JT - Joelle Taylor Archive

JT

Collection

Joelle Taylor Archive

198?-2021

4 boxes Mixed

Authors, English -- 21st century
Queer poetry

Tayor, JoelleJoelle Taylor is a poet, playwright and author. She has performed across the UK as well as internationally and her work is on the OCR GCSE English syllabus. A former UK slam champion, she founded the national youth slam championships SLAMbassadors in 2001 for the Poetry Society and was its Artistic Director and National Coach until 2018. She has published four full collections of poetry: Ska Tissue (2011), The Woman Who Was Not There (2014), Songs My Enemy Taught Me (2017) and C+nto & Othered Poems (2021), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Songs My Enemy Taught Me was inspired by fusing her own story of surviving sexual abuse with masterclasses engaging groups of vulnerable women across the UK. Speaking to refugees, prisoners, young mothers and survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, the collection powerfully evokes the struggles women still face globally in the twenty-first century. A documentary about her life and work, Life Changing Verse, was broadcast on television in 2010, and in 2020 she made a documentary for BBC radio about butch lesbian culture.

The Archive was deposited in 2022 under the Storehouse Model as part of a Mellon Foundation funded project (2021-2013) to build a Centre of Contemporary Poetry in the Archive at UEA.

This catalogue entry, summarising the collection is just one of several routes through the archive of Joelle Taylor (for traditional inventory see section 2 below).

Section One: the following resources are useful additional references to read when encountering the archive or preparing for a visit:

i) The 2002-2003 Mellon Foundation funded project which brought Taylor's archive to UEA employed a 'community led' methodology, discussed in detail in the publication: 'Towards a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive: Final Report' (published by the University of East Anglia and available via our Website www.uea.ac.uk/bacw or via the UEA's Publishing Project)

ii) Taylor wrote a crown of sonnets inspired by the project which is published separately in the pamphlet: 'Uncollected: Poets' (again available via our Website www.uea.ac.uk/bacw or via the UEA's Publishing Project).

iii) Working as a Poet in Residence on the project, alongside three other poets (Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Jay Bernard and Gail McConnell) Taylor engaged in a conversation with the then Visiting Poetry Fellow, Will Harris, to discuss her creative process and her archive. An extract of this conversation is transcribed in the aforementioned: 'Towards a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive: Final Report'.

iv) A digital exhibition site: https://contemporarypoetryarchive.omeka.net/ contains videos of events relating to the project, where Taylor reflects on the process of archiving. In addition to Taylor's own writing and recorded reflections on the archive, the site contains exhibits from her archive, curated and interpreted by UEA postgraduate students. Finally, Taylor led a writing workshop at Cromer Public Library in Norfolk as part of the project and the public participants' responses are archived and a selection exhibited on the site.

Section Two: what follows is a more traditional inventory of the archive material deposited by Taylor with additional interpretation by Taylor.

The archive of Joelle Taylor consists of three series, which the poet refers to as vitrines:

JT/1 Vitrine One: Poetry
JT/2 Vitrine Two: Prose/Novels
JT/3 Vitrine Three: Theatre

Use the top right hand navigation links to visit the records that relate to each of the different vitrines (or series) within the collection.

Taylor has written the following as a guide:

"Each Vitrine is dedicated to a form of writing: theatre, poetry collections, and prose/ novels. Imagine these boxes are glass, so that you not only see the contents of each but also the contents of the others beside it. I have tried in the curation of these vitrines to show how ideas repeat, overlap, superimpose themselves across different works, how they haunt the page as well as the body.

Inside each poem is a novel or a theatre piece, or the reverse. Cunto and Othered Poems may have begun as a short story called O, Maryville in The Night Alphabet, but I was writing around the subject and characters for decades, trying to find a language. This is best illustrated with the short stories Abigail’s Play Party, and Lucid Johnston (a performance piece). But the obsession with the butch body extends still further back, and I have included a notebook from my late teens/ early 20’s which demonstrates this."

Taylor produced the following timeline identifying links between the works:

TIMELINE (with links to subsequent works)

Early notebooks (link CUNTO notes – similar pathways of thought, recurring imagery)
Naming (link with SMETM – investigations into sexual terrorism and sex-based violence)
Lucid Johnston (link with CUNTO and WS through Billy McCree character)
(W)horror Stories (link CUNTO Notes – Billy McCree character)
Songs My Enemy Taught Me (NAMING link – accounts of sexual violence)
CUNTO & Othered Poems (Whorror Stories/ TNA – preoccupation with the masculine feminine, the butch, the other woman)
The Night Alphabet (Cunto/ WS)

Access is permitted to visitors for private research

Copyright. All rights reserved. Photographs may be taken for private research only with permission of the archive on completion of a copyright declaration form. The amount of copying is subject to fair dealing under copyright law.