Episode #2: Marianne Moore Would Probably Tweet

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was a poet who lived a life so full and varied, she kept notebooks to keep track of thoughts and day-to-day observations.  Professor Cristanne Miller, a specialist of American female poets, wanted to make those notebooks more accessible. Natalia sits with Cris to talk about Moore's interest in baseball, how many people it takes to get digitized notebooks on the internet, and how we can get a proposal for a sport poet laureate going.   

Transcript

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music  0:00  
[Intro music]

Natalia Estrada  0:09  
Welcome to Digital explorer, the show where I talk to people about digital scholarship and our relationships with computers. I'm Natalia Estrada. 

music  0:24  
[jazz drums]

Natalia Estrada  0:31  
Fanaticism?  No.  Writing is exciting
 

and baseball is like writing.
   

  You can never tell with either
      

how it will go
      

 or what you will do;
    

generating excitement—
   

 a fever in the victim—
    

pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.
 

Victim in what category?
 

Owlman watching from the press box?
 

To whom does it apply?
 

Who is excited?  Might it be I?

Baseball and Writing, first stanza. 

music  1:05  
[jazz drum]

[music]

Natalia Estrada  1:14  
Like most of us, I've gotten really used to being able to find anything I need or want to learn more about on the internet. For example, I recently picked up knitting. So I started to look around on Ravelry for pattern ideas. And I somehow find designs for these mochilas or bags from the Wayuu, who are indigenous to Colombia, where my family's from. And then I started digging even more trying to find these online archives about these mochilas. And then, you know, thinking about is it weird that these white pattern designers are advertising for mochilas? When they're not, you know, connected to this at all? And is it also weird that we kept on saying mochila instead of bolsa when I was growing up? You get the idea where I'm going. But I've taken for granted the idea that this kind of stuff that I want to learn more about is going to be readily available on the internet. 

Do you remember your earliest relationship with computers?

Cris Miller  2:19  
Very clearly. I got a job at Pomona College in 1980. This was immediately after finishing my PhD, and Pomona had a program that would pay for an initial computer purchase for all new faculty. So I bought a Compaq, C-O-M-P-A-Q, computer. And I bought a compact form of the Compaq, which, you know, is enormous and probably weighed 20 or 25 pounds, but not very compact. And there were training sessions for faculty to learn how to do it. I was, to everyone's surprise, quite a whiz at just figuring out the basic programming. And I was you know, I thought it was terrific. Mostly I used it for word processing kinds of things, because that's what I do. But it enabled ... was quite a few steps up from a typewriter. 

Natalia Estrada  3:15  
This is Cris. 

Cris Miller  3:16  
My name is Christanne Miller. I work at the University of Buffalo. I have been here since 2006, initially as chair of the English department, and now I serve as the director of the arts management program and co director of the digital scholarship studio network.

Natalia Estrada  3:36  
And Cris is someone who I'm really excited to hear more from because not only does she show enthusiasm for any new possible useful tool coming her way, like when she talks about the early email. 

What about the internet?

Cris Miller  3:49  
The internet followed pretty closely behind that computer purchase and training. I was working on a presentation for the Modern Language Association and an accompanying article with scholar who was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And her husband was a physicist who worked at the Fermi lab for the University of Chicago. So he had been using, let's say, internet e mail long before this was broadly accepted system for other people. And he showed his wife and me how to do this. So we started using email and exchanging documents across the Internet around oh gosh, it must have been 1982 1983. So this was very early. And it was enabled by you know what we learned from my friend's husband because of his work in nuclear physics.

Natalia Estrada  4:49  
Does it feel like at that time that you got like secret access to this like great new tool that nobody else would know about until like, like the early 80s is fairly early in people's minds about technology and the internet back then?

Cris Miller  5:05  
I have to say that I wasn't so much interest in, in technology itself. But it was clearly a wonderful tool. And I've always been, the more involved I've become in research, of course, the more involved I become in communication with people who don't live where I live. And this was especially true when I was teaching in Southern California at Pomona College, which is a very, very small college and relatively isolated from the most of the scholars who work in my field. And so I had close connections on the in the Midwest, on the east coast, even in Europe, and I needed to be in communication with these people. And it was not so fast. So if I would send something late at night, I knew Lynne would have it by the next morning, she wouldn't have it instantaneously,

Natalia Estrada  5:56  
which is so different from now. Everything is so instantaneous. It's like we expect all like, the information that we can get so fast.

Cris Miller  6:06  
Yeah, but, but it completely enabled this project, because otherwise we would be mailing things or, you know, we're trying to read things to each other over the telephone, because those were really the only other options for a fax. But you know, that's expensive.

Natalia Estrada  6:22  
So without the email, it wouldn't like this project would not have happened,

Cris Miller  6:26  
it probably would not have happened or it would have happened much more slowly.

Natalia Estrada  6:31  
But she also has been able to use the digital landscape to introduce the public to an incredibly fascinating, yet less well known poet, an example of someone whose documents and papers weren't made readily available, until person her team took on this digital archiving project. 

Also, one thing I like about Cris is that she is full of energy. Whenever we talk over zoom, she likes to walk on what I think is a treadmill. That being said, you may hear some squeaks here and there. 

Talk to me about Marianne Moore.

music  7:11  
[jazz music]

Cris Miller  7:11  
Marianne Moore is poet who was born in 18. Oh, gosh. And now I'm blanking on the date. I think it was 1882 No. 1878. And she died in 1972. So this is a woman whose life really spanned not just a century, but a century where there were extraordinary technical revolutions. So she came into a world where people essentially mostly use buggies. And women wore ankle length skirts. And the culture was entirely Victorian, and 19th century. And by the time she was in college, 1905, these things were changing. So with the advent of the automobile, the telephone and the radio, or then television and then moved into, maybe you could take a very, very early computer age. So this is a woman who really experienced a lot of history. And she's not just an extraordinary poet, but she was an absolutely attentive recorder of the things that she heard and saw in her life. So one of the things that is remarkable about more is that she kept notebooks on everything. So she kept notebooks on what she was reading. She kept notebooks on things that she overheard when she was on a train or at the circus or at the zoo. She kept notebooks about things. Her mom's sad, but sermons she went to art exhibits, she saw a concert she attended, you name it, she was keeping notebooks. She kept notebooks, from her studies at Bryn Mawr where she went to college and so on. There are 122 of these notebooks. And the family the more family was very real has been very reluctant to allow Moore's papers to be published. So they, for a long time prevented in addition to her letters, she has extraordinary letters of great communicator. She used to say sometimes it took her all morning just to answer her mail. She never married had no children, as was the case for many prominent female poets of her generation. And one understands why she was a feminist in her own manner, but it was not the manner of the, let's say, sexual revolution oriented feminists of the second wave and so it took a while for that generation to understand mores mode of feminism because it seemed so different. She seemed, at most, let's say asexual Although her circle of friends was, I would say dominated by gay men and lesbian women, but anyway, dynamic, brilliant woman with an extraordinary sense of language can just a gift for seeing and recording things.

Natalia Estrada  10:22  
think another thing was that Marianne Moore had a lot of very interesting interests

Cris Miller  10:28  
Oh Yeah. 

Natalia Estrada  10:29  
So what I really love about her is her her fascination with baseball. 

Cris Miller  10:33  
Yeah. 

Natalia Estrada  10:33  
Can you talk about that? 

Cris Miller  10:35  
Yes.

So, you know, she was a sports fan, her her brother was a chaplain in the Navy, but an avid tennis player and sailor and she liked doing things outdoors, she played tennis with her brother. And she played tennis with the kids who lived on her street. She loved boxing, she actually had a kind of friendship with Muhammad Ali, they wrote a poem together. And she loved baseball.

Natalia Estrada  11:04  
Seriously, she was a very well known baseball fan, there's actually a really great photo of Moore throwing out the first pitch for the opening of the 1968 season at Yankee Stadium. It's awesome. And as someone who grew up with baseball, I love it.

Cris Miller  11:19  
One of the things that people don't really think about in relation to her interest in sports was that it also had a kind of political edge for her. So all of her baseball poems focused on the Dodgers, the first team to integrate, and most of the players that she writes about are the African American players on the team. So and, and Moore was, in fact, very engaged with racial politics of her time, but in a very, let's say, understated way. So rather than saying black players in baseball, she wrote a poem about baseball in which those happened to be the people she's talking about. And if you don't know anything about baseball, you don't notice this. Right. Or if you don't know anything about the Dodgers, you don't understand what she's doing. But she's calling attention to the art and ability of players who aren't ordinarily lace, isolated for praise, in a way. So she does this with a ballet dancer. And another poem, the first black dancer, to be hired by the New York City Ballet is the topic of one of her poems, no mention of race at any point in the poem, but just the focus is a kind of praise of our artistic ability. And then African American artist.

Natalia Estrada  12:51  
I mean, I think it would be cool if like Major League Baseball had like a poet laureate in the model of Marianne Moore. Like right about our underappreciated players, the players. Yeah, you know, yeah. Model kind of like how Amtrak has a poet laureate. But like, 

Cris Miller  13:06  
I didn't know that. 

Natalia Estrada  13:07  
Yeah, they have like a poet. Poetry position for a bit, but yeah, they should model this baseball, or like any other sport, you know, highlight that. Highlight the relationship, because there's always this weird binary between the arts and sports. And just run with it.

Cris Miller  13:27  
Yeah, absolutely. Or boxing Poet Laureate.

Natalia Estrada  13:31  
All right, so who's writing the letter to the Boxing Association? 

Correction. Amtrak did have a writer residency program, but I haven't been able to find anything past 2016. That being said, 

Dear Major League Baseball. Have you considered hiring a poet, a writer, a rapper, a general wordsmith of sort, maybe call it the Marianne Moore residency program? Just putting it out there. Sincerely, y arriba los Doyers, Natalia

Cris Miller  14:10  
Here's another interesting she loves circuses 

Natalia Estrada  14:14  
talks about this, please. 

Cris Miller  14:15  
Yeah, well, she's loved to animals that were unusual. She writes poems about an anteater, the pangolin, or about a little desert rat called the jerboa, and, or odd plants. She writes a poem about the monkey puzzle tree. So she's, she's extremely interested in environmental issues that have to do with animals, again, who are typically marginalized and not seeing not thought about not written about within her family. They had a kind of system of nicknames that they used for each other that had to do with animals. So she was quite her mother and brother, she was called Rat, and she was good, being a masculine pronoun from the time that she was about 14 years old. So her mother would write her letters that would say things like "Rat was wearing his favorite dress last night." Her brother was various animals, biter, dog, turtle, and so on. And then the mother was always the little harmless animals, a mole or bunny. But but Moore was Rat for most of her life. And I think this also is a kind of mark of her feminism and independence, right that this was a stance that she enjoyed, right? She was the independent one, she was tough, she was going to survive. And she was her brother's brother, and they were her mother's uncles. They grew up without a father in the family. Yeah, it was very interesting family.

Natalia Estrada  15:50  
What I wonder about is that, why is it that Marianne Moore is not as prominent? Because she's such an interesting person? 

Cris Miller  16:00  
Yeah. 

Natalia Estrada  16:01  
Why is it that most she's not as prominent as other poets of her time?

Cris Miller  16:06  
Yeah, I think there are two reasons. One has to do with gender politics, literary criticism. So she was the peer, the contemporary of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, she was extremely well respected by all of those, poets sought out, but when it came time for new critical focus on ports of importance, pretty much all the focus went to the men. And then when you got to the, let's say, 1960s, and more women got interested, and when you could even call the first wave of semi revival of earlier female poets. But what they saw in Moore was a woman who, who seemed a whole lot like one of the guys, she had no interest in their terms. And unlike HD, for example, who was, you know, writing novels about sexual desire, and living pretty openly as lesbian, and so on, and so on. Marianne Moore seemed to have a kind of boring, boring life that as I said, you know, made her one of the guys and in fact, Adrienne Rich has a feminist essay, where she more or less refers to Moore as you know, what one of those one of those male poets, so there was no recuperation of Moore during that early feminist period. And so it took until really the 1980s or 90s, for a number of critics to begin to write about Moore in ways that really opened up the aspects of her poetry that did correspond with the political social issues of that era, in ways that that opened up the poetry to new kinds of reading, right, not just a kind of new critical preciousness, or precision, you know, and also, I think the fact that the family didn't allow letters or any of the peripheral material that she'd produced to be published prevented there from being more interest in the poet because there was no way in to Moore's life or work except through the poetry and the poetry is difficult.

Natalia Estrada  18:32  
To give you an idea, here's Cris reading one of Moore's poems.

music  18:36  
[ocean waves]

Cris Miller  18:42  
The Fish 

the fish 

wade 

through black jade.

 Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps 

adjusting the ash heaps;

 opening and shutting itself like 

an 

injured fan. 

The barnacles which incrusted the side 

of the wave cannot hide 

there for the submerged shafts of the 

Sun 

split like spun 

glass move themselves with spotlight swiftness 

into the crevices, 

in and out, illuminating 

the 

turquoise sea 

of bodies. The water drives a wedge 

of iron through the iron edge 

of the cliff, whereupon the stars, 

pink 

rice-grains, ink-, 

the spattered jellyfish crabs like green 

lilies and submarine 

toadstools slide each on the other. 

All 

external 

marks of abuse are present on this 

defiant edifice, 

all the physical features of accidente lack 

of cornice dynamite grooves 

burns and 

hatchet strokes, these things stand 

out on it, the chasm side is 

dead. 

Repeated 

evidence has proved that it can live 

on what cannot revive 

its youth. The sea grows old in it. 

Isn't that a beautiful poem? that the, the lyricism is extraordinary. And the movement from, you know, these moving gorgeous bodies in the sea to the end of the poem where you're seeing the damage that people do to, you know, the seashore, right. So you don't see dynamite grooves in the middle of the sea, but you see them on the cliff, right, so you can kill the cliff edge, but the sea grows old in it. 

So the idea for the digital archive was that these notebooks had never been published in any form, because the family was preventing publication. And also, there's so many of them. And they are so detailed, that it would be very difficult to reproduce them in print, in a way that no press would agree to do, oh, 122 of these notebooks, some of them are 450 pages long. And you would have to have a facing page manuscript so that people could see what you've actually written, as well as the transcriptions that we were making, especially in her poetry, drafting notebooks. So I actually managed to get from the estate, unique permission to publish these notebooks online. So that was a coup. And, and then at that point, I started looking for people who could help me establish a digital archive to make this happen.

Natalia Estrada  21:55  
You mentioned that it would be difficult to reproduce these notebooks and print. And that also, the family was hesitant in having these notebooks out, what do you think? Was the argument or what made them change their mind? 

Cris Miller  22:14  
Yes. Okay. So, you know,

partly it was, over the years, they became a little more open. So over the years, they actually did publish an edition of letters, I was one of the CO editors, I was in the mid 1990s. And then my argument about publishing these things online, was that they would be available, but they would not be easily reproducible. That is to say, you could do a screenshot of an individual page to lift it, but you couldn't just copy a notebook and have it right, in the same way that you could at least theoretically photocopy of, you know, printed book or whatever. They were very concerned about the reproducibility. And so they thought that things that were online would be both more accessible worldwide. And they're interested in their relative being better known, but also that it would be in some way more protected.

Natalia Estrada  23:10  
So when people talk about building a digital archive, they there's an assumption based on my understanding, there's an assumption that it's you had the material, the physical materials, you scan it, that you put it online, you now have this experience, and it's much more complicated than that. Can you talk about the process?

Cris Miller  23:29  
Yes. So first of all, I could never have done this without Nicholas Wiseman, who was, as I was just starting this project, he was a graduate student at the University of Rochester who had been working on the Blake archive for several years. And I made a presentation at Modernist Studies Association said that I was, you know, wanting to start this up, anybody who would be interested in helping, please come and see me. And so you know, Nick was there like that, after the presentation was over, along with a few other graduate students who had no technical training, but were interested in the project, transcriptions editing and so on. But Nick actually had the training to begin to help me think about what what would need to be done in order to to produce the kind of site we wanted. So I managed to, I had stopped chairing the English department, the then Chair of the English department quit very quickly, suddenly, because he'd been promoted to a higher position and you'd be associate provost. So they asked me to come back as chair and I said only on the condition and you'll let me hire a postdoc

Unknown Speaker  24:48  
to work on this Moore digital archive. So I was able to hire Nick for a two year postdoc to help get this thing started and we got a an impact grant from you be I have support from the Cubs team at UB to work with them their technical expertise, Nick's and my sense of what needed to be done, from the literary, textual studies side and Nick, from his background with a lake archive. And we, within a year, we really laid out the groundwork of the site. So what the technology would be for moving from a transcript of a manuscript to the online publication of the manuscript and the transcript and facing page order, you know, along with an increasing variety of peripheral materials that would coordinate with this. So a glossary, an introduction to each notebook, ways to move back and forth between the notebooks and newsletters published on Marianne Moore in the early 1980s, that hadn't been, you know, we're publishing a tiny edition, and hadn't been reproduced since then, and so on, and so on. So we now have a huge amount of material that we could put online, you know, once we have the staff that enables us to process it in a way that will work electronically with the, with the system. 

Cris Miller  26:18  
So I'm the director of the archive, Nick is the technical director, we have three associate editors, who I would say know basically nothing about the technical side of things, but they, they do the editing of the notebook, so the transcribing and editing of the notebooks, and then, and then send the material, essentially, to me for proofing. And then to Nick and me for the whole procedure that's required in order to get it ready to publish online, then, we typically have either one or two graduate students who were able to hire both to help out with textual proofing and some of the I'm gonna say, more rudimentary, technical, technical aspects of preparing material for online publication, and then somebody who is more of a real programmer, and can help Nick with more complicated aspects having to do with checking the coding, or correcting things that are in the coding, really understanding the TSL, the protocol for textual studies. And, and, and right now we have an additional couple of people, because we hit a kind of bottleneck last year. So we have a number of notebooks that are that have been edited, that had been proved that are really ready to go. But we need people to move them through. Really, it's a translation from one form of textual one form of text to another. So from let's say, a Word document to the fourth writer that we're using, get through the GitHub system, and then into a visual viewer so that we can send it to an outside proofreader, and you know, do all the final checking for spacing and everything else and then translation onto the actual publication site in the in the archive. So, so we have another few graduate students, and I have also just hired somebody, to help me maintain a clear overview of where we are with each project. So nothing gets lost. It is hard with the number of projects and the number of people working to make sure that I'm really on top of everything that's happening and not letting things fall through the cracks. So

Natalia Estrada  28:43  
I was gonna ask where do you see the archive going from here? Do you see a lifespan going?

Cris Miller  28:50  
Oh my gosh, this will be you know, this digital archive will I hope be in operation long after I am passed away. Because there are so many notebooks first of all, many of which have not yet been scanned. So you know, first we need digital images made. The library that houses these notebooks is only this is another reason we wanted to get this archive going. The the library that houses the notebooks is only open 18 hours a week for research access. So the notebooks are essentially inaccessible. And especially if you come from anywhere outside the United States, it is outrageously expensive to go to Philadelphia and only be able to work 18 hours a week on this material. So So we're making this material accessible in a way that you know, otherwise, then it's never been before and otherwise, it could not be but there's a lot of it. And because and the Rosenbach Museum and Library which houses these notebooks apparently has no money or staff working Continuing the digitization project process. And so at some point, we're thinking, you know, do we need to write grants for the Rosenbach? Or how do we, how do we, as an archive, move forward with digitization now, we haven't edited and transcribed all the notebooks that have been digitized. So that's what we're trying to do now. But we will eventually have to move to that next step of getting the rest of them digitized and figuring out how that will be done, who will pay for it, and what the mechanics are. Yeah, so that's one, you know, that's the major next step. On the other hand, there's a smaller next step that we're already in the process of making. And that is that Marianne Moore not only kept these notebooks that she recorded things in, but she also kept calendars, so date books, and sometimes in our calendars. She also made notes about things she was doing "lunch with wh Auden, won the Pulitzer Prize!". But it could also be "washed my hair", or, you know, played tennis with, you know, some little kid down the street. Anyway. So these notebooks are very interesting for giving a kind of intimate sense of a woman's life over the course of 60 years. So incredibly interesting for historians, for people interested in social culture, for people, or for people who are working on Moore's poems or essays, to see when she's meeting people. And sometimes she even says, you know, working on this essay, so you can see in a more detailed way where the work is going, while other things are happening in her life, or while she's doing other things. So she talks about when she's ill when her mother's ill, you know, so you have more precise dates than you would in any other way. So she lived with her, as I said, she never married, and she lived with her mother until her mother's death in 1947. So at that point, what was already in her 60s. So her mother was long lived. And that was a very close, complicated relationship. But yeah, so the our, so one of the projects that we're engaged with right now, is putting the notebooks online. And we're not going to do those and facing page transcriptions. Because there we figure the, it's really about the information. It's not about what the page looks like. Whereas when she's drafting a poem, you want to see what the page looks like, one of the associate editors is the, his job is to work on these date books. He's setting up a system through this GitHub quirk writer for to create the template that people will transcribe into. And then the translation process that will occur from there. Before it goes online, it'll be simpler, much simpler than for the notebooks are so much less handwriting. But, but we do now have all of the notebooks, scanned, all of the date books, scanned, images are in order. So that is pretty close to being ready to go, which is really exciting. 

Natalia Estrada  33:25  
So what has the response been like to the project? People love it.

Cris Miller  33:30  
So there was a Marianne Moore conference in May. And I would say, half of the papers began with saying, I can't believe how enabled I was to do this work by the digital archive, you know, what, what else are you putting up? So a lot of excitement about what's to come and, and really enormous appreciation for it, even though there are only I think, three notebooks up so far, just to have those up. And especially because two of them are really key poetry notebooks that a lot of people turn to, has been very useful for more scholars.

Natalia Estrada  34:07  
That's awesome. But usually, you might not hear a response from people and the fact that there was a conference that you can go to,

Cris Miller  34:15  
well, you know, that it's been a problem getting grants for the more archive because she's not that well known. And so, you know, it's not like Walt Whitman, where you can say, important to American democracy. In fact, we can make these claims, but it doesn't have the automatic resonance because people haven't been reading Marianne Moore's since they were in grade school, or hearing the name and so on. But, and it's also been difficult to, therefore, to make the argument that the archive is useful beyond the realm of Marianne, more scholars, but within the realm of Marianne, more scholars, it is absolutely important is significant, useful. So, you know, we'll keep working on that. grant applications. But, you know, that's the kind of argument that we're we're having to figure out ways to make clear that that that the archive can be useful. Beyond the world of more scholars, 

Natalia Estrada  35:15  
is there like a project that you have in mind that you would hope would come from the archive like you wish someone would take the archive the materials from it, and just do something with it? Is that in your mind anywhere?

Cris Miller  35:29  
Well, that's a very interesting question. Sometimes, I think one of the ways that one could make clear to a broader public, the importance of the work that the archive is doing is to take one of the notebooks that's already been transcribed and published online. And to put it out in a print publication, with commentary, interpretive commentary. So for example, to take one of the poetry notebooks, reproduce it in print form, and then have interpretive commentary on the poems that she's drafting in that notebook, and what we learned from the drafts in relation to the public published poems. So that would be that'd be a really fun project, I think that there would be some press editor who might be interested, right, be a single notebook, not 122. And, you know, could be that the whole thing wouldn't be reproduced in facsimile. But, you know, let's say many key pages. Yeah, I don't know that would so that would be fun, for me, or for somebody else to do? 

Natalia Estrada  36:54  
So we've started this conversation with your relationship, your early relationship with computers and the internet. How do you think your relationship with both has changed over time, and especially with this project?

Cris Miller  37:08  
Well, when I came to UB, so it was 2006, I came in as the English department, which is extremely demanding job. And it was just at the time that a number of other faculty at UB, were beginning to put together some kind of digital humanities support groups. And I was, I knew at that point, that I would do some kind of Digital Humanities, or I would say, digital literary project having to do with one of the poets I worked on. And it wasn't clear to me yet, whether this would be with Marianne Moore, or would it, it would be with another poet, Mina Loy. And so I was sort of exploring both avenues. And I, but I knew that I also couldn't do it, I absolutely could not do it until I was no longer chair of the department, because chairing the Department took too much of my time, right, there would just be no time for that kind of lift. So when I found that I could get access, I could get permission to publish these more notebooks, that was a deciding factor. And that's why I went with more. So I'd actually been extremely interested in I knew that this was the wave of the future, for poets with complicated archives, and also for making, especially, you know, my interest is female poets accessible worldwide in ways that they just hadn't been. So, yeah, I would say that, when I am, when we started the digital archive, I actually took some training workshops to you know, find out more about TEI XML and, you know, the so that I would really have a better understanding of the kind of process that went into encoding and you know, what it was that needed to be done to produce the the flexibility and fluidity in moving around the site that we wanted. And since then, yeah, I just have a you know, increasing respect for the people who are capable of moving back and forth between technical let's say, programming, and an understanding of literary study or literary textuality that, that the programming serves, rather than having the literature serve the programming or you know, the other way around. So so all of that, but then also, I become more and more aware of the necessity in our educational system, especially in let's say, the Modern Language Association, envelope. The need for digital humanities training for our undergraduate but especially our graduate students, they need Need to know how to be savvy in relationship to a digital archive production. Because there are more and more issues with print publication expands difficulty of publishing. There are more and more people interested in archival work, and archival work is more difficult to publish often than other kinds of work because it is so messy and so extensive. And it is also tied up with pedagogy. You know, what do you do in your own classes? How do you produce things? And how do you critique what you see online. So, you know, our students are very sophisticated about reading literary texts, but they're often not very sophisticated about reading, digital, you know, texts, let's say, or archives. And so, you know, in more than one graduate class I, I've had students compare Digital Archives, who appear to be doing similar things, and then talk about what the differences are, what do you learn? What do you miss? What do you see? What do you not see. And this is, I think, for them very eye opening, because it enables them to look critically at what they're getting online. Whereas I think that they're sometimes more naive about wanting to accept what's online as true where they are what's in print, right, they already know, to be skeptical of print. But if it's online, it seems, you know, really immediate and must be, must be right. So anyway, I mean, not talking about social media, of course, but scholarly sites that are online. Anyway. So I think that there are huge pedagogical issues having to do with digital skills, and production that I'm now much more attuned to than I was a decade ago. The thing about a digital project is it is not stable. Right? That's not what could that you produce it. And then that's it. So you produce a Digital site, and then the technology changes. And so you have to keep figuring out ways to keep it alive in the current technical universe, right? So there are not just glitches that enter and but sometimes will new programs, I mean, think about the floppy disks, you can no longer use because they fit into no computer. You know, I have, oh my gosh, since the 1980's, I you know, I got stacks of them that are totally useless now. But, you know, with each generation of new computing technology, these things changed. And it's going to keep changing. So we need people who can who can keep alive, the work that's been produced as well as people who can produce new work.

Natalia Estrada  43:04  
What do you think she would think about this internet landscape this like tech technological landscape that we're in now? What do you think she would? Do you think she would have a field day,

Cris Miller  43:16  
she would love it, she would have a field day, you know, this woman's notebooks are kind of like intertextuality, before there was a system that enabled one to do it, right. So she kept she indexed some of her notebooks, why she could find things more more quickly. And she used material from these notebooks and her poems, and this is what makes him so fascinating, that she draws lines out of, you know, some things you read, maybe it was a month ago, maybe it was six years ago, maybe it was 15 years ago, and uses it in a poem. So she's gonna, she's these notebooks are, you know, kind of her own archive, things that she thought are observed or noticed, or that struck her fancy. And, and she uses them in poems, and then, and as a kind of, I think, parody of TS Eliot's notes in the wasteland. She also uses notes for several of her poems, but they're not notes to Paradise Lost, or Shakespeare or, you know, famous people that, you know, they'll say things like, read this in a newspaper, or they're to science textbooks, or overheard at the circus. So, you know, her point is, poetry comes from every place, right? The language that counts the language that resonates the language that builds these poems that she's making comes from every sphere of the world. Ordinary people science books, and you know, the old books about, you know, something else museum catalog descriptors.

Natalia Estrada  44:51  
I just realized that she reminds me of like her way of doing art and creating art and thinking about it. is very similar to the Instagram account Humans of New York, where it is anybody in the city of New York, they have their photo taken and they tell their story. But it's the people that you don't think of that kind of disappear in the background. But I imagined Marian Moore would love a project like that.

Cris Miller  45:19  
I think she would. I think that very much she would she, she has promised about a television broadcast Mozart's The Magic Flute, and she's interested in technology, she's interested in the ways these things are happening. The very fact that you would go on the radio with Muhammad Ali, when she was in her 70s. You know, this is a, she was interested in what could be done right next next steps,

Natalia Estrada  45:45  
or like, now you can, you know, post a social media message or like, just tweet to the President now, like she would she would love it. I think she probably wouldn't love it that much.

Cris Miller  46:02  
You would hope that you wouldn't spend too much of her time doing it so that you'd actually get some poetry written. But 

Natalia Estrada  46:06  
no, she would figure out a way to make poetry on Twitter.

Cris Miller  46:11  
That's it's altogether possible. This is a part of my life that I would never have predicted part of my scholarly life, I would never predict it in 1980. But, you know, I just find it increasingly fascinating. And I'm, you know, I hope to keep working on this for a long time.

Natalia Estrada  46:30  
I hope so too. Cris, thank you so much for talking to me 

Cris Miller  46:34  
Oh, thank you, Natalia. 

Christian Miller, professor of English Lit, and co director of the digital scholarship studio network.

One wonderful, most famous poems is called poetry. And it begins with the line begins i to dislike it. There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle, reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine. And then the poem goes on from there, and it ends by calling attention to what she says. Poets should be literal lists of the imagination, above insolence and triviality and present for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, you know, just a lovely line. Yeah, so what should a poem be an imaginary garden with real tones in it? So that combination, the genuine and all its rawness and the imagination is very much I think, characteristic of Mary and more. But what a great way to begin upon poetry I to dislike it.

Natalia Estrada  47:59  
You wouldn't expect that from a poet to be like "yeah, I don't like this either."

Cris Miller  48:04  
Reading it but perfect contempt for it. discovers in it after all, please for the genuine

Natalia Estrada  48:11  
Digital Explorer was produced, written and hosted by me. support provided by the UB libraries. We have a list of the resources mentioned in the episode, including where you can find them in the UB Library's Special thanks to Omar Brown. Cris Miller, Chris Hollister, Matthew Faytak, and the cat Jasmine. Thank you and we'll see you online