The origins of North American documentary poetry are often traced back to Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” (1938). We know, however, that its practitioners (including Rukeyser) tend to view themselves less as citizens of a North American lineage and more as subjects of a geopolitically imbricated world. As the turn of the millennium ushered in a new age of web connectivity, and with it, both broadened and consolidated document ecologies, poets responded to the changed landscape with new “documental” methodologies: appropriating, reconstructing, and “resocializing” documents to remediate the hierarchies of cultural memory (Leong 2020). In addition, various thinkers and writers have sought to account for the dialectical violence between social regimes based on an ontology of what Maurizio Ferraris calls “documentality” and what John-Michael Rivera calls “the spectral logic of undocumentality.” Increasingly, Anglophone documentary poets choose to foreground the transnational, translational groundwork of their practice, working to expose the networks of connectivity elided by/in master narratives of U.S. history. Moreover, not all practitioners of what we might call documentary poetics situate themselves in North America, nor do they all write in English. This seminar seeks alternate, comparative angles onto “documentary poetics,” scaled to view the translational/transnational connections which have both potentiated and emerged from the genre.

Broadly conceived, documentary poetics describes the practice of creating “found” art using materials from institutional and/or personal archives. It enters into the politics of the document, but it may also seek to perform the limitations of the documentary mode, inspiring terms such as “undocumentary” (Rosa Alcalá), “unarchival” (Paula Cucurella), “disappropriation” (Cristina Rivera Garza), and “anti-documentary” (Leong). For this seminar, we use the term “poetics” to open our inquiry into how “documentary” may posit a shared orientation/method/modality which interacts with the generic conceits of poetry, as well as fiction, autotheory,  film, and the visual arts. Differently put, how do the specificities of media and genre interact in documentary poetics? 

We invite critical inquiry into the common slippages between terms like record/document, witness/reportage, archival/documentary, as well as discussion of related terms and genres in languages other than English. 

Further questions include:

• The document as both form and medium
• Different site-specific ways of theorizing the documentary/documental contestation of the official record, the “arkheion” of the archive.
• Doctoring documents: the aesthetics and politics of forgery/faking/fabulation. 
• Creative practices of translation and transcription.
• The border between documentary poetics and border studies.
• The ethical tensions between vouching–and vouching for–and versifying.