ENGL 372
Documentary Poetry
Last Offered Fall 2020
Division I
This course is not offered in the current catalog

One of the most vibrant trends in contemporary writing, documentary poetry draws on various kinds of source materials in the creation of innovative forms. This course will be a joint adventure in the reception and production of such projects, and is designed for anyone interested in the intersections of archival research and creative writing. Part of our work will be to historicize and theorize this mode of literary making, which emerges out of Modernist experiments in polyvocality, collage, and what Ezra Pound termed the “poem including history.” We will begin the semester by looking at Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 poetic sequence, “The Book of the Dead,” which exposes the complicity of Union Carbide in the silicosis contracted by the miners who dug the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Rukeyser wrote of her desire for a “poetry [that] can extend the document”; our subsequent readings in this course will look to a number of contemporary book-length projects that do just that. Our documentary models–by such writers as Heimrad Bäcker, Anne Carson, Layli Long Soldier, Don Mee Choi, M. NourbSe Philip, Mark Nowak, and Claudia Rankine–treat a wide range of subjects, yet all share both an investigative approach and a commitment to thinking about the way individual lives are shaped by larger social and historical structures. Generically, these works make use of the strategies of poetry, but also frequently incorporate essay, narrative, and image to create distinctly mixed forms. Students likewise will choose topics to investigate over the term, conducting original archival research and thinking inductively through the material toward a final project that will be shared with the public on our course website.