The University at Buffalo's Poetry Collection, through Dr. Alison Fraser and the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School, invited M.C. Kinniburgh, co-director at Granary Books, to discuss her archival work. This talk explores her ongoing series "Messy Archivist," which explores the interstitial qualities of working on archives through prose, poetry, and images. Published by her experimental imprint TKS Books, each "Messy Archivist" is a handmade chapbook that is often organized around a keyword, such as messy, or need. For the fourth volume and this talk, the premise is surface: what might be interpreted as an archival surface, and how does our attentiveness to the relationship between surface and depth inform our understanding of archives, especially at scale?
Pictured are shelves from Helen Adam's library at the University at Buffalo's Poetry Collection.
