Graduate Student Spotlight: Molly Porter on Creating a Digital Anthology of Seattle’s Regional Poetry
Along with its undergraduate minor, the UW Textual Studies Program offers opportunities for MA and PhD students enrolled in any program at the UW to earn a Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies. Designed for students researching cultural and literary materials, working in archival or digital formats, or for those considering careers in editing, publishing, libraries, or archives, this graduate certificate program helps students explore their interdisciplinary interests while building the skills necessary to work with a variety of textual and historical materials and media forms in both analog and digital environments.
In this post series, we’ll be shining a light on some of the recent work of UW Textual Studies graduate students. For this inaugural feature, we talked with Molly Porter, PhD Candidate in English and alum of the UW Textual Studies graduate certificate program, about her work on a digital humanities project featuring poetry of the Puget Sound region, as well as how her time in Textual Studies has informed and enriched the research of her dissertation. In her own words, Molly describes her current research and its relationship to her Capstone project digitally anthologizing Seattle’s regional poetry.
The Poetic Signage of Seattle’s Public Lands
Hi there, I’m Molly Porter! In pursuing my Ph.D. in English, aided by the Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies, I research what I consider to be an overlooked textuality in literary studies—poetry quoted on signage, such as in parks. I think that studying this tangible intersection of poetry and public lands is crucial for understanding how literature shapes place, and vice versa. It also sheds light on a key readership of poetry we miss out on in focusing exclusively on the traditional media of books (or the new digital media of Instagram poetry).
While this isn’t the conventional domain of textual studies, my focus on the physicality of this poetic signage and their geographic placement in public lands has been instrumental in pushing me to think beyond the symbolic domain of poetry to consider poetry’s materiality–a consideration aided by my coursework in the Textual Studies graduate certificate program. For example, it was so rewarding to get to write with oak gall ink on parchment in a medieval romance class. In a digital media class, I enjoyed finding a Mountaineers poem about an alpine landscape pasted in a scrapbook alongside an inscribed piece of wood in the UW Libraries Special Collections and relished the challenge of considering how to translate this specimen’s tangibility and ecological significance into a digital environment, leading to my culminating Capstone project.
Digital Humanities Capstone on the Poetics of Seattle’s Bioregion
For my Capstone, I created a web-based anthology of the poetry of the Puget Sound bioregion in which I digitized unpublished poems from the UW Libraries Special Collections. Realizing that, compared to locations like New York or London, the region of the Puget Sound remains largely unstoried in the public imagination, I sought to remedy this gap by making digitally accessible poetic works about the region held within UW’s Special Collections and available in the public domain.
My interest in these poems was guided by both their thematic similarities, all being literature about the environment, as well as their material conditions, such as their shared geographic location and similar dates of publication. Each has an interesting material form (i.e. scribbled on paper, typed by a typewriter, pasted into a scrapbook, etc.) and each, though varying in their genre and content, are united by their focus on and engagement with the natural environment of our Seattle region.
Textual Studies and the Ecological Archive
My subfield of ecocriticism focuses largely on how literature portrays or responds to the natural world, like in a novel’s description of a park. But a focus on textual studies encourages me to ask the reverse: how about considering more tangibly how “nature” portrays literature, as captured in an inspirational quote in a sign within a park? And what would it mean to consider how the natural world responds to a literary text? For example, we can see the material landscape portraying literature in this quotation inscribed onto the steps of the Mount Rainier National Park, but we can also see behind it the tangible way the “natural” world is roped-off and is shaped by the aesthetics of ecological preservation lauded by quotations like these.
The interdisciplinarity of my research has encouraged me to take a wide view of what counts as “textual evidence,” as I’ve moved outside the conventional archive of the library to the public lands populating our region. It’s important to remember how this landscape of Tahoma, while influenced by these poetic plaques, is also deeply shaped by oral stewardship traditions from local tribes one can miss out on in a hyperfocus on print-based textual evidence. Paying mind to the materiality of these texts–printed, inscribed, and spoken–helps me to draw out such signage’s varying historical scales from the local to the global and helps me to unearth the sometimes circuitous routes of their textual transmission that, occasionally, bring my outdoor wanderings back into the UW library’s archives.
Researching with UW Special Collections PNW Archives
For example, Ezra Pound’s famous expression “make it new” features on a plaque in the relatively new Dune Peninsula in Tacoma on the Frank Herbert Trail, which has transformed a once-dystopian copper smelting landscape into a utopian space for public recreation. Though Pound’s mantra was a big influence on the iconic sci-fi writer (who taught classes on Utopia and Dystopia at UW), it felt a bit random that this highbrow, politically controversial, European literary master ended up here at a park in the PNW. What is this phrase doing here in this place?
After many internet rabbit holes, I found that this famous phrase’s first publication can actually be traced to a 1928 University of Washington Book Store chapbook “translation” of the Confucian classic “The Great Learning,” a first edition of which is housed in a specially-dedicated collection of the UW Libraries’ holdings on the Pacific Northwest. Begun in 1905, the collection comprises thousands of library materials and archival collections that document the people, history, and culture of this region.
I had no idea our seemingly provincial region had such a key hand in carving out this piece of literary history until a close reading of this plaque prodded me to trace its origins. It turns out that Glenn Hughes, an early twentieth-century UW English professor and founder of our School of Drama, commissioned the chapbook publication which featured this phrase while here in Seattle. The phrase was written down in a footnote of the chapbook by Pound while in Italy, which he drew from a French translation of the work, which took its source material from an inscription on an ancient washtub in China.
Through this winding route the quotation came to be read by Herbert and now by contemporary park-goers in Washington State where it writes over Coast Salish fishing histories in a plaque on reclaimed land at the once-polluted Dune Peninsula.
In attending to this smorgasbord of textualities across the globe in research for my dissertation (which analyzes authors like Pound, Muir, and other writers quoted on local signage), I’m starting to trace the localized history of this phrase “make it new” to dig up eco-literary connections between the regional and the planetary, between the traditional indoor archive and the outside, public realm of inscribed literature in an exploration of the “where” of modernist innovation.
Graduate-Level Courses in Textual Study, Special Collections, and Digital Humanities
Congratulations to Molly Porter on completing the Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies and many thanks for sharing this exciting research with the Textual Studies blog! The Textual Studies program offers an array of courses at the graduate level that reflect the program’s dedication to the study of diverse texts across time, place, media form, and language, including non-anglophone and non-alphabetic corpora, computational and digital approaches to textual study, and the ability to experience hands-on learning with materials in UW Special Collections and the UW Libraries’ archives.
If you’d like to find out more about opportunities for graduate students in UW Textual Studies, our upcoming courses, or the certificate program and its requirements, you can explore our website or email text@uw.edu.
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