Writing & Society Research Centre seminar

Repertoires are common repositories or indexes of knowledge. They are cultural storehouses of ideas that are personalised momentarily in individual expressions, while remaining radically outside the control and ownership of sole artists or corporations. While the ‘set-list’ is a temporal and historical marker of specificity (this performance at that time and place), a repertoire is a trans-historical collection of cultural artefacts that implies associative and non-chronological ways of arranging material. And while repertoire is often made explicit in musical and theatrical practices, it is usually a ghost term in poetry – obscured partly by publication and reading environments that stress continual newness, and partly by ontological horizons that still prize single authorship and ‘unique’ narratives. In this combined critical paper and reading, innovative poet and musician Kate Fagan will explore the significance of repertoire as a conceptual and allegorical figure for certain compositional strategies in contemporary poetry. Her paper will examine ideas of repertoire as a way of understanding compositional methods within the book Saga/Circus by U.S. poet Lyn Hejinian. Kate will then apply that thinking to two core elements of her own recent poetic practice: her adaptation of sample-based cento forms, and her ongoing interest in archival, documentary and list-based poetries. The critical paper will be followed by a brief performance of poetry from a new series of works called ‘Archivalist’.