Diana Arterian : Agrippina the Younger & Smoke Drifts

As an artist, how does one dive into the wreck of an archive, a canon, a shared collective memory, a history—one filled with silenced voices, distorted accounts, erasures and elisions—on behalf of those wronged by it? Poet Dionne Brand says “the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck” and Diana Arterian’s work seems animated by this work of salvage and recovery. We look at her new poetry collection, Agrippina the Younger, about a Roman Empress who, today, is only known as the “daughter of,” “sister of,” “mother of,” “wife of ” various men of history; and also at Diana’s new work of translation (co-translated with Marina Omar) Smoke Drifts, the first time the Anglophone world is able to engage deeply with the work of the Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman, a rising literary star silenced in the prime of her life. We look at feminist practices and strategies of archival confrontation in these two very different contexts, Ancient Rome and modern Afghanistan, and the different considerations and choices Diana makes as she dives deep into the wreck and somehow resurfaces to re-present these lives, this art, shimmering with life, for us.

For the bonus audio archive Diana contributes an epic medley of readings, everything from ancient Armenian poetry to some co-translations in-progress of contemporary Armenian poetry; from her memoir-in-progress to a hard-to-find 35 year old piece by Alice Notley called “Homer’s Art” which wonders how a women could write an epic and if “there might be recovered some sense of what the mind was like before Homer, before the world went haywire & women were denied participation in the design & making of it. Perhaps someone might discover that original mind inside herself right now, in these times.” To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and about all the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.