Documentary poetry applies the outward-looking, journalistic mission typical of documentary filmmaking to a genre (poetry) that our culture typically perceives as an inward, expressive endeavor. In fact, documentary poetry first started appearing in the early 20th century, with the work of William Carlos Williams in his long project Paterson (which includes passages and headlines from newspapers, correspondence, and public documents), Muriel Rukeyser’s US1 (which incorporates medical reports, trial transcripts, and congressional testimony), and the work of Charles Reznikoff, who uses transcripts from the Nuremberg trials in his work Holocaust.
Most simply put, documentary poetry is an alternative mode of storytelling. More specifically, this course will consider work that, in the words of Joseph Harrington in his article “Docupoetry and archive desire” from the journal Jacket 2, “(1) contains quotations from or reproductions of documents or statements not produced by the poet and (2) relates historical narratives, whether macro or micro, human or natural.” Some of the texts that we will read and discuss—such as Claudia Rankine’s work—filter data, documents, photographs, and other cultural artifacts through the central subjective consciousness of the poet, while other texts—such as Robert Strong’s Bright Advent— take a more “objective” approach and minimize the centrality of the poet’s collecting consciousness in favor of the foregrounding of historical narratives and/or public artifacts.
In recent years, many poets have taken up documentary poetry as a mode for discussing important cultural conflicts and issues. Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory(saina), for example, weaves together references from dozens of sources into a reflection on the experience of Pacific Islanders in contemporary culture; Claudia Rankine’s Citizen confronts American racism, using current media representations against themselves; C. D. Wright’s One with Others combines references to newspaper and media stories with personal interviews of people who lived through the Civil Rights era in the mid-south to paint a portrait of the ways in which Americans miscommunicate and miss each other.
In addition to considering important works of documentary poetry, students will design and compose their own semester-long documentary poetry projects. These projects may use any of the hybrid approaches to poetry that they will see in our readings, or they may choose to invent their own approaches to combining research and poetic convention by, to name just a few arbitrary examples, writing a poem using the structure of a documentary film script, or composing a poetic dialogue that incorporates factual data, or creating a collaged book that combines verse, prose, and a variety of different photographic/graphic images; or designing an online project that takes advantage of digital resources, video, and links.
