Activating The Archive #1 - Russell Thompson & Cherry Eckel - The Archivists Reason Pt.1

Where have all the archivists gone? What does it mean to archive?

Performing poetry since 2020 has had a major shift in it’s plausibility as a career. I myself took a back seat to the stage and took to the online-sphere as an educator and envisioned a platform where poets could meet other poets, spoken word artists could meet all crafts to imbibe of their nourishing creativity and transform what was learned into new work, or whole new practice.

I took to research about nexus technology for environmental work, astrology and nature in the city as muses, but also ventured in to the craft of graphic novel storytelling as inspiration for writing poetry and shared my findings with a few Poets Built It members.

But what people like Russell Thompson, an intrepid explorer of the literary terrain for the last forty years has done, is create a masterpiece.

Forty years of poetry, championed by Apples and Snakes, the poetry organisation, has an archive, and, it is Russell who painstakingly compiled and gifted it to the poetry world.

Here is part one of the interview with theatre-maker and spoken word performer, Cherry Eckel.

~ Zena ~