“Some days, everything is a machine, by which I mean remove any outer covering, and you will most likely find component parts…”
Mary Jo Bang, A Doll for Throwing, (2017)
The exhibit, Some Days, Everything is a Machine, explores the creative practices of poet and translator Mary Jo Bang across analog and digital formats. From Missouri, Bang has taught in Wash U’s English Department since 2000. She is the author of nine poetry collections, a translation of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, and numerous other translation projects. Bang was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for her 2007 collection, Elegy. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Berlin Prize. She was nominated for a 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry for her most recent collection, A Film in Which I Play Everyone.
Bang’s creative process is reflected in these archival materials. The range of her work, includes poetry, translation, photography, and collage. The photographs and photocollages show Bang’s early career as a photographer, which continued alongside her later practice as a poet. Attention to the image has long been central to her work. Using a Diana camera, a lightweight plastic camera known for its soft focus and vignetting, she shot Trooping the Colour in London around 1988. When she was studying for an MFA in poetry at Columbia University, she photographed her fellow students, Mónica de la Torre and Timothy Donnelly among them.
In every medium, whether translation, poetry, mixed‑media, or photography, Bang’s attention to detail, her play with self‑portraiture, and her experimentation with language represents a praxis that is at once refined and joyfully playful. Within that play, deeper meanings unfold through a critique of society that draws on both historical and contemporary sources to ask: How best might we live this one life we’ve been given, grief and all?
Tracing Bang’s creative practice along digital and analog formats raises important questions for digital preservation and what it means to collect the papers of a writer whose practice is now hybrid (both digital and analog) and at risk of being lost without intentional stewardship.
This exhibit is part of the Mellon-funded Born-Digital Poetry: Planning for the Future of Literary Archives project. It was curated by Born-Digital Poetry fellow Sarah María Medina, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, International Writers track. Metadata creation and Omeka Omeka implementation by Diana Bell, Born‑Digital Poetry Fellow and Project Archivist.
Special thanks go to Christa Kileff, Digital Assett Metadata Librarian, Joel Minor, the Modern Literature Collection Curator, and Sarah Weeks, Web and Email Archives Coordinator. Additional thanks to Marijane Ceruti, Jessi Cerutti, Ian Lanus, and Sarah Swanz for their digitization, curatorial, and technical support, and for their contributions to the project. All materials are from The Mary Jo Bang Papers, except those on loan from Bang.
The online exhibit expands the physical exhibit digitally, reflecting rapidly evolving literary technologies and the importance of preserving poetic practice in the digital era.