Advanced Poetry - Docupoetics and Other Forms of Lyric Research

Docupoetics and Other Forms of Lyric Research

The Docupoetic Tradition

There are a number of excellent overviews of what docupoetics are and how this approach to poetry emerged. We suggest any of these articles if you have lingering questions after reading our chapter.

Philip Metres, “From Reznikoff to Public Enemy”

Joseph Harringon, “Docupoetry and Archive Desire”

And then there are some lovely essays reflecting on where the docupoetic impulse comes from and how it might be translated onto the page in creative and ethical ways:

Tarfia Faizullah, “Against Explanation”

Olivia Milroy Evans reflects on Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument, an essential book on the ethics of docupoetic practice.

Georgics

In this chapter we suggested that the origin of docupoetics can be traced back to the Georgic poems of ancient Greece, which are elegantly written “how-to guides” that had important practical functions as well. Here are some examples of these earliest examples of poems that might be thought of as docupoetic:

Virgil’s Georgics – A how to-guide for gardening, viticulture, animal husbandry, and beekeeping, with forays into the nature of the gods and the cause of civil unrest.
Christopher Smart’s The Hop Garden – Hops farming & beer making! With a side of political allegory.
Vita Sackville-West’s The Land – A celebration of the English countryside through the seasons written by an accomplished landscape gardener, dear friend and lover of Virginia Woolf, and noted critic of heteronormative marriages.

Modernism’s Influence on Docupoetics

Many of the Modernist poets of the early-to-mid twentieth century were interested in creating long poems inspired by epic traditions. To hold many different kinds of cultural material – from literary allusions to visionary hallucinations to descriptions of the machinery of modern life – they experimented with linked fragments and other forms of collage that are common in docupoetic poems. Here are some Modernist poets whose work not only employed these craft techniques, but also used research techniques we associate with docupoetics today.

William Carlos Williams’s Paterson – An epic recounting of the industrial and cultural history of Paterson, New Jersey.

Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead – An account of the devastating effects of a silica mine in West Virginia that draws on court records, affidavits, and medical findings.

Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” – A history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade that focuses most closely on the uprising on the slave ship Amistad.

Docupoetic Histories of Racism

Frequently writers engaging with questions about race and racism document the harms and crimes white supremacist systems would try to erase or bury.

M. NourbSe Philip

Chaun Webster

Rick Barot, especially the poems in The Galleons.

You may recognize the names on this list from a similar list in the supplementary materials to “The Racial Imaginary.” When you are exploring poetic lineages, paths often criss-cross along the way.

Docupoetics and Ecopoetics

Docupoetic projects are often concerned with questions of justice, as we mentioned when discussing excerpts from Craig Santos Perez’s series From Unincorporated Territory, an extraordinary triptych of poetry collections that tell the cultural, historical, political, indigenous, and ecological stories of Guåhan (Guam). For this reason docupoetic forms are often a good fit for ecopoetic themes. You’ll find many more writers working in this tradition in the chapter “Writing the Field” and its supplementary materials, but here are some docupoetic works that engage with documentary evidence around questions of environmental justice.