This generative workshop offers students at all levels the chance to hone their writing skills and explore poetry’s formal possibilities while delving into the expansive field of documentary poetry. Our focus will be at the intersections of history, witness, and the literary arts to create works social and personal significance from archival source material and interviews. Muriel Rukeyser, whose long poem The Book of the Dead we will study, famously said, “'poetry can extend the document.” We will investigate how poets use documents and other means to reframe and re-contextualize subjects often considered outside the scope of poetry. Documentary film, photography, and visual art will point toward other nontraditional approaches to archival and living material, and will provide a foundation for the ethics of documental art. Students will be writing and researching topics of their choice throughout the course to create a 10-15 page work of documentary poetry.

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