ABSTRACT
This essay offers a genealogy for the renewed practice of documentary poetry as a genre registering and responding to the slow violence of the Anthropocene. While the documentary impulse reaches back as far as Virgil’s Georgics, a farmers’ manual for urbanites, in Western poetry the environmental documentary poem emerges with John Clare, who documents the effects of enclosure on the lives, ecologies, and microclimates of the fields. William Carlos Williams’s technique of documentary juxtaposition, as manifested in his long poem Paterson, or Ezra Pound’s shaped texts, influence the twentieth-century environmental poem, locating forms that bring tension to news, data, and description. In Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead , the same characteristics that marginalize poetry, its nonlinear mode of thinking, suit it to an act of witness implicated in investigation, documenting the complex connections between environmental cause and effect, and aimed at a transfer of energy. Objectivist poetry brings a quantum twist to this documentary practice, the words of the poem themselves among its “historical and contemporary particulars.” Following Charles Olson’s site-specific “composition by field,” as a counterfactual practice of history tracking marginalia, Susan Howe exposes how “poetry shelters other voices.” The page also shelters paralinguistic features of performance, such as tone, gesture, and silence, eradicated by written history but sounded in the renewed attention given oral literatures by ethnopoetics. For poets such as M Nourbese Philip or Cecilia Vicuña, “the knot is witness to the exchange,” where documentary poetry becomes a site-specific, multi-media practice of witness, recovery, and resistance.
