Document(ary) Poem

The documentary poem employs the word “document” in two ways. First, it is a poem that
documents a political or social incident or reality, exploring its larger structure, governing ideas,
repercussions. A documentary poem is grounded in the belief that a poem should bear
witness to the present, in its wider contexts than the ‘merely’ personal. Documentary poems
explicitly expand the poetic frame, emphasizing the collective and historical over the lyrically
private. Walt Whitman is often described as the ‘forefather’ of this mode; its twentieth-
century roots are in the Depression-era poetry of George Oppen, Muriel Rukeyser, and
Louis Zukofsky, who took many of the principles of the social documentary and applied
them to poetry. Often, a documentary poem involves an element of critique or social
protest; this element is more often registered through the use and juxtaposition of source
materials than through an explicitly didactic tone.

This last point leads to the second way “document” functions in a documentary poem. A
documentary poem incorporates external source material—quotes from newspaper reports,
Internet sites, photographs, song lyrics, citations from books—into its surface. These
different sources are often layered on top of one another, creating a dialogical, multivocal
texture. Thus external documents are necessarily a part of a documentary poem.

For this assignment, then, one option is to write a documentary poem that engages some
facet of our collective present. The key here is to avoid polemics: a documentary poem is
not intended to be a ‘soapbox’ number that pontificates on the ills of modern society, or that
mourns the plight of the forlorn homeless man on the corner. Eschew mawkish appeals,
programmatic rhetoric, clichéd imagery, and simplified ‘solutions,’ and instead try to
document the complexities of the situation you examine.

The other option for this poem is to produce a more purely collage-driven poem, a work
that juxtaposes different kinds and styles of language into a polyvocal surface. Here you
might be less focused on documenting one large cultural event or social phenomenon and
more interested in the surfaces and textures of language interacting.

Either way, you will need to incorporate external source material into your poem, composing
by way of juxtaposition that brings different texts into conversation with one another.
Incorporate at least three texts of some sort—preferably with diverse dictions and styles—
into your poem. The poem should include a works cited list that names the texts you use.