American Docupoets

Naomi Marx

1. Documentary poetics are not a poetic movement but a mode: weaving methods of documentation, criticism, journalism, and analysis into a poem’s body. Hermeneutical in nature, docupoetics delve into the weeds of words and language: dissecting petals and stamens, pulling up roots, examining dirt. 

2. Docupoetry is not ekphrasis. While ekphrastic poetry uses a work of art—visual, auditory, literary, or otherwise—as the exigence of a poem and vehicle for the poets imagining, a docupoet has a project in mind, and finds the materials necessary to carry out this project. For this reason, docupoetics are always an exercise in duration. Docupoetry can rarely be realized in the space of a few pages, often requiring the length of a book to turn the poetic object to the light in every manner available to the poet.

3. Docupoetics offers exactly what the academy is searching for. In every discipline, from history, sociology, psychology, and public policy to economics, mathematics, physics, and environmental science. To communicate the felt, the unquantifiable, everyone searches for methodologies in their discipline. The mode lies in poetry. But docupoetry will not gather dust in the ivory tower: it mobilizes in the streets. Grassroots movements and revolutionaries know the possibility of poetry, and the belonging of their histories, actions, and documents among strange true words.

4. Mark Nowak describes the tradition of documentary poetics as “lefter-than-liberal.” 

5. It is impossible to identify the first writers engaged in docupoetics, as the mode has existed long before we had the language to describe it. This being said, we owe a lot to Muriel Rukeyser.

[RUKEYSER]

“The Book of the Dead” – 1938

In The Life of Poetry, now out of print like many of Muriel Rukeyser’s books, she writes, “The gestures of the individuals are not history; but they are the images of history.” Rukeyser was a thought-leader in social justice oriented poetry. Jan Heller Levi, editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, claims that the poet was combating ethnocentrism, male-centrism, and false binaries well before mainstream academic culture began working towards these ends. “Rukeyser speaks for the multiplicity of experience,” Levi writes. Countercultural expressions of meaning have always necessitated a shift in mode. For Rukeyser, this took the form of documentary poetics. 

U.S. 1, tragically out of print, contained the long poem “The Book of the Dead.” In 1936, Muriel Rukeyser traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where she had heard coal miners were dying one by one of silicosis, an incurable lung disease. At twenty-two, Rukeyser took on the project of documenting and exploring a forgotten community’s experience. Lists of names, transcripts of court statements, quotes real and imagined, doctor’s notes, stock market figures, statistics on disease. Rukeyser’s endeavor took on the methodologies of ethnography, the research of investigative journalism, and the form of poetry.

Silicosis is caused by the inhalation of microcrystals of silica, dust resulting from the usage of power tools around natural caches of the mineral. The silicosis cases were preventable, but the New Kanawha Power Company did not protect its workers. Silica was a valuable commodity, and the byproduct of their mining promised an extra profit. Rukeyser, a queer, feminist, communist-associated Jew saw in Gauley Bridge the “images of history.” The tragedy befalling the town represented to Rukeyser the functions of power in time, and, being a poet, she found the mode to write it. 

The recurrent images of “The Book of the Dead” are transmuted from lived experience and picked apart. Silica dust crystals, the power generated by coal, X-ray plates, the heat and smoke of industrial furnaces; these images, alongside the figures of the miners and their families, produce the emotional core of the poem. Around this core is a whirlwind of fragments: the language which accompanies death, money, illness, bureaucracy, and labor:

MEARL BLANKENSHIP

“I wake up choking, and my wife
“rolls me over on my left side;
“then I’m asleep in the dream I always see:
“the tunnel choked
“the dark wall coughing dust.

“I have written a letter.
“Send it to the city,
“maybe to a paper
“if it’s all right.”

Dear sir, my name is Mearl Blankenship.

The physical documentation of the Gauley Bridge mining disaster made up the majority of what was communicated about the lives and deaths of the victims. Rukeyser, by compiling, lineating, parsing, paring, and meditating on this documentation, set an important precedent in the pre-history of documentary poetics. She carried out her project in the pursuit of a belief, rather than retreating to masculinist traditions of poetry which disavow a woman’s convictions. Rukeyser saw an injustice in her world which pointed to the very power structures which she had aimed to spend her young life resisting. Instead of flinching from the summons of her conscience, she traveled towards it. In doing so, Muriel Rukeyser set the tone for what docupoetry could achieve, and more importantly what sort of convictions the mode must be in service to.

“Do you believe what you yourself say? When you act, do you believe what you are doing?” Rukeyser asks her readers in The Life of Poetry. The line of questioning is not merely an artistic exercise but an edict. Consequently, each docupoet I have read seems to be consciously answering these questions for themselves, proving the metal of their projects.

[WRIGHT]

One Big Self: An Investigation – 2003

C. D., not James. Do not read the new edition which features Wright’s poems without Deborah Luster’s photographs. Find the original photobook edition, or nothing makes any sense.

Wright accompanied Luster in visiting a number of Louisiana prisons—Louisiana State Penitentiary, Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, and East Carroll Parish Prison Farm—with the book project being born from Luster’s photographs and Wright’s poetry. Collaboration is the only way anything will ever move forward. 

Docupoetics necessarily has a conscience. Wright quotes Kafka in her introduction: “Guilt is never to be doubted.” There is no way to visit a prison and not feel guilty, especially if you’re a white poet. There’s no use lingering on it, it’s just a fact. She calls the action of visiting the prisons and bearing witness a mere “flick of the conscience.” There are ways to do harm in this position. One Big Self circumvents this harm and testifies to its project by reuniting those inside—the forcibly separated—with those outside through art. This is a project worth doing: one with a conscience, even if just a flick. 

The poems of One Big Self push docupoetics to the limit. A sense of wovenness is inescapable on each page, but it is rarely clear from what sources fragments of text are being woven. Snippets of language are contextually attributable to inmates or guards, signage or court documents. But most demand the reader’s interpretation. In an untitled poem which begins [Prepare to exit the forest], Wright writes, “Louisiana bumper sticker: JESUS DON'T LEAVE EARTH WITHOUT US.” Docupoetry thrives when it makes literal the implicit mission of most contemporary poets: make strange the everyday, parse the poetry which is lying latent in the world around us already. This line shows Wright’s refusal to impose her own interpretations on the experiences she writes about. She offers the words and their context. The mode of the poem passes the parsing on to the reader, as the absence of a comma in a scrap of found text allows for a million units of meaning. Meanwhile, the poem continues on.

It’s a great day to die, a great day to leave the body, he told the press 
before his Easter execution. 

When I go, I want my lips Smyth-sewn, none of that perfect-bound crap 
it doesn’t last  

And burn me up          I don’t want any more real estate

The subject exists only in the one line, “I’’’s and “you”’s popping up elsewhere while the “he”—real or fictive?—haunts the poem. The speaker’s meditation on what happens to the body after death draws out the tensions between the subject, presumably a man on death row, and the speaker, possibly a projection of Wright the poet, with their knowledge of book-binding techniques. The man is the anchor between the poet’s meditations and the found text, his “Easter execution” conjuring bumper-sticker-Jesus and later prompting the speaker’s “faulty eschatology.” Masterfully, Wright’s poems make room for the lyrical and meditative between flashes of found text. This complexity is only permitted through the emotional anchor of an image which each line might be traced back to. Most often, these images are laden with mystery and tragedy, evidence only of what is hidden. In this sense, the poems reveal themselves through the same process with which they speak to “the corrosive toll of protracted confinement.” Every poem in One Big Self leaves far more unknown than known, the entire book a project of negative capability. 

Wright and Luster’s collaboration with one another and with their subjects seems to be the inspiration behind the title. It is a co-created ontology between the photographer, the poet, the inmates, the guards and wardens, the readers. Docupoetry itself is a collaboration between texts: the old is made into the new by a poet relating their words to the words of others. In the book, Wright uses “fragments from an antique and aggressively pious board game, road signage, prison data, inmate correspondence, and inventories of things—from baby teeth to chigger bites.” These textual collaborations create a polyvocal body, as many people come together in a collection of docupoetry in the form of one big self.

[LONG SOLDIER]

WHEREAS – 2017

is a book of poetry in two parts. The first deals directly with language, specifically Lakota and English. Poems in the first section build definitions of Lakota and English words, deconstruct the changing of meaning with the changing of tense, or explore the collaboration of text with the blank space of the page. Long Soldier writes in shapes, in boxes, in panels, in lists, across borders, behind blackouts—and all this is only what is happening at the visual level. The subject matter of the poems in WHEREAS builds an argument against imperial hegemony as it is mobilized through language. Critically, imperialism is practiced through space and land, and the relationship between environment and words stand at the center of Long Soldier’s sweeping and personal poetry.

Long Soldier is a poet on a mission: she proves her content through her form and her form through her content. Like Rukeyser and Wright before her, Long Soldier is not writing for the sake of artistic expression, but with a greater social and political aim. Part two of the collection achieves this aim. The second part of WHEREAS, sharing the name of the book, sees Long Soldier focusing her poems toward a singular document: the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, signed by then-President Barack Obama. Long Soldier writes that her “response is directed to the Apology’s delivery, as well as the language, crafting, and arrangement of the written document.” The Apology was never read aloud by Obama, witnessed or publicly received by any indigenous representatives, or accompanied by any form of legislation or change. 

Each poem in the response begins with the word “whereas,” formatted in all-capital letters. This structure is modeled after the Apology, in which each “acknowledgement” is prefaced by the same word. One such sentence states,  “Whereas the arrival of Europeans in North America opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples.” The Apology lacks gestures towards restitution for or acknowledgement of the genocide that was conducted upon indigenous Americans. Long Soldier’s docupoetic endeavor seeks to treat this absence with all of the attention its omission was created to avoid.

The docupoetry—a mode of meticulous attention—is well-suited for this aim, and Long Soldier a well-suited poet to accomplish it. She writes, in response to the quoted clause, a poem which begins [WHEREAS my eyes land]. In this poem the narrative action circles around her daughter being rushed into the house by friends, with bloodied hands and knees from a fall. The daughter forces a smile and a nervous laugh, until the speaker tells her “Stop, my girl. If you’re hurting, cry.” She describes the impulse as “that bitter hiding.” 

… Yet I’m serious
when I say I laugh at the phrase “opened a new chapter.” I can’t help my body.

I shake. The realization that it took this phrase to show. My daughter’s quiver isn’t new—
but a deep practice very old she’s watching me;

The entire poem is excellent, with the recurrence of the textual reference at the beginning and end and the personal narrative about motherhood in the middle. The poem both serves the aim of the project and works in isolation, speaking to the anxieties parents have about what behaviors they model for their children, and how these are complicated by the context of a culture preserved through generational passage. The cyclicality of the subject matter is replicated in the cyclical form of the poem, ending where it begins.

WHEREAS is a vital contribution to docupoetry. Long Soldier works in the fissures left by poets like Rukeyser and Wright, using the conventions of the mode to enact her convictions, gesture towards social justice, and situate her context as a poet squarely within the subject matter of the poems. It is in poems like [WHEREAS my eyes land], where the emotional center might reside between a mother and daughter without compromise towards the breadth of the mode and the project, that docupoetry might be realized to its full potential.

     6.  All of these works are by women poets. When I say docupoetry is what the academy is in need of                 right now, I mean look at this feminized mode of creating, of being. Consider Rukeyser, Wright,                   and Long Soldier gatherers: consider that we do not need more hunters.