Event Type
Expressing the desire and need for a poetics that has a political horizon beyond that of the lyric as mere song of the individualized bourgeois subjectivity, Anne Waldman writes: "Documentary is our new hope. / We will fill the ranks." This roundtable will feature poets discussing the theoretical and practical aspects of working in archival and documentary modes. These four poets will offer artist-talks then hold space for an open discussion testifying to the potentials of documentary poetry as well as testing the limits of archival poetics. The artist-talks will cover a range of poetic media and genres including digital video, photography, and writing as a technology for reckoning real life.
The roundtable will cover approaches to documentary that are influenced by historiography and activist journalism as well as approaches to familial archives, and archives of the state; these poets will cover themes and dynamics implicit in documentary and research-based lyric practices such as: the archives generated from asylum hearings within contemporary migration and US-Mexico border politics; the bureaucratic archive justifying the so-called Global War on Terror (and its activist counter-archive); the Palestinian diaspora as manifest in a family archive; and how the "documentary motive" can alloy lyric practice.