TINA DARRAGH

Blue Bag Press has spent several years working to publish, digitize, and promote the writings of Tina Darragh (1950 - 2025), a poet and librarian associated with Washington D.C.’s node of Language and innovative oriented poetry. This labor constitutes our “Tina Darragh Project,” and has always been made available to readers for free. This effort is conducted in alignment with and continuation of Darragh’s own anti-capitalist poetic initiative enshrined in her “shared poetic license project(s)” and her wider attention to the commons, access, and opposition to commodification.

In addition to these “archival” works, Blue Bag has also re-presented Darragh’s “debut” collection, My Hands to Myself, in a newly prepared digital edition as a RESOURCE, and printed two booklets: 4 Plays (AGITPROP) and MUTANT SOLIDARITIES. This project continues to operate “in flux,” just as we have replaced prior editions we have released or made available. We offer all these materials now here, in a single location, and will continue to update it with future materials as they become available. There is also a forthcoming bibliography, volume of “correspondence,” and an omnibus edition of the three editions Blue Bag has released.

This project is made possible with the permission of Jack Inman. The majority of scans are from the Blue Bag Press collection, with select material culled from various locations and correspondences.

A good deal of Tina’s remaining work can be found elsewhere online at Eclipse (two chapbooks from Leave Books and Sun and Moon Press), in Jacket2, and Pennsound, in the Among the Neighbors series, and through her publishers Belladonna (rule of dumbsand Elders Series #8), ZimZalla (Opposable Dumbs), and Little Red Leaves (Deep Eco Pré, with Marcella Durand). The breadth of the holdings here, alongside the other 5 print works online, and the readings, prove a fairly comprehensive “collected works,” and such as they appeared originally, though there are gaps.

A collected writings intended for print is in preparation from Edge Books & Primary Writing, edited by Rod Smith, Phyllis Rosenzweig, and Diane Ward. Tina’s papers are held at George Washington University. A summative obituary for her, written by Charles Bernstein, is located here.