Archive of Desire: A Poem in Four Parts for C.P. Cavafy began as a collaborative multidisciplinary project between the poet Robin Coste Lewis, the composer Vijay Iyer, the cellist Jeffrey Zeigler and the visual artist Julie Mehretu. This multimedia quartet traveled to Athens together to engage with the Cavafy archives as part of the composition of their performance, a performance now rendered anew on the page in Robin’s new poetry collection. We look at the different ways Robin alchemizes archival material across her three books, at questions of selfhood and desire when engaging with the poetry of another, at her unique relationship to time, at how queerness informs her poetics and that of Cavafy’s, and much more. A conversation that conjures everyone from Anne Carson to Lyn Hejinian, Daniel Mendelsohn to Ross Gay, and roams from ancient Greece to modern Alexandria.

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