Preserving the Slip: Poetry, Archives, and Error

Abstract This essay begins with an erroneous slip of paper found in the archives of the American poet Susan Howe, at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library. I take this original ‘slip’ in Howe’s archive and connect it to the different resonances of ‘slip’—as paper, as error, as parapraxis, as counterfeit, and as that which eludes attention—in order to excavate several pressing questions for how literary studies has conceptualized ‘archival poetics’: what slips occur when archival and documentary poets give themselves to the archivization process? How does archival slipperiness spill over, and to what else might it slip into? Attending to these questions across the work of Susan Howe—a ‘poet of the archives’—I offer close readings of several textual ‘slips’, with a particular interest in questions of personal and historical representation. I conclude by arguing that sustained attention to the granular—to the occurrence of these ‘slips’ without an attendant urge to recuperate them into something else—is necessary to newly conceptualize the politics and affective relations of poetic archival encounter.