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On Documentary Poetics TRACKING/TEACHING: ON DOCUMENTARY POETICS CURATED BY JOSEPH HARRINGTON ESSAY PRESS LISTENING TOUR #21 ESSAY PRESS LISTENING TOUR CONTENTS As the Essay Press website re-launches, we have commissioned some of our favorite conveners of public discussions to curate conversation-based chapbooks. Overhearing such dialogues among Introduction poets, prose writers, critics and artists, we hope —Joseph Harrington iv to re-envision how Essay can emulate and expand upon recent developments in trans-disciplinary Two Pacific Decolonial Docu-Poets Walk into a Tiki Bar small-press cultures. — Donovan Kūhiō Colleps & Craig Santos Perez 1 Full of Many Stars: Pushing Past (and Pushing Series Editors: Andy Fitch the Past into) the Heliocentric Poem Aimee Harrison — Camille T. Dungy & Adrian Matejka 17 Courtney Mandryk Victoria A. Sanz A Small Encyclopedia of Life, Death & Other Ryan Spooner Investigations — Allison Cobb & Kaia Sand 46 Series Assistants: Cristiana Baik Ryan Ikeda Afterword: Habeas Corpus? —Phililp Metres 66 Christopher Liek Author Bios 74 Cover image: from the curator’s collection ii iii historical researcher/writer? These questions underlie the conversations that follow. The impulse to preserve, record and disseminate the stories of individuals and collectivities (including species Introduction and ecosystems) in worthy words is one motivation for —Joseph Harrington writing a “poem including history.” In addition, poets are driven into the archive due to curiosity and the need to know. Since Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever The Lacedaemonians, entering into battle, sacrificed was published in the late ’90s, the World Wide Web has to the Muses, to the end that their actions might be come into its own. Rather than being a space defined by well and worthily written, looking upon it as a divine its boundaries, as Derrida’s archive was, this new meta- and no common favour, that brave acts should find witnesses that could give them life and memory. archive offers something expansive, to be investigated endlessly (provided you have access to the tools, and —Michel de Montaigne “Of Glory” (trans. provided your government will allow it!). Nowadays the Charles Cotton) archive seems virtually (and deceptively) boundless— the multiple trails of breadcrumbs beckon the inquiring mind in many different and ramifying directions. It is oets are the unacknowledged historians of the no wonder that so many poets have been drawn to world. Or maybe historians are the unacknowledged P research. poets. History looks different when understood as a creative act. Theorists such as Hayden White and At some point, the searching has to stop, and the Michel de Certeau have taught us to view history storytelling begin (“You won’t believe what I just found as history writing, and historiography as poetics. What out!”). The investigative poet, by presenting her research happens when the historian embraces this view—when results in her poetry, ends up teaching new reading the historian thinks of herself as a writer, as a poet? publics things that they did not know already. In some Or, alternately, what happens when the poet turns sense, this result has to be the test of any documentary/ historical/investigative poetry. In many cultures, past iv v and present, the poet is the historian and history teacher, the margins.” If the archive must be opened up, poetry or history is told as poetry or song (meter and rhyme are can help do so, if it focuses on the outlines, the margins, aids to memory, if nothing else). These histories have the elided, the unsaid as well as the said. often celebrated the legacies of kings and the deeds of warriors. Nowadays, poets are more likely to record But what do you make of it? This process of turning the and celebrate the brave acts of anti-war activists than archive inside-out (or relocating it altogether) requires those of (unselfconscious) warriors. But the impulse to imagination. It requires transformation into poetry, make those acts “well and worthily written” in order to into a language that is conscious of itself. A research- “give them life and memory” is the same—not least of based poetics selects and manipulates documents and all when these records memorialize the murdered, the artifacts, just as any “creative” nonfiction must involve enslaved, the colonized, the surveilled, the silenced, the poiesis, fashioning. The primary materials are de- disappeared, the invisibled. accessioned: they become collage, mash-up, braided stories or imagined voices. Allison Cobb cites her dual However, the Official Story already has an archive of “commitment to inquiry as well as the imagination,” its own, and it is, as Derrida points out, policed. If the and perhaps this is the theme that unites the following poet aims to overturn or detourn oppressive structures contributions—imaginary gardens with real toads (or of power, she must re-fashion the archive, refuse to let flowers) in them. The relationship between historical someone’s history be destroyed. Doing so means not documents and poetic imagination is sometimes difficult repeating, but re-writing history, in both a factual and and fraught. The participants in these conversations affective manner—in order, as Camille T. Dungy puts speak clearly and frankly about the artistic, practical and it, “to bring the human back to a group of people.” ethical issues they’ve confronted. Likewise, for Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez, documentary poetry constitutes “a refusal to be erased The three exchanges that follow take different tacks. from the archive.” This resolution may entail researching Craig Santos Perez and Donovan Kūhiō Colleps lay out “off the beaten path” (literally, in the case of Kaia Sand’s many of the theoretical and practical issues raised by work about the Vanport section of Portland, Oregon). contemporary documentary poetry—most importantly, Or, as Adrian Matejka says of his book The Big Smoke, the political and personal stakes. Camille T. Dungy “The real opportunity for poetry in this project came in and Adrian Matejka discuss a few of those issues at vi vii greater length, plus the nitty-gritty logistics, and ethics, of the process of composition, from conception to research to writing. Allison Cobb and Kaia Sand then steer the conversation into even larger philosophical and phenomenological issues (they end with “Life & Death”!). The textual form of their conversation gives a Two Pacific Decolonial sense of the trans-genre nature of much documentary or investigative poetry today. Docu-Poets It is my hope that this little book teaches, or puts you on Walk into a Tiki Bar the trail of, something you did not already know or had not already thought. Donovan Kūhiō Colleps & Craig Santos Perez viii 1 of poets in that class, helped build a constellation of what is possible with the form. Can you speak about how and when the form of documentary poetics became a key path for your poetics? Are there any authors or texts that really spoke Craig Santos Perez: How did you first learn about to you while writing what was to become you first “documentary poetics”? Which authors/texts were early collection, from Unincorporated Territory [hacha]? influences? CSP: Many of the authors you mentioned have also Donovan Kūhiō Colleps: I first encountered docupoetics influenced my own work, and I would add the influence of in a creative writing graduate course at University of poets like Charles Reznikoff, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Hawai‘i-Mānoa, during my last year in the masters Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Barbara Jane Reyes, Catalina program. It was a pivotal course for me, in terms of Cariaga, Simon Ortiz and Lisa Linn Kanae. Because I being surrounding by amazing poets and teachers, and never had the opportunity to take a course dedicated in terms of finding new expressive paths to explore. I to documentary poetics, I didn’t have a name for what think we were all trying to approach the form without drew me to certain poets and poems (I would only learn really solidifying a definition for it (for me that was very this name later, when scholars started writing about exciting). When asked what I thought “documentary and teaching my work in a “documentary” context). I poetics” was in that class, I remember saying something continued to explore this path because I wanted to learn like, “It’s an evolving dance between documents and techniques that could help me write the history of Guam poetic imagery that turns a subject inside-out.” But even into my poetry. It is a similar question that Simon Ortiz now, I feel that it is not a good enough definition. Some asked in his book from Sand Creek: “How to deal with poets who were early influences on me were people like history?” And, as you know, history becomes much more Allison Cobb, Muriel Rukyeser, William Carlos Williams, complex in a colonial context. Mark Nowak, Kaia Sand, Claudia Rankine—too many to name them all! They, along with my amazing community Looking at our incomplete lists, there is such a diverse range of writers who have explored the documentary 2 3 impulse. As a scholar of Pacific literature, do you feel I was 15 years old to when I was 30. I struggled to write that documentary poetics is evident and/or prevalent in about Guam, because it had become so distant, both Hawaiian and Pacific poetry? in nautical miles and in memory. What helped me was reading poets who explored documentary poetics. DKC: Yes, for sure. I think that’s why I respond to it the These poets were able to write the complex histories, way that I do. The word that resonates with me is braid. politics and cultures of places and peoples by braiding That form seems to lend itself to the ways stories have (as you put it) multiple voices, narratives, discourses and functioned and lived throughout Hawai‘i, throughout documents into their poems.
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