Teaching email: on documentary poetry

30 March 2020

Aloha class--

This week we’ve started reading (and, I hope, writing) documentary poetry. I’d like to answer a couple questions here, and then tell you something about my own interest in this sub-genre of writing. I’ll do this as a Q&A between me and myself and you!

--When does this tradition of writing begin?

While documentary poetry seems especially popular (is that the word?) these days, the form comes out of Modernism (which was a response against Romanticism). Poets like Ezra Pound, in the Cantos, and T.S. Eliot, in The Waste Land, used literary and political histories to write “poems that include history,” as Pound put it. William Carlos Williams’s long poem, Paterson, and Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead, are important early instances of documentary poetry. That Williams was a doctor and Rukeyser a journalist, inclined them to using documents (consider that prescriptions are documents, as are newspaper articles) in their poems. Rukeyser’s work inaugurated the use of documentary poetry as a kind of activism. She wrote the poem about an industrial disaster in West Virginia in the 1930s in order to shed light on abuses against workers, who were put in harm’s way without adequate protections. Her poem includes everything from the blues to excerpts from Congressional testimony. Another poet who used documentary poetry in a similar way was Charles Reznikoff, whose Testimony, drew from legal cases, many of them about terrible injustices against African Americans, among others. He also wrote a book called Holocaust, which uses the Nuremberg Trials as its basis. I’ve never been able to get through that book; it’s unrelenting.

--Why is documentary writing so important?

The 20^th and 21^st centuries have been chaotic: monarchies gave way to democracy and to communism; colonialism collapsed and post-colonial nations floundered; there were wars and wars; faith in institutions, systems, faiths fractured. Poets responded to this chaos either by 1) trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again, as the Modernists did or 2) by cobbling together a new way of representing the world, trying to heal the fractures by investigating them. The Modernists tended to be Fascists, which is certainly one way of organizing things. The post-modernists have tended to be more on the Left side of the spectrum, like Rukeyser and more recent poets like Adrienne Rich and Mark Nowak. Lisa Linn Kanae and Donovan Kūhiō Colleps try to make sense of Hawai`i’s very fractured histories of western contact and immigration. The documentary method is good because you can at once acknowledge the breakages (the poem is written in pieces) and try to show a way to patch the pieces together.

I wrote two books about my mother’s dementia (Dementia Blog and “She’s Welcome to Her Disease”: Dementia Blog, Vol. 2, both from Singing Horse Press). These are mixed genre books. I used more documents in the second volume, having to do with the government asking if my mother had remarried or even if she existed (this was about my father’s military pension); questionnaires sent out by the Alzheimer’s home about my mother’s habits and interests (sadly few at the end); and the contents of her bedside drawer after she died. Each of these rather impersonal sets of documents opened up questions about identity, history, and how to grieve for someone who had not yet died . . . it was tough stuff, but the biggest adventure of my life as a writer. (Yes, writers tend to thrive on crises.)

--Why teach documentary poetry?

I’ve found that this mode of writing works really well for students here. There are so many layered stories and cultures and languages in Hawai`i that the material is there to be tapped. I also like to teach documentary writing because it’s a wonderful way to make connections between private family stories and public historical ones. For example, if your ancestors came here as refugees from Vietnam, your family story is necessarily tied to a series of shatterings in world history—wars, displacements, and so forth. One of my favorite teaching stories involves a young man in a class years ago who responded by my asking the class to find out their family stories by telling me that he and his father didn’t talk. I suggested that he explain that this was an assignment for a class, that he needed to do it. So his father started talking. He was Vietnamese, fled to the USA, and is now a commercial fisherman. By the end of the semester, this student had a project that illustrated those connections/separations and he was also closer to his dad. Like so many great teaching stories, it depended not on great teaching, but on simply making an event possible (without evening knowing I was doing that!).

Donovan Kūhiō Colleps’s Proposed Additions, which I hope many of you have and will read, also came out of documentary poetry class I taught on the graduate level. The layers Donovan uses range from the Hawaiian histories of Ewa to contemporary Ewa. He uses his Hawaiian grandfather’s cancer diary, and his blueprints for an addition to the family house, as well. His grandfather becomes the link between Donovan and his immediate family, as well as to Hawaiian culture and language.

--Why write documentary poetry? I’m asking you to write a short piece this week. Take a document, like a birth certificate, or adoption papers, or a passport, or a family photograph, or a newspaper article, and work with it. You can write on top of the document, or you can expand outward from it. Give it a try. It becomes a wonderful way of exploring yourself in the context of larger histories and cultures.

Which brings me to the accidental conjunction of our readings of documentary poetry (Joseph Han’s on-line chapbook next week is another example) and the current global pandemic. Our lives have been fundamentally changed, and very quickly, by this virus. It’s not just our politics that have been affected, but also our daily lives. If we lived in larger communities before, we’re now living fairly solitary lives. If we had service jobs to work at before, we’re now unemployed. If we loved to enter the classroom and teach, we’re now reduced to writing emails to our students from the privacy of our “offices” (multipurpose spaces that they often are). As one of my son’s profs told him, we are now living history.

This is material for documentary poems, believe me! Get to them!

Wishing you all good health and peace of mind.

Susan S.