In the spirit of friendly, mostly like-mindedness, I would like to shake up conversations about documentary poetry.
In her essay “Documentary Uncertainty” Hito Steyerl asserts that “(p)oststructuralism has taught us how ‘reality,’ ‘truth’ and other basic notions on which possible definitions of documentary rest are at best as solid as the fleeting reflections on a troubled surface of water.” I agree. And so I want to invite documentary poets to meet our work’s fleeting reflections.
Welcoming this watery surface of uncertainty into the conversation about documentary poetry injects the conversation with the energy of important complications. Steyerl continues: “Let me suggest that this uncertainty is not some shameful lack, which has to be hidden, but instead constitutes the core quality of contemporary documentary modes as such.” Given this “core quality,” most practitioners of the documentary mode find themselves falling into two camps—the realists and the constructivists—and both are problematic according to Steyerl. The realists naively believe in “an objectivity that, more often than not, turns out to be extremely subjective” and the constructivists risk “sliding into opportunistic and cynical relativism.”
I want to relinquish the desire to define documentary poetry and relinquish any battle between realist vs. constructivist tendencies in order to meet, eye to eye, the hybrid text and potent future engagements with representation, fact, and the book itself.
How I Arrived at this Desire
Years ago, when I was a bit nearer to my old identity as sociologist-in-training, I had questions about “investigative poetry” and two terms I heard used in mostly experimental poetry circles: documentary poetry and documentary poetics.
In response to these swirling and untethered terms, as I perceived them, I was asking:
If Ed Sanders coined the term “investigative poetry” to encourage poets to think of themselves as journalists working in verse, what would a documentary poetry approach encourage? What does it mean for poetry that “the image” lurks behind the term “documentary”? If I taught documentary poetry, what theory would I teach alongside the poems? I am a poet who uses found text, and I am a visual artist who manipulates historical documents to destabilize the authority of the book and the document. How useful is it for me to call my work documentary? Were there generative frameworks accompanying this nomenclature?
At the time of these questions, I was a writer-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council sharing studio space with visual artists. In conversations with Sara Jordenö and Nanna Dubois Buhl and others about art that engages history, fact, and subjectivity, the term “documentary” came up more than once. I learned that Hito Steyerl identifies the rise of “documentarism in the field of art” alongside developments in cultural studies in the 1990s. As a former student of the social sciences, this made sense to me. She writes of the heightened “awareness of power relations within not only documentary articulations, but all forms of representation” resulting in the transformation of narrative modes within art. I also came across Bill Nichols’ Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Indiana University Press), a text often referred to in documentary film classes and writings. And so I found a foothold into some theory that was generative; Nichols’ writings in particular impacted my poetics and the books I have written since then.
Now, about five years later, it is my impression that few of the recorded conversations about documentary poetry have touched on some of the beautiful complexities at hand in film theory and the visual arts. Hence, this two-part blog entry.
Two Proposals
I want to propose two things for poets who find themselves in or around the term “documentary”:
1. documentary is a discourse and any documentary art is best understood this way instead of trying to establish fixed characteristics, compositional tactics, and results;
2. poets might contribute to this discourse most effectively by examining how reading poetry differs from other kinds of reading and also differs from viewing images.
Under the heading “Defining Documentary,” Nichols writes,
Documentary as a concept or practice occupies no fixed territory. It mobilizes no finite inventory of techniques, addresses to no set number of issues, and adopts no completely known taxonomy of forms, styles, or modes.
This echoes Steyerl’s ideas. Nichols goes on to state,
Of greater importance than the ontological finality of a definition—how well it captures the “thingness” of the documentary—is the purpose to which a definition is put and the facility with which it locates and addresses important questions, those that remain unsettled from the past and those posed by the present.
Because the word “discourse” implies an investigation of how we construct meaning, we have the exciting possibility to examine, as Nichols suggests, the purpose behind the drive to define documentary poetry.
I believe that the quest to define documentary poetry may be subterfuge for these anxious and problematic questions: “Do poems matter and if they do, do some matter more than others, and if that’s true, how do I make the poem that matters most?”
These anxieties, as I have experienced and witnessed them, attempt to compare the art of poetry not only against other arts, but also against other human activities, such as activism or politics or education. Examining the “false problem” of these questions invites us poets to actually give up those anxieties. (See Deleuze in Bergsonism: “. . . conceiving everything in terms of more and less, seeing nothing but differences in degree or differences in intensity where, more profoundly, there are differences in kind is perhaps the most general error of thought, the error common to science and metaphysics.”) So after shedding false comparisons and definitional anxieties, admitting that a documentary poem is a kind of poem that differs in its discursive frameworks from other poems, what new questions are “unsettled from the past”? I want to dig around and see. I have some hopes for the future of documentary poetry and will discuss these hopes in what follows.
A Sampling of Current Conversations on Documentary Poetry
First, here are some examples of statements on documentary poetry that I think are rife with interesting and rich subtexts:
In a September 2011 Coldfront interview with Mark Nowak entitled “Documentary Poetics: Sort of Uncharacterizable,” interviewer Seth Graves begins by stating, “I want to talk about documentary poetics—and really to try and come up with even a definition for it.” Rather than help build a definition, perhaps sensing the lack of energy in this task, and wary of drawing exclusive boundaries, Nowak comments that he believes documentary is a “modality within contemporary poetry rather than a new kind of genre.” He then relates his experience of an AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Conference panel on “research poetics” where the conversation become quickly quite flat, everyone agreeing that all poets conduct research, and so Nowak admits: what is really at question or worth discussing? He later goes on to comment that he finds solidarity with many documentary filmmakers because of the content they work with, but he does not discuss the representational issues inherent in film, or how his own compositional tactics might find an echo in some nonfiction film tactics.
Yet Nowak’s honorable impulse to shy away from the term may actually create an inadvertent eclipse: eclipsing how poets might learn from documentary film’s considerations, or how poets might even contribute to documentary discourses in film and art. In an earlier post for Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation, Nowak writes, “ . . .documentary poetics, though present in poetry, is currently more widely and, in my view, fully leveraged in visual culture (film, photography) than the language arts (which has a lot to learn from its praxis in other fields).” This post, which also links to Harriet’s “Documentary Poetry and the Language Surge” by Martin Earl surely signals some future work to be done, including, I would argue, collapsing the debate between the tactics of Nowak and Kenneth Goldsmith—a debate that Earl eventually rests on. Perhaps Steyerl would say they are both documentarians of sorts and differ in that one is a “realist” and the other, a “constructivist,” and both employ conceptual tools “which are neither clear nor transparent themselves.”
In a description of a “Documentary Poetics” panel at School of the Visual Arts in the spring of 2011, the authors of the description tap the energy of documentary discourse to a good degree, stating, “Clearly ‘information’ is not a neutral category, especially when we are dealing with problematic or difficult information. If we honor the (at times dubious) claims of documentary as a genre, is it possible for us to ‘lie with statistics’ in an ethical way?” I am sorry I could not attend this panel, so I am not sure where the conversation ended up, but it is interesting to me that while this description captures some of the energy of documentary’s discourse, it does not mention the documentary turn in the arts and the ways that problems of information and representation have been addressed many times—in theory and in artworks themselves. If we look at the body of documentary work, we would see this panel’s initial claim, that “documentary draws its authority from a claim to be nonfiction or to be a recording external reality” has been repeatedly problematized.
One of the first articles that comes up for a web-based “documentary poetry” search is the Poetry Foundation article “From Reznikoff to Public Enemy: The poet as journalist, historian, agitator” by Philip Metres. Metres locates the possible origins of documentary poetry in modernism: “Drawing from the ballad tradition and from Modernist poets’ experiments with collage, these poets frequently employed documentary materials to give voice to stories of people and movements that the mass media tend to ignore or misrepresent.” He continues, “documentary poems constantly court their own collapse, testing a poem’s tensile boundaries in the face of what Wallace Stevens called ‘the pressure of reality.’” I agree, but it may be useful to point out that all documentary forms, in light of poststructuralism, “court their own collapse.” It might be interesting to explore how a poem collapses or shows evidence of collapse in ways that differ from documentary film or visual art.
Metres goes on to create a list of books and titles that might count as “documentary poetry.” I found this listing activity to be quite common in the existing discourse. Several other lists of this kind exist, as well as syllabi, which are lists usually at the service of one kind of definition over another. And because lists by their very nature are definition oriented, the existence of so many of them signals the discursive rut in which I think we might be stuck.
To get out of the definition rut and on to more interesting questions, I believe we poets must explicitly admit this:
The ethical challenge of marrying fact and art has been long debated and disputed, and gets attempted again and again by a whole community of documentarians and artists who grow in ranks every year. As a discourse, documentary doesn’t answer the question “what is a documentary?” but rather documentary becomes a discursive site for ethical and representational considerations. Even with mutable defining characteristics, documentary poems also constitute a site of discourse.
Questions for Poets Because of Poetry
Therefore, interesting questions for poets would be: What would poetry have to offer that is new to documentary? What unique discursive offerings can poets provide because the work is not a film, video, or installation with their attendant modes of display: the museum, the gallery, the theater, the wall?
In the writing that follows, I present Nichols’ ideas of documentary as a discourse with a certain set of concerns and attributes in order to uncover generative implications for poetry.
First, Nichols argues that documentary is a community of practitioners with “an institutional formation.” There is an Academy Award for documentary film and filmmakers. Documentary filmmakers are “in dialogue with that [documentary] tradition and with their cohorts.”
I interpret various attempts at defining “documentary poetry”—articles, interviews, panels, courses and syllabi, lists, poets’ statements, book blurbs and reviews, conference presentations, Nowak’s mention of a forthcoming anthology from Wesleyan—as indicative, at least in part, of a desire for a cohort. Yet perhaps the community of practitioners of documentary poetry is focused, to a fault, on justifying the need for a cohort. In so doing, they have become stuck on the most basic, yet least supportive, least interesting quest: a definition and a defense.
What if practitioners of documentary poetry insisted that theirs is no longer an innovation or intervention into the world of poetry, but is an accepted and acceptable practice that has a relationship to the larger community of documentary practitioners? Perhaps more interesting and complex questions about ethics and practices and genre would replace the “what is it?” question.
Nichols suggests that as an “institutional practice,” documentary film enjoys material support in the form of festivals, conferences, companies, entire departments within schools, as well as news networks. He points out that even with institutional support, documentary film is far from being policed to a detrimental degree.
Is there an equivalent institutional practice in poetry? What if we who taught were to admit that our courses on “documentary poetry” are part of an institutional conversation about truth, text, and representation? Would this be an admonition of our potential demise, or would admitting institutional support foster perhaps more rigorous conversation about documentary poetry?
Nichols also suggests that documentaries constitute “a corpus of texts.” Considering the documentary film as a text means considering how a film “take(s) shape around an informing logic.” Nichols suggests that documentary logic lies within the realm of problem solving: documentary films begin with a problem, it presents a case, and even, at times, offers a solution.
Can a comparison be made to the documentary poem? If so, would this comparison free documentary poets up to admit that theirs is a problem-based or interventionist text? And if so, then perhaps the issue of how to narrate the problem and represent its agents and/or its victims (a particularly challenging and problematic task) is then open for analysis. Perhaps the idea of poetry’s potential to propose solutions—which may seem radical or, to those wary of propaganda, dangerous—is an idea that can be fleshed out in lively discourse.
Then, documentary film exists, suggests Nichols, because there exists “a constituency of viewers.”
Do we agree, as poets—even as documentary poets—that we have readers? I sometimes sense a subtext, if not a voiced proclamation, that we are “only” reading each other. I question this and think there is a constituency of readers of poetry, and of what could be called documentary poetry as well. If, after all, documentary film is a form that is rising in popularity, why wouldn’t a person be interested in a documentary poem? An example of wider-than-we-realize readership and popular media’s mention of documentary and poetry in the same breath: C. D. Wright’s One With Others receives the National Book Award in 2010, and The New Yorker review states: “An affecting element of this book is the way its elegiac impulses accord with, even as they chafe against, the documentary impulses.” In fact, the term “documentary” and “documentary convention” is referred to more than once in this review.
Recognizing that a constituency of readers exists may lead us away from the impossible-to-answer who is reading? question and toward the more interesting how does reading happen? How do readers of documentary poetry make inferences? Do readers expect the work to function as poetry in general, or do they expect to encounter it as they would a documentary film? What is this particular experience of reading like?
Finally, somewhat related to the above, and most importantly for me, is this:
Nichols suggests that documentary film is a “discourse of sobriety,” a non-fictional system, and that as such, the viewer comes to expect a history lesson, a life lesson, a window into a possibly “unknown” but relevant world which they will end up knowing at the end of their viewing experience. “Documentary convention spawns an epistephilia. It posits an organizing agency that possesses information and knowledge, a text that conveys it, and a subject who will gain it,” writes Nichols.
Perhaps this is where poetry can make a tremendous contribution to the discourse of documentary!
Just as the poet, and subsequently the reader, involve themselves in a subject matter which begins with facts, or contains the trace element of fact, so do poetry’s textual disturbances present themselves: white space, line breaks, alternative syntax, lyrical soundings, point of view confusion, narration slippage, font anomolies. But: a reader can re-read. What do we make of this choice presented in the form of a physical book? Mastery is alternately suspended and achieved because poetry and the book ask for a unique relationship to fact, to text. Even if confusion regarding content or form presents itself, a reader believes this might be a temporary state. This idea excites me: readers of poetry are practiced, perhaps, in the sometimes slow, sometimes fast shifts between confusion and understanding; poetry is an exercise in faith in both states. What does this have to do with representations of reality? I think there is something powerful there in the experience of self-directed epiphany. But I am not sure—so I’ll ask another question: Because poetry alters time and is private, and the book is not public and a “time-based” media like film, video, or images placed on a gallery wall, how might the reception of fact and history be different for the reader of documentary poetry?
Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others comes to mind, particularly her culminating claim that historical fiction and the inclusion of fiction in photography—she discusses a staged photograph by Jeff Wall—are forms that hold great potential for the development of empathy. Sontag posits that the slowness of reading is powerful. Deciphering someone’s imaginative creation does not allow us to “shorthand” the looking with something we think we’ve already seen. The form requires the reader to insert much-needed time into the act of “witness,” fostering what she argues is a truer understanding of the subject matter. Perhaps documentary poetry also asks for this slowness, this co-imaginative creation.
Side question for further research: is acoustic ecology and sound art that features the field recording documentary poetry’s sibling practice? Because the listener encounters a mediated, perhaps disembodied (or is “relocated” a more accurate term?) experience of sound, what is their experience of knowing? What actually is the subject at hand when listeners are intentionally opening their ears—organs of perception that founding acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer points out are never closed—to something “other”? How are facts transmitted through audio recordings?
Back to documentary and knowledge:
Steyerl warns that documentary art, even with its intentions to critique structures of power and even its intentions toward a greater good “reek(s) of authority, certification, expertise” and that the white cube in which this art is often displayed, with its “clinical constellation of gazes” replicates the problems of power in conventional documentary. Nichols also warns that documentary knowledge “becomes a source of pleasure that is far from innocent.”
So perhaps the documentary poem at least borders on the “post-representational,” a facet of affect more so than image, and similar to the unfocussed images of contemporary war displayed by CNN. Is documentary poetry what Steyerl would call “abstract documentarism” where “the closer to reality we get, the less intelligible it becomes”?
Perhaps a documentary poem provides this:
how to feel to speak the language
of the truth of the discomfort
of knowing and the texture
and pleasure of not knowing;
of oscillating
between concept and mystery
the legible and the blur
the motion between propels
a reader toward a future
coming in and out of focus—
Stay Tuned . . .
. . . .for my next blog post: on Nichols’ modes of documentary (expository, observational, interactive, reflexive [with many reflexive sub-modes]) and the possibility that these modes inspire new reading frameworks for documentary poetry, as well as inspire the documentary poet to make new kinds of works. If each mode has its own ethical blind spots, even as some modes attempt to address existing problems of representation, what can we poets learn from these formal tactics employed by documentary film?
