Four-Week Documentary Poetics Workshop with Diana Khoi Nguyen
“Documentary Poetics”
Instructor: Diana Khoi Nguyen
Date/Time: July 22 - August 19 (skip August 12), Wednesdays, 10am - 12pm ET
Location: Zoom
Course Description
This prominent modality has been a longstanding practice across literatures. According to one of its practitioners, Mark Nowak, documentary poetics “has no founder, no contested inception, no signature spokespersons claiming its cultural capital; its practice is not limited to the pre-modern, modernist, or post-modern moments (it is as comfortable in musty historical archives or conversations with actual live individuals as it is with Google).” It exists, in fact, “along a continuum from the first person auto-ethnographic mode of inscription to a more objective third person documentarian tendency.”
In this course, we will consider what it means to document in the practice of composing poetry, and study the various ways that contemporary writers draw upon source materials to create forms exigent to their subject matter.
This mode of literary making emerges from Modernist experimentation in collage and polyvocality, and we’ll briefly study early works, such as Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 poem, “The Book of the Dead,” tracing the practice to writers and literary artists such as Layli Long Soldier, Bhanu Kapil, Susan Howe, and more.
As we read, immerse, and ruminate, we will consider these questions in relation to what we are reading and thinking: What is extraordinary and full of possibility in the act of documentation? What is the valence of the non-neutral archive: where are its erasures and violences, and how can a poet be a curatorial engine in subverting the archive? How can we write from a practice of listening and ethics of refusal—of refusing to re-enact the crimes of history and the archive?
Course Format
Class time will be split between discussion of assigned course materials, mini-presentations, critical-creative praxes, which are critically informed creative experiments (as a way to engage and implement what we learn from the course materials), as well as informal sharing of these experiments via “Open Studios” (my reframing of what is traditionally known as ‘workshop’). In short, we will read and experiment (play!).
It is my hope that our intentional space is one where we will collectively and individually revise a working definition of the course topic, documentary poetics. We will collaboratively build on our knowledge of the subjects addressed and ask insightful, generous questions which further open up the course materials for ourselves and each other. It is crucial that we all actively preserve the "classroom" space as one of advocacy and a place of possibilities, rather than one that is hierarchical and restrictive. How can we draw on each other and the resources of our community to activate those cognitive and creative abilities which we may not have engaged with previously?
Course Texts:
I may supplement each week’s materials with additional interviews, book reviews, and/or video clips; these will posted to our shared course online folder.
• Nox by Anne Carson
• DMZ Colony, Don Mee Choi
• Holly by G.E. Gilbert
• That This, Susan Howe
• The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Bhanu Kapil
• Whereas, Layli Long Soldier and excerpts from the forthcoming We
• Films: Hirokazu Koreeda's After Life (1998); Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990)
Course Schedule:
Week 1 // Introductions, orientations; a brief primer on Documentary Poetry; Pushing back against history and the archive (or lack of archives); Begin in-class writing experiment and informal sharing
• Read excerpts from: Whereas by Layli Long Soldier, as well as an excerpt from We (will be provided via PDF)
Week 2 / Generating the archive, working with oral history and living stories; Open Studios (aka workshop) of student workexperiments
• Read excerpts from: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by Bhanu Kapil and DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi
Week 3 / Material Practices - Overview of literary artists working at the intersection of documents, image, text, and collage; Open Studios (aka workshop) of student workexperiments
• Read excerpts from: That This by Susan Howe, Nox by Anne Carson, Holly by G.E. Gilbert
Week 4 / Reenactments - Studying documentary techniques in film (to adapt to a poetics practice); Open Studios (aka workshop) of student workexperiments
• Watch: Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990) and After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998)