Why think through documentary poetry via four modes—expository, observational, interactive, reflexive—proposed by documentary film theorist Bill Nichols?
1. To explore modes available to me that I may not have considered, compositionally. This answer highlights aesthetics.
2. To consider, explicitly, a work’s possible effects on audience, on readers—or the relationship between compositional mode and reception. This answer highlights ethics. I am most interested in the second consideration, and this essay will concentrate on ethics.
Regarding the use of these modes, writes Nichols, “. . . each mode deploys the resources of narrative and realism differently, making from common ingredients different types of text with distinctive ethical issues, textural structures, and viewer expectations.”
This inquiry stems from my desire to more prominently feature the audience in discussions of poetics and poetry. I am reaching into film theory to find a lens that admits this: regardless of author intention, reception is a worthy consideration.
This essay also builds on my previous blog post on documentary as a discourse—and hopefully illustrates the idea that more interesting discussions of ethics emerge when we step away from trying to form a stable definition of documentary poetry.
The Expository Mode in Film
According to Nichols, “The expository text addresses the viewer directly, with titles or voices that advance an argument about the historical world.” This mode is employed in network news, and early documentary works like “Nanook of the North.” This mode features voice-over, a commentary, an argument, borne of modernity’s idea of the benefits of “knowing” and collecting knowledge outside of one’s own experience. If interviews are featured, they tend to be highly edited, to support the over-arching argument. These projects are concerned with cause and effect, hoping to educate, and hoping that common sense will emerge in response, often, to a social problem or societal ill.
Nichols explains that not all expository documentaries are organized around history, a problem, a past, or an argument. He posits that a “poetic” approach may also be expository in that it sets out to describe, to attempt a portrait, a snapshot of a situation perhaps assumed not readily available to a viewership or readership.
The Expository Mode in Poetry: C. D. Wright’s One Big Self: An Investigation
An example of this mode, particularly the “poetic” approach within exposition, might be C. D. Wright’s One Big Self: An Investigation, a work of poetry centered around prisons, prison subjectivity, as well as the subjectivity of her own whiteness and status as artist who interviews prisoners. Wright states the challenge of her role as interviewing, composing poet, “going to prison” in order to “investigate.”
While her book contains elements of the interactive mode—containing interviews—the work does not privilege the interviewer/interviewee relationship. Wright chooses, compositionally, to treat language collected as a large collage, removing quotation marks, so that instead of singular portraits and scenes, a large fabric of being and experience is portrayed—a “One Big Self.” Individual identities are more or less subsumed into the larger argument: an argument of discovery. This is especially noticeable if you trace the origins of this project. Wright’s book is formed from text initially written for an art book featuring photos by Deborah Luster. Luster, on a quest to understand violence and criminality in the wake of her mother’s murder, took portraits of inmates, gifted copies to them, and then made this book along with a gallery show, with a portion of the proceeds going to the inmate welfare fund.
The photo book version of this project, then, is a very thorough expository project because it contains actions toward a solution—and “solution” is a concept often present in the expository mode.
The photo version of this project also features small text profiles of each inmate. In a sense, by removing specific images as well as those “captions” or profiles, Wright has written a long voiceover, a voice that narrates prison life, leaving the reader with, I believe, primarily a feeling of empathy for the inmates. In a moment of reflexivity, Wright comments about having some guilt at looking at a bowl of delicious blueberries on her own table at home—this moment of beauty and freedom serves as high contrast to the lives she is writing about.
The disdain for prison proliferation and the racism of the criminal justice system is obvious in Wright’s work. Also obvious is the particular “othering” inherent in a project where the one who makes the work is “on the outside” and must go and visit, literally, an “other” space of confinement where she will meet her subjects. Wright also points out the economics of it all—that stock in prison design systems are rising in value. One Big Self aims to educate, and though it proposes no particular solution, in classic expository mode, the book points to a problem, a social ill.
The ethical challenges or perhaps unintended consequences of the expository mode are also present: Wright retains authorial power over the found text she has gathered, and has created a subjectivity in “the other” to explore her own non-inmate status. The idiosyncratic arrangement of each page—moving from found text to commentary of various sorts, containing sentences as well as phrases, and various types of white space highlight an author at work. Though it is clear where she stands as author—against prison proliferation—her expository approach privileges, ever so slightly, the one who knows, who writes, who sees and arranges, and possibly re-inscribes the inmate as one without the totalizing view, without the power to arrange this logic, this portrait.
Some of the work’s ethical challenges came to light when I taught this book in a class on documentary—in film, visual art, and poetry—at The City College of New York. The students were fascinated by the collage technique employed by Wright. They were in solidarity with her politics, and so they became more interested to know that poems could be composed in this manner and that they could center around a social problem.
The class, mostly students of color, came to rest on an uncertainty, though—and this ethical question is key in the expository mode—the question of whether Wright had the “right” to tell others’ stories. How did it benefit the subjects of the book that their story—stitched together as a collective—was being told?
And if Wright herself was the subject of the book, what right did she have to garner sympathy or empathy while the other subjects of her text are incarcerated? Did they, as readers, care about her dilemma of representation?
The class went back and forth on these questions.
Students sensed that Wright was asking questions of subjectivity and privilege throughout the book, and so as a class, we decided that Wright’s expository approach was heavily inflected with reflexivity. Yet perhaps confessing her doubts was also not enough: many readers were not sure that an issue so apparently clear and devastating needed to be so self-reflexive. In the end, some students asked, what if she could write this text so that it was not at all about her? What would that look like?
Most interesting to me was this: the possibility that utilizing the expository mode, constructing a work where authority is in the voice and composition of the poet, meant that some students seemed to want more clarity of argument from Wright’s project. They believed her book had a fault line: to highlight the guilt of individual prisoners, by telling the details of their often violent crimes, confused the overarching social problem of prison proliferation.
Perhaps wary of the exceptionalism of individual crime stories often used to justify entire racist systems of punishment, these readers wondered why she wouldn’t edit out some the “individual crime” content, positing that maybe her approach put a solution to the problems of the criminal justice system at even more of a distance.
The Observational Mode in Film
Sometimes called cinema vérité, or direct cinema, observational documentaries stress, according to Nichols, “the non-intervention of the filmmaker. Such flims cede ‘control’ over the events that occur in front of the camera more than any other mode.” The observational documentary eschews voice-over, music external to the film, and other devices such as reenactments, and interviews.
“Observational filmmaking,” posits Nichols, “gives a particular inflection to ethical considerations.” These include “whether or not the author has received permission to film, whether they are just furthering their career on the backs of others, whether the exposure of their subjects will harm or help them, and should the filmmaker’s own opinions find a place in the final product.”
Instead of a focus on a problem/solution narrative, as expository works emphasize, observational film most often attempts to capture “the everyday” and “the typical.” A close cousin to this mode is ethnography, with its desire to suspend authorial argument, but to simply “expose” and “describe.”
Whereas filmmakers who work in this mode might intend the following: to disappear as authors, and to make something “impersonal,” in fact, the effect of this tactic is often the opposite. According to Nichols, “authoring agency presents itself as an absence.” Attempts at invisibility or non-intervention highlight, for the viewer, the author’s decision to turn the camera on. Rather than an “impersonal” film, observational documentaries are often in fact quite personal—viewers are allowed to see, window-like, into the life of the social actors who are framed.
The Observational Mode in Poetry: Goldsmith’s Soliloquy and Place’s “The Guilt Project”
Perhaps “found text” or “appropriated text” work in poetry may be thought of as an equivalent to the observational mode in documentary—an equivalent, to some extent, of turning on the camera and “walking away” as an author.
Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy immediately came to my mind. Goldsmith “composed” the work by recording everything he said for one week in May, and transcribing it as one long paragraph.
I read every word of Soliloquy. I felt that I was being asked, as a reader, to not read. And because it felt like a dare, and I admit from my sports background that if presented with a dare, I will attempt to compete, and so I read every word.
As the pages went on and on, I became closer and closer to Goldsmith’s “personal” life. Without editing, Goldsmith’s authorial presence is, ironically, enormous. Goldsmith’s uncensored ways are quite compelling in his interactions especially with family, a site of relationship that developed as the book progressed. Soliloquy becomes incidentally confessional. I admit that I feel like a trickster, offering this read of Soliloquy. As an untamed narrative, composed by a very transparent procedure, it is one of the most romantic (in the literary sense) autobiographies I have ever read. I am doubtful that Goldsmith intended this.
One might think of some of the work of Vanessa Place as observational as well.
Note on “conceptual writing”: Goldsmith and Place together have been called, and call themselves “conceptual writers.” But as I study, and admittedly I am in the middle of figuring some things out, I am not yet convinced of the theoretical value in importing the term “conceptual” from the visual arts into writing and poetry. So I will leave that label, mostly tied to methods of producing work and critiquing institutions, behind for the moment. As authors interested in “non-fictional” representational systems—so not the work of the imagination or the expressive work of the individual poet—I actually find it quite generative to think about Goldsmith and Place’s work within the realm of documentary. When I do this, I can burn through what I feel is the somewhat useless, for poetry, institutional critique aspect of “conceptual art” and get to more juicy issues of ethics and audience reception.
Just last week I heard Vanessa Place read from two projects: “Statement of Facts” and “The Guilt Project.”
“The Guilt Project” features court proceedings that recount the details of a child sexual abuse case. The record appears to be unedited, and as Place read the transcript, she also read cataloguing or identifying numbers that accompany the court record. This ups the ante in terms of the idea of the veracity of the documents. The numbers also provide a bit of a reprieve: their banal lack of information was, for me, a welcomed relief from the terrifying and terrible details of what happened to a girl.
It is important to pause here and acknowledge that this discussion of Place’s work centers not around my private reading of her work, but listening at a reading—so in a sense, I experienced the work almost as I would experience a documentary film. I think the time-based nature of the poetry reading intensified some of the ethical issues emerging form Place’s work. Another contextual detail: I listened from the position of a teacher of creative writing, who has become very tired of trauma narratives, so much so that I am about to embark on a study of the possible “best practices” in teaching—to facilitate a student’s growth toward excellent writing. Listening to Place I wondered if the choices for this subject matter were extreme “othering” or complete silence. Neither one, to me, pedagogically, seems quite right.
Back to Place’s work:
As Nichols suggests, Place presents us with “the sense of unmediated and unfettered access to the world.” Because Place seems not to “intervene” as an editor—she presents the texts, resituating them into the space of “a poetry reading”—we are left with three options from this authorial stance as Nichols identifies them, and I felt them to be highly applicable in this case: “empathetic identification, poetic immersion, or voyeuristic pleasure.”
The result of any of these options is, with “The Guilt Project,” aversion.
On empathetic identification: if I began to identify with the victim of the transcript, I felt short of breath and victimized, perhaps flooded with my own unpleasant memories, or worrying about the memories of others in the room. I also felt sorry for the abused subject frozen-as-victim status and if I began to catalogue any similar wrongs committed against me, then that also did not feel like a way to honor the subject’s specificity, individuality. On poetic immersion: if I became immersed in the poetic language and Place’s performance, then I was abandoning the subject matter, which felt like an inhumane abandonment of the subject. On voyeuristic pleasure: if I rested on voyeurism, then I was possibly identifying with the perpetrator, whose own visioning mind committed the first objectification of this girl.
Sitting, listening to Place, watching her read, my choices, if I stayed in the room which I did, were to either withstand the discomfort of all of these choices, or exit the trap of “no good choice” by beginning to wonder about Place herself, running through a list of her possible intentions. Therefore, in a stance of “stepping aside,” Place’s authorial presence ironically loomed quite large. I also began to ask some things of poetry, splitting off from the subject matter at hand, some questions that viewers typically ask of the observational mode: “Why choose this subject matter?” and “What new light is being shed on this subject matter?”
In Place’s work, in an attempt to honor her work, I came up with two possibilities, one having to do with poetry itself, the other having to do with the law.
First, Place obviously wants to say something about poetry—that a poetry reading could be this, that one need not be lulled by beauty, but instead poetry could smack you with intense realism. Second, Place’s work displays the problematics of legal discourse and processes. As the feminists have warned us, the victim gets re-victimized in court. And so a victim can be re-victimized at a poetry reading, which places a severe wedge in our idea of poetry and art—as well as the law and justice—as “good for us.”
None of these ideas are new to me, and when confronted with these options at her reading, I did not experience any new ideas about poetry readings, the role of art, or women and the law and language.
Additionally, when Place read from “Statement of Fact,” also a legal document that quotes a conversation between inmates, including a transcription of rap lyrics, the complexity of the use of the word “nigger” was made flat, made intellectual by Place’s whiteness and the poetry reading setting—a classroom in a neo-gothic building on the campus of University of Chicago. I crave complex poems about race written by white poets, but I believe that flattening this word via pure quotation pulls up short, unless the poet’s primary goal is to say, “I can say this word,” which then seems to be much more about re-inscribing a certain mainstream art stance: everything is fair game for the artist regardless of social context, the author’s own identity, and audience reception.
I write this not entirely sure what Place’s choices could be for this subject matter, but one thought experiment came to mind: what if she replaced every instance of the word “nigger” with a hand gesture like brackets and said “n-word”? The absurd repetition of that, perhaps, could have achieved something on many more levels: evoking ideas of permission, avoidance, and possibly even getting rid of the beautiful sound of that word—the way it is used poetically within the speech of those quoted—could this have made for a more interesting text performed by Place?
So if it is not me, who, then, would Place’s ideal audience member be? The irony is that she would likely never get invited to read in those places where her work could have the most impact: a traditional poetry venue like the 92nd Street Y in New York, or downtown, at a class at NYU Law. But maybe NYU Law School is not ideal because of critical race theory, a theory whose origins are in race-based critiques of the language of law. Perhaps her work would shake the ground in a class on feminism?
If Nichols claims that an observational mode gives viewers “revealing views,” what is to be revealed via Place’s work might hinge entirely on who her audience is.
And if what is interesting is Place’s biography—I learned that she is a public defender who defends accused rapists—then I wondered if there were other narrative strategies that could get at the complexity of her job, strategies that would not “use” a victim of violence to explicate Place’s own experience, perhaps, of the violence of her workplace discourse. Perhaps if Place had used her own name in her work, putting herself into those rooms, the complexity possible in an interactive documentary mode would have solved some of the problem of re-victimizing the victim.
Finally, because of the mode and subject matter of Place’s projects, she faces ethical questions central to the reception of every observational documentary: quoting Nichols, “To what extent and in what ways shall the voice of people be represented?” and “Does the evidence of the film convey a sense of respect for the lives of others or have they simply been used as signifiers in someone else’s discourse?”
The Interactive Mode in Film
This mode features footage of interviews and is less about interrogation or prosecution, and more akin to the role of public defender: the idea is to illicit response and frame the response to bolster an argument or further a particular point of view. Filmmakers in this mode are even, at times, featured in the film, on camera, or their voice is just off camera, involved, and doing the asking. The interactive mode, according to Nichols, has a strong “present-tense quality,” sense of the local and the specific as viewers witness a relationship, a person, a place unfold in front of them.
The Interactive Mode in Poetry: Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers and Fitzpatrick’s Zamboangueña
First, I want to say that it is striking to me how much poetry does not employ this mode. Most poets are not, it seems, interested in journalism training and interviewing techniques and technologies to acquire materials for their poems!
But two texts do come to mind as possible examples. One example is Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers that eventually reads more like a fiction—the surreal overtakes any answers you might expect to hear to the questions Kapil lays out at the onset. Another book that relies on interview, and signals the presence of the interview relationship through use of a cover illustration and beginning note, is Corrine Fitzpatrick’s Zamboangueña. Fitzpatrick and an older woman—presumably her grandmother—are featured on the cover in a line drawing where they walk arm and arm over a map of the Philippines.
As Nichols points out, one of the driving ideas behind the interactive mode is to “let the subject’s voice be heard.” But almost ironically, what ends up happening in the interactive mode is that audience members begin to interrogate the filmmaker’s voice as they listen for answers to questions, asking “Who is this person who wants to know?”
Kapil’s text seems to admit this, or at least exploit this inevitable result—the “answers” to the set of evocative questions she asked Indian women in her travels, are so poeticized, stylized, and are so “worked on” as answers go, that we are left to read not just the “subjects” who answered questions, but we read a sense of mysterious relationship between the author and subject. As the text progresses, readers are aware that something that began with transcripts and interviews has turned into something quite different in the author’s hands.
This presence of fiction within documentary reminds me of the film, “Looking for Langston” from director Isaac Julien. Julien uses actors and shoots “faux” documentary footage of gay men socializing—referencing the period, and referencing this rather undocumented and suppressed detail of the life of Langston Hughes.
In the face of documentary and its limits, fiction fills out the truth.
In a nearly opposite compositional approach based on interview, Corrine Fitzpatrick’s tactic is, as she states at the beginning of the chapbook, to leave her grandmother’s interview answers completely intact as she transcribed them. Fitzpatrick completely removes herself from the text except for introductory remarks at the beginning of the book (similar to Kapil’s). But she does not disappear. She arranges her grandmother’s speech as cells, as units that float on a page and this framing choice treats each utterance with care, allows for an “other” presence marked by white space, and so we can imply that Fitzpatrick, “off the page,” residing in between her grandmother’s speech, is listening with great care.
Both Kapil and Fitzpatrick circumvent one of this mode’s primary ethical challenges: the interview as hierarchical discourse where the interviewer has more power than the interviewed.
I believe that Kapil’s text sets up a new hierarchy: author and interviewees have set up a private space, a nearly private language that requires interpretation: this act of reading puts the reader in a destabilized non-authoritarian position. Kapil also overturns the social science and oral history tradition of interviewing women of color for the sake of developing a transcript of “knowledge of the other.”
Fitzpatrick also messes with the power of the oral history transcript: she destabilizes this interviewer/interviewee power relationship by expunging her voice entirely from the text, except to signal her keen listening, highlighting this important contextual detail: it is a family story, and Fitzpatrick indicates a cultural tradition of respect—to ask questions and receive an elder’s story.
I do not think it is a coincidence that Kapil and Fitzpatrick signify and revise the interactive mode: gender and ethnicity perform a revision of an historically oppressive social science rhetorical regime.
Still, how much control, how much involvement and intervention did the interviewed have? What ethical responsibility does the author have to obtain permissions for quoting even one phrase uttered by another in such a work? What are the ethics of provoking memories and stories that might be difficult and consternating in order to make art? Did these encounters upset or help the subjects?
I believe that Kapil and Fitzpatrick answer these questions through very different means: fiction and deference. But they also share a tactic: beauty. In a sense, the emphasis on beauty in both of these texts communicates something I would call “authorial grace.” Through their treatment of this material and their subjects, readers may sense that these authors also acted beautifully, gracefully, with their subjects.
I might also conclude by asking if these works are documentary—they begin with that impulse or construct, but via composition, a belief in beauty as being as important as a non-fiction “discourse of sobriety,” the texts become something new: perhaps “post-documentary poems.”
The Reflexive Mode: Is All Documentary Poetry Reflexive?
The last mode, the reflexive, is the mode that calls the very formation of knowledge, the very existence of the text—film or book—into question by letting the viewer/reader know that what they are seeing is, even if it is concerned with non-ficiton, a fabrication.
Nichols identifies two kinds of reflexivity: political—the information we are learning about is so politically new and pressing—and stylistic—the filmmaker uses incredibly constructed means to structure or compose a film. Reflexive work aims not to stand in for “real” by presenting content that is hyper-real, or by presenting content in a why that calls attention to itself as a film, or both.
As I review Nichols propositions for this category, I realize that I have seen reflexive qualities in all of the works discussed thus far. It occurs to me that anything called “poetry” even within the discourse of “documentary poetry” is reflexive.
Still, nearing the close of this essay, I will hang on to the notion that compositional tactics inform the ethical challenges and the way a work is received. So even though we can call all documentary poetry reflexive, I still think it is useful to parse out some comparisons with Nichols’ ideas, also keeping in mind that Nichols admits the permeability of these categories, these modes.
The Reflexive Mode in Poetry: Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary and Philip’s Zong
It may be useful to consider Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary a reflexive documentary text in that Nowak is obviously making an argument about a particular social ill: the dangers of mining and multi-national corporate interests persisting over the interests of the workers. Further, Nowak has composed a highly reflexive, stylized and consistently ordered collage of documents: miners’ testimonies from West Virginia, newspaper articles from mining disasters in China, photographs of the West Virginia landscape, photos of Chinese miners by photographer Ian Teh, and coal curriculum guide excerpts. There is a ping-pong structure established as the book maintains a predictable sequence of these elements.
Unlike Muriel Rukeyeser’s “The Book of the Dead” poem sequence, set also in West Virginia and around a mining disaster of the 1930s, Nowak does not insert himself explicitly as poet and seer into this landscape. This lacuna in Nowak’s text is curious to me. I am thinking of how Nichols points out the possible similarities between pornography and documentary:
Distance, a separation between subject and object, is the prerequisite for sight, realism, desire, and power. It is necessary for the imaginary relationships of identity and opposition, duality and stereotype, hierarchy and control; it is also necessary to the imaginary coherence of realism when it invites us to overhear and look in, unacknowledged.
Poets, as word-workers with the ability to “telescope” in quite close, can make themselves as much the subject of study as the professed object of study. I believe this is what Rukeyeser establishes in her work; it is interesting that decades later, Nowak does not.
Is it possible that the utopian ideal of a global party of workers is persistent and provides enough justification for Nowak’s opaque stance toward his subject matter? Is it possible that he believes that the injustices are so overwhelming that only “the facts” about the content and not about his authorship are necessary?
Questions about gaze and subjectivity, particularly because photographs are present, persist. I wondered, why are the photos Nowak takes devoid of people entirely? Is this possibly borne out of a reluctance to re-inscribe the Appalachian “other” as WPA-era documentary photos did? Does the presence of the Chinese miners’ bodies and faces, versus the West Virginia landscapes devoid of people, re-inscribe something about the racial other, about who can choose not to be photographed, about which bodies are remarkable? What did Nowak experience, going to that place to make photographs, to make a book? What was his relationship to the people he quotes and the landscape he photographs before he arrived? And after?
A final point on Coal Mountain Elementary, reflexivity, and irony: Nichols warns about the use of irony in the reflexive mode: “Ironic representations inevitably have the appearance of insincerity since what is overtly said is not what is actually meant.”
The presence of coal curriculum language in Nowak’s text is highly ironic, and while I think Nowak meant to critique the West Virginia school system, I want to ask, how would we want an elementary school in West Virginia to teach children about coal and mining? Are we to believe that children and mining families do not have a critical consciousness about what their parents do? Do Nowak’s lesson plan sections make fun of elementary school teachers? Are there songs or dinner table conversations where “the real” education happens? Are we to believe all West Virginians and miners have been duped?
A final example of a text that is both politically reflexive, as well as compositionally reflexive: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong, a book written collaboratively between Philip and an ancestor voice, Setaey Adamu Boateng. (I reviewed Philip’s book for the Poetry Project Newsletter Feb/March 2010 issue, and that writing can be found in pdf form on the web, so my discussion of the work will be a bit truncated.)
Zong contains a transcript of the historical record—the 18th century court case—that begins her inquiry; the work contains several sections of poetry in various forms derived from the language of this court case; there is a fictional ship manifest; there is a glossary of non-English words used; and finally, the book contains a thorough process essay describing not only how Philip wrote the book, asking why and should it be written—Philip tells the story of whether or not she had the right to tell this story. Her discussion of the ethics of this is contained within the book.
Philip is thorough in her approach and I believe has co-authored with Adamu Boateng a highly successful reflexive documentary work—and brings me to a good ending place for this essay:
Because the book is a form that is not time-based, or is multiple with regard to time, because within its covers readers can move in any direction, can re-read, can take their time or go quickly in total absorption or avoidance, a documentary poem has some advantages over the documentary film. There are opportunities to present many things—including source documents, poetics, purpose—for study, not just looking. By removing the set sequence and the limits of the frame, as well as the visual nearness of “the real,” documentary poetry has the capacity to deliver discourses of knowledge that can:
1. respect and make space for doubt,
2. give readers time to develop conclusions and responses of their own, on their own time,
3. and most importantly, as poetry, this work invites readers to access non-fiction in an embodied way—a participatory practice of perception—reading with breath, pause, white space, music, fragment, excess, illegibility even. Reading, as Freire might say, the word and the world.
Final Disclaimer: Destroy this Essay!
After exploring Nichols’ ideas and modes, applying them to poetry, I may safely say this: it may not matter if we use the words “documentary” and “poetry” in the same breath, and it doesn’t matter which poem fits what mode. Nichols’ work provides a scaffold around “poetry, narrative, and ethics” and I believe it is possible to get there without this particular scaffold.
Dear Poet: If you believe you have readers, then what are the ethical implications of the narrative tactics you choose?
