Documentary Poetics: The Poetry of Politics, Testimony, and Witness

Documentary poetics engages in the art of documentation in order to, as Philip Metres argues, “testify to the often unheard voices of people struggling to survive in the face of unspeakable violence.” How, then, and in what ways can documentary poetry challenge our thinking or change the world? This craft class will investigate the history of documentary poetry in order to understand the means and motivations behind the genre. We'll analyze a diverse range of documentary poetry, including work by Don Mee Choi, Layli Long Soldier, Solmaz Sharif, and propose our own documentary poetics project.