Del Ray Cross founded and edited the historical archive, and his own poems appeared throughout the original publication’s run. Eleven surviving publication pages span Issues 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15, 17, 20, 24, 29, and 31. Together they trace a voice drawn to city streets, intimacy, comic digression, music, weather, memory, and the sudden turn that lets an ordinary detail open into a poem.
Del Ray Cross in the historical archive
The archive includes “what made me write,” “bassoon,” “Forgot the thought,” “Ice,” postcard poems, and several untitled or group-titled sequences. Cross also took part in the postcard-poem exchanges that connected the historical archive contributors across cities and issues. The range is broad, while the poems repeatedly return to movement: a thought breaks off, an image changes direction, a joke becomes an admission, a street scene acquires emotional weight.
Sound, music, and the moving line
Music appears everywhere in Cross’s the historical archive work: bassoon, symphony, Frank O’Hara, drumbeats, songs, voices, and the rhythm of phrases that seem to improvise as they go. the archive’s guide to sound devices in poetry offers a formal context for that use of cadence, recurrence, tonal interruption, and sonic association.
Love, memory, and address
Many of these poems speak through attraction, former lovers, friendship, desire, absence, and the odd persistence of remembered scenes. A pool table, a coat-check guy, an orange leaf, a hot tub, a postcard, or a street can become the point from which feeling expands. the archive’s field of love poems continues that tradition of intimate address across tenderness, comedy, longing, and estrangement.
Collage and contemporary speech
Cross often lets the poem absorb whatever language is nearby: fragments of conversation, cultural reference, public speech, jokes, lists, visual details, and abrupt narrative turns. the archive’s guide to modern poetry places that mobility within a wider history of collage, free verse, hybrid form, and the expansion of poetic diction.
the historical archive and ANACHRONIZMS
Cross’s editorial work made the historical archive a meeting place for poets from many scenes and countries. His own long-running project ANACHRONIZMS, begun in 2005, extends the same appetite for daily observation, cultural debris, memory, humor, and ordinary life into thousands of poems. A 2012 interview in Cordite Poetry Review discusses Cross as a poet and founding editor of the historical archive.
Further reading
Cordite Poetry Review publishes an extended interview with Del Ray Cross about poetry and the historical archive. His continuing ANACHRONIZMS project presents his ongoing poems, photographs, and visual work.