Documentary Poetics

Consider the following recent writing projects-a
poet travels to her home state of Indiana in
search of remaining traces of the Underground
Railroad; another reproduces newspaper excerpts
about mining disasters in China, interleaving them
with photographs and worker transcripts regarding
the 2006 Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia; yet
another composes a long poem that only uses words
from titles, catalog entries, or exhibit
descriptions of Western art objects that depict a
black woman. "Documentary Poetics" will assess
this documentary turn in early twenty first
century poetry. If, according to Horace, poetry is
meant to "delight and instruct," then a major
strand of contemporary poetry is now
embracing-over and against a delightful lyricism-a
pedagogical, historical, or memorializing
function. We will study important modernist
precursors such as Muriel Rukeyser and Charles
Reznikoff and then proceed to a range of
contemporary practitioners including M. NourbeSe
Philip, Rob Fitterman, Mark Nowak, Craig Santos
Perez, and Claudia Rankine. In addition, reading
thinkers from Michel Foucault to Erwin Panofsky to
Maurizio Ferraris will bolster our sense of what
we mean by the term "document." This class will be
a reading-focused seminar and may include student
presentations and an opportunity to workshop. The
final project will be a chapbook-length work that
significantly draws on pre-exisiting documentation
though critical papers may be submitted pending
instructor approval.