"Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians."
—Neil Gaiman
“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.”
—Jacques Derrida
“I ransack public libraries and find them full of sunk treasure.”
—Virginia Woolf
Dear Readers,
In the mid-1970s, Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae and his team uncovered something extraordinary: sitting untouched in the palace ruins of the city of Ebla, Syria, wooden shelves filled with thousands of complete cuneiform tablets had collapsed in a long-ago fire, maintaining both the order and the integrity of their archives, and preserving an ancient knowledge for close to 4,500 years. The Ebla Tablets, as they have come to be known, provide us with a sense of Ebla’s importance to the ancient world: it was a center of economy and education, a place of literary production, and a major cultural hub; this resource has also allowed scholars to improve their understanding of the phonetics of the dead language of ancient Sumer. Had these archives not been created, or had they not been preserved by the fire, imagine the chasm in our knowledge of the past—and our understanding of the present.
The point is this: we should listen to Neil Gaiman and Jacques Derrida and Virginia Woolf. Librarians and archivists—and let’s add our beloved curators and art historians— help us grasp the organization and propagation of information; they are responsible for providing and maintaining the texts through which history will understand us, and in that sense they control the knowledge of the future. This issue of Gulf Coast, which we’ve taken to calling “The Archive Issue,” bases its organizational inspiration on the practice and lexicon of archival science. If you’re into extracurricular reading, we highly recommend looking up the definitions of section titles in the “Archival Lexicon” on the Society of American Archivists website. Images for the sections and the issue’s interstitial art are almost exclusively courtesy of the University of Houston’s Special Collections, and the section images’ metadata come from descriptions in the digital library. Each pairing of archival title and image seeks to acknowledge the dynamic political and artistic potential of such juxtaposition.
Nowhere is the sprit of “The Archive Issue” more clear, however, than in our special folio of eight writers responding to items held in our Special Collections. Through their arresting, original poetry and prose, we may learn of the Biloxi Wade-Ins, imagine the voices of the Gorilla Girls, or envision Tom Blue riding the rails. We owe a great debt to these writers, our colleagues in Special Collections, and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts for being open to this project. It has proven to us, and we hope to you, that the University of Houston Libraries are indeed full of treasure.
The art, art writing, and criticism in this issue tap into the richness often hidden in encounters. Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo’s reminiscences of Jean-Michel Basquiat shed new light on the music, artists, and writers who claimed early 1980s SoHo as their home turf. Through the Italian artist Angiola Gatti we see the vast possibilities that may occur when a ballpoint pen meets a canvas. In delighting in these possibilities, we also realize, of course, that the curation and production of a journal of art and literature is itself a kind of archiving of encounters, particularly as copies of each issue are housed at the Library of Congress—hopefully, until the end of eternity.
To that end, we’ve paid particular attention to our roles as editorial caretakers. When we think about the arc (and the archive) of American literature, we find it remarkably imbalanced. We acknowledge that we—and all editors—are implicated in that inequity. If you’ve been following our work with these last few issues you know that we’re also interested in pushing against language hegemony. As such, this issue includes translated and original texts in Croatian, Mandarin, Polish, and Serbian, as well as English translations of Italian and Spanish. And Ilya Kaminsky’s consideration of Adélia Prado’s poetry references the work of numerous other poets in translation. We’ve also been lucky enough to include in this issue a special section curated by the poet Eduardo C. Corral, which features new poems by Latina, Latinx, and Latino authors whose work we should all follow. While the art and writing in this issue is not a panacea for artistic, representational, and market-driven ills, we do intend to be conscious in addressing and engaging them.
T.S. Eliot, in his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” argues that each new work of art changes all the artwork that has come before it. We like the implications this idea holds in reference to the archives, but also in reference to our work with the journal for the last two years. 2016 marks the 30th anniversary of the journal and the end of our tenure as senior editors. During our time we’ve launched the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, expanded GC Online, have watched the journal’s art writing flourish, and we joined forces with Pleiades Press to publish and distribute this year’s volume of the Unsung Masters Series. (Subscribers, you can expect a copy of this year’s Unsung Masters book on Beatrice Hastings in the mail!) Each new senior editorial staff changes and grows the journal, and we look forward to seeing how our friends and colleagues will usher Gulf Coast into its fourth decade. Until then, please know how grateful we are to you—writers, readers, and supporters—for sharing with us this time.
