostalgia for those old card catalogs: entire bulwarks packed with multiform, typescript wonders.

Elizabeth’s book celebrates library-related ephemera, to be sure—but it also turns the archive into a dynamic, intimate maze whose corridors surprise. Here, the tactile manifests in both the beautiful, fragile, and treacherous: paper fortune tellers are right at home with concertina wire. Digging into records involves meeting past selves, and The Archivist, a powerful guide. With its exuberance for the curio, and seriousness about histories that inform memory, this is a splendid debut.

Our interview unfolded over email as Elizabeth and I considered ideas such as time, poetic forms, and the courage it takes to page through the libraries we hold within ourselves.

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Karen Rigby (KR): Let’s start with the title: There’s a sense of time being far more dimensional than linear, and of worlds-within-worlds. The past is ever alive.

Elizabeth Hoover (EH): The title is the tiny tip of an iceberg of reading and thinking I was doing about the concept of queer temporality. I was reading things like Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer History by Elizabeth Freeman, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, and, of course, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz. For these thinkers, time—past, present, future—is complexly enfolded, and our relationship to the so-called past is erotic, bodily, and reaching toward a yet-to-be-imagined future.

As a writer, I understand this temporal enfolding to take place in language, hence the idea of present tense. I remember in freshman year learning that when you quote writers in a paper, you always use the present tense (Muñoz writes) as if their books are still being written in the present moment. That way when I cite Muñoz I am mourning his untimely passing while talking to him in the present.

KR: The card catalog recurs in the book through imaginary facsimiles, if you will, or poems-shaped-as-cards—would you speak more about this?

EH: I grew up using a card catalog system. I remember how the card catalog cabinet was just really huge and beautiful! It was made out of this gorgeous finished wood with brass handles. I think that’s why hipsters use old card catalogs to store their spices or whatever now. The catalog was like the whole library condensed. It also made looking for a book feel really embodied, running your fingers down the cards, and having to flip through all these other cards before you find the one you want.

I was working on a PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and got my hands on a big box of old cards from their card catalog. I used those to model the poems in the shape of the cards in my book, while I also studied the rules and conventions surrounding them. Working on them felt like working in any other strict form like a sonnet or villanelle. As you get the hang of it, the work to fulfill the rule-base requirements becomes a space of freedom and play. The relentlessness of the “see also” reminded me of that sense of infinite possibilities while pawing through the card catalog as a kid.

KR: Libraries hold a perennial mystique for many people. These days, though, more and more information is digitized. Do you sense any shift in how you experience connections to the archive?

EH: As much as I love handling archival material and am committed to do that for my own pleasure, archives can create a lot of barriers. Some of them are only open at certain times, or require ID’s or institutional affiliations, or are far from where you live. I love that, even though I don’t live in Milwaukee anymore, I can share with my students the zines from the Milwaukee Queer Zine Archive. Or we can look at photos of Mable Hampton from the Lesbian Herstory Archive or listen to recordings of Harvey Milk. It’s really a matter of figuring out how to talk to people about what these archives do and how they do it and give them access points to the digital collection so they can still explore with a sense of excitement, discovery, and the accidental encounter.

I taught a class at Webster University called Archival Poetics and, even though we didn’t travel to Chicago to see the Gerber Hart collection, I can’t deny the power of my student falling in love with the drag performer Ms. Tillie, whose photos they saw in their digital collection. They were obsessed! And they’re a trans-femme kid from rural Missouri. They needed that ability to touch—even digitally— a particular type of history as a way of breaking a feeling of isolation.

KR: That’s fascinating, and I’m glad that you mention this. We seem to hear, more often, about the negative aspects of a wired world: about the divisive nature of certain platforms, or about how algorithms are reshaping our minds and attention. But here, that ability to access an archive is priceless.

EH: Oh, for sure. Archival work can be very emotional, erotic, and intimate—even when you are looking at digital collections. I don’t really want to weigh in here about the negative aspects of the Internet because I don’t think that the predatory and exploitative nature of capitalist corporations is that different on- or off- line. That same student asked me once how I suggest they respond to homophobic or transphobic comments on Reddit. This person is a really talented writer and highly intelligent scholar. I don’t think they—or anyone—should waste their time and talent being unpaid content writers for billion-dollar companies like Twitter or Facebook. The more important question to be asking is: does my neighbor need a ride? Or can they give me a ride so I can go to the trans-femme support group?  Ooops, I guess I did end up railing against the “wired world,” but go check out some online archives! And then give them a couple bucks!

KR: Mentions of a grandfather’s military service lace through several of these poems. It brings up a compelling contrast: the public archive may hold evidence about certain eras and wars, yet within the private, family archive, there may be silences that leave gaps in the record.

EH: The grandfather in the book is a composite of my paternal and maternal grandfathers. My maternal grandfather served in World War II, but there is no evidence that he participated in a particular war crime. However, as a white American, there is no doubt that my ancestors participated in crimes against humanity and my life is full of benefits from that history of violence. I did some research into my families’ pasts, but those specifics didn’t really give me a better understanding of how to take concrete action in the present to address or redress those wrongs. I feel like when white people, me included, do research of this type, we are either looking for evidence that our families weren’t “that bad” or participating in this weird cottage industry of memoirs of white people discovering some horrible thing an ancestor did and then trying to reconcile the fact that they love their racist grandad or whatever. Either way it’s an act of absolution: either the “my family didn’t own slaves” or “I suffered emotionally from realizing this, so I come out clean on the other end.” So I wanted to keep the researcher in an inconclusive place, a place of circling.

I’ve gone off on a tangent…but my grandfather did refuse to talk about his service. So, yes, there are gaps in all archives, both private and public. The question is what is our responsibility toward those gaps? Sometimes we have an impulse to “fill them in,” but that can perform a double erasure—erasing the erasure, hiding the violence. So can those gaps become sites for the imagination, sites of possibility and play? But it’s also important to acknowledge these gaps are sometimes purposeful, that sometimes evidence is thrown out or redacted. Luckily there are alternative spaces and archives where that material is welcomed.

KR: The librarians in the book seem to be collective, often.  Would you elaborate on how you arrived at them?

EH: The librarians are definitely a collective, because they are the regulators of access to the archive (this archive has closed stacks!) and librarians tend to work with larger publics and a larger range of materials.

Meanwhile, the archivist who is singular, is genderqueer. They wear natty bowties and gold petticoats. That was important to me because, for me, archives have been places of connection to my queerness and places I have experienced gender euphoria. The archivist is a genderqueer guide that helps the researcher navigate through various indicators of gender expression. They also have big top energy, I hope, and, in the end, get the researcher up on their table, if you know what I mean. 

KR: Echoes of loss permeate some of these poems, in terms of adolescence or bygone experiences. The image of a corsage, for instance, blooms more than once.

EH: Do you ever find yourself telling the same stories over and over again as you meet new people? I think there are these moments in our lives that feel saturated or permeated with significance, but we aren’t really sure why. We tell them over and over again trying to figure out what it is about them, why we keep re-turning towards them. (Yes, I meant it to have a hyphen, as in turn to again and again.) Before I knew I am gay, I wore a tux to prom. I knew there was something “wrong” about it because I left the house in the prom outfit my mother bought me and changed in the car. Why did I do that? What does it mean? Does it let me have some sort of sense of completeness in my personal narrative so that “coming out” isn’t a stark before and after? Does it show people how cool I was? Or do I keep telling that story because I hope someone will tell me they did the same thing or tell me what it means? I didn’t have a corsage, though, which was a bummer. Years later I got to go to an adult queer prom in a monochromatic scarlet suit with a white corsage. It was cathartic.

KR: Many of these poems are rich with textiles and vintage references, like Howdy Doody. When did you acquire this particular aesthetic and/or find an affinity for the thingness-of-things?

EH: I’m glad you asked me about Howdy Doody! To write that section of the book, I talked with my dad a lot about how he built his own marionette theater as a child. He was very candid about the racist and anti-indigenous characters presented in the show. So, these objects become very complex as they move through time and context, meaning differently. But talking with my dad about the object of the Howdy Doody marionette created a chance for us to connect and work through some of what he experienced in the past. Through that conversation, the object has an additional layer of significance now.

Pittsburgh, of course, appears in the book since that is where I was born and raised. Pittsburgh has all this mythology as the “Steel City.” You can see this as a romantic ideal in a mural called “The Crowning of Labor” by John White Alexander that was commissioned by Andrew Carnegie in 1907. It winds its way up the grand staircase connecting the Carnegie Museum of Art to the Carnegie Natural History Museum, which incidentally, was connected to the Carnegie Library via a small hallway when I was a kid. The mural depicts these muscular white men laboring in smoke, and as the mural ascends the clouds part and the sky gets lighter and lighter as the workers reach enlightenment via Carnegie’s philanthropy. I wanted to be a part of this collective heroic history. I have objects, like bits of metal I’ve scooped up while trespassing in abandoned mills, where I went trying to connect with that history and failing.

It wasn’t until later when I considered how cancer has ripped and continues to rip through the older generations of my family that I started to question this narrative and realize it is also about environmental destruction, the violent exclusion of black workers from unions, and the exploitative labor practices women and people of color endured. Now these objects take on different significance. I keep them because they tie me to a communal history, not in spite of, but because of their lack of significance, their failure to yield quantifiable results. For Muñoz, things that fail to cohere, that fail to remain, “stand as evidence of queer lives, powers, and possibilities.” They are about possibilities that remain even though they were never realized.

Finally, I think a lot of the reason this book is so full of objects is because I remember discovering that archives keep more than just books and printed matter. These objects are called realia, and I just thought it was cool. I was already under the impression that museums and libraries bleed together because of the architecture of the library and museums of my childhood. Seeing realia further muddied those distinctions. 

KR: Realia is indeed very cool—thank you for mentioning that. To return to your sense of Pittsburgh’s history changing, from a childhood notion of the “collective heroic” on toward learning that there were far more complicated harms, do you feel that libraries/archives are places where we might find other such meaningful reckonings?

EH: I think so. Reckoning is such a complex word and part of me resists it because it is related to accounts, like financial accounts. But etymologically, it’s also related to recounting and how account also has a double meaning that includes narrative accounts. I like that reckoning begins with “re,” as in to revisit, retell, revise, or remember. Does it have change at its center?

In terms of archival reckoning: I’m thinking about how Stonewall exists in our historical imagination as this turning point in which gay people fought back for the first time against police brutality. But in 2000 historian Susan Stryker started researching the history of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district and uncovered—without the aid of traditional primary source documents—the story of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. She used the GLBT Historical Archives’ sites database to walk the neighborhood and chase little clues like this wonderful photo from the Henri Leleu Bar of queens on a break in the cafeteria drinking coffee wearing leathermen hats and little crowns. Stryker’s work, which became a wonderful documentary called Screaming Queens, wasn’t just a reckoning with the gaps in our archives, but also a reconsideration of historical research methods.

But these archival discoveries raise questions like how has the story of queer resistance been whitewashed? Looking at the story of Compton, I am reminded of how queer activism was about housing rights, sex worker rights, fighting police brutality, protecting queer youth. Sex workers have always been at the core of queer activism and always the first to be derided or erased, but they were at the center of the uprising at Compton’s.

KR: The very nature of libraries calls to mind indexing, cataloging, taxonomies—some of these poems, like those that bring in elements of natural history museums—turn toward  accumulation, even listing. What draws you to this?

EH: I think I am trying to gesture toward a completeness, but enact the failure to reach completeness in form. That sounds really abstract! Let me try to concretize it. I remember when pursuing my PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee we took something called preliminary exams. At other universities, they are often called comprehensive exams. Basically they involve reading 100 or so books and then writing essays on them in a compressed time. The idea is that if you read enough books in a particular area, you have a comprehensive idea of the field. But for me, it gave me the sense that I was only getting the tiniest sliver of knowledge. Every book I read had like 100 or more citations of books I’ve never heard of! And that is just the shit that is written down.

There is a line in my book, “The librarians come before dawn to catalog the blanks and are still behind.” These knowledge systems are always in motion because they are never complete and so we keep adding to and modifying them.

Indexing, cataloging, and taxonomizing are always insufficient to contain what they are trying to classify. I think of how genre and gender share an etymological root. Our genre classification has to keep expanding to add things like the lyric essay or experimental poetry, but then you start to examine how a particular text resists how it is defined and the whole thing starts breaking apart. I was skimming through the acknowledgement of Spill by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, this great book of prose poems, and saw some of it was published in a fiction anthology. Once, I accidentally assigned it in a creative nonfiction workshop because I really wanted talk about sentence rhythm and structure in essays and forgot it was poetry. Similarly, our gender system is so absurdly blunt. I remember debates at a university that will remain nameless because there was a desire to add a Q to LGBT Studies. Lots of faculty objected and I remember one professor, “Sure we can add a Q, but then pretty soon you’ll want another letter! Do you want us to give you all the letters?” And I remember thinking, yeah, give us all the letters.

KR: It’s often said that writers are readers. For the bibliophiles, are there texts that were formative for you?

EH: Wow! This is such a hard question because, as you can probably tell from my previous answer, I want to list like a million books. I will start with Robin Coste Lewis’ poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus, which is an amazing testament to the power of listing and also an extraordinary intervention into the violence that taxonomies can create. Sun Yung Shin’s book of poetry Unbearable Splendor made me feel almost uncomfortably excited about ambitious textual play and experimentation. When they agreed to blurb my book, I swooned. Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Rocket Fantastic inspired me to write more, I don’t know, sexy? Finally, Dawn Lundy Martin does some extraordinary work with archival documents in The Main Cause of the Exodus.

The book ends with a “see also” list of some of the writers who informed my love of queer archives and archival theory such as Anne Cvetkovich, Julietta Singh, and Jose Esteban Muñoz. I wanted to add that “see also” list as a way not only to acknowledge their importance to me but also command the reader to check them out. “See also” is in the imperative! I think it also goes back to what I was saying about completeness. It’s a way to say, “Listen this book just scratches the surface of archival possibilities and that is actually a good thing.”

 Hilariously, I discovered Cvetkovich, who became super formative for me in terms of my academic work, because someone is reading An Archive of Feelings in a music video for the song “Let’s Pretend We Don’t Have Feelings” by Gaymous. Such a great dance song! I love that I found my academic path via a dance anthem.

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Elizabeth Hoover (she/her) is the author of the archive is all in present tense, winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Book Prize. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in the North American Review, the Kenyon Review, and StoryQuarterly, and she has contributed essays and articles about art, pop culture, and books to Bitch, Paper, The Art Newspaper, Kenyon Review, and the Washington Post. She is the recipient of the 2024 Pat Holt Prize for Critical Art Writing from Lambda Literary and is an assistant professor of English at Webster University.

Karen Rigby is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and Fabulosa (JackLeg Press, 2024). She lives and writes in Arizona. www.karenrigby.com