Infrastructures of Late Documentary Poetics in North America

Abstract

This dissertation examines the surge of long form and citational poetry in the first decades of the twenty-first century and the revival of the term “documentary” to describe these projects, a configuration that I refer to as “late documentary poetics.” Documentary poetry emerged as a distinct genre in and around the time of the Great Depression, as writers and artists on the political left developed new aesthetic forms to respond to economic, social, and environmental crises. In the same period, documentary cultural production was integrated into state-sponsored programs, like those established under the New Deal, and played an important role in consolidating the liberal nation-building project in both the United States and Canada. My account of documentary poetry’s development in the early twentieth century follows and extends existing studies of documentary film and literature that emphasize how documentary’s early association with left radicalism was intentionally incorporated into the project of liberal governmentality in North America in order to develop a form of state-sanctioned opposition that was primarily cultural rather than political, reform-based rather than revolutionary. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that late documentary poetics not only addresses the colonial and state archive thematically through the citation of institutional, legal, and corporate documents, but also engages with documentary’s own history as both a tradition of anti-capitalist writing and an infrastructure of governance rooted in the instrumentalization of cultural policy. By analyzing the social and political conditions of documentary poetry’s emergence, I expand formal accounts of documentary poetics by connecting aesthetic structures associated with documentary composition like citation, visuality, and generic mobility to related structures of liberal governmentality like territoriality, carcerality, and individual agency. I use the term “infrastructure” to refer to the co-construction of these aesthetic and social forms because it emphasizes how documentary poetics materializes the assumptions of liberal modernity not by reflecting or reproducing social conditions in literary form but as an active participant in a dynamic system that includes literary forms but also institutions, communities, media, geographies, and histories. My chapters put several recent documentary poetry projects by Mark Nowak, Juliana Spahr, Cecily Nicholson, and Mercedes Eng in dialogue with related modernist documentary poems by Tillie Olsen, Muriel Rukeyser, and Dorothy Livesay to argue that late documentary poetics is what Raymond Williams calls a “residual cultural practice” because it makes meaning by negotiating documentary’s infrastructure without taking it to be permanent or unopposed.